By Eric Peters
Eric Peters Autos
August 21, 2026
It is coming up on a year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated - the right word, since this was not merely a murder. We do not use "assassination" to describe ordinary murders, as for example when a thug breaks into someone's home and murders the people within. Assassination are done for political reasons, not economic reasons.
Charlie Kirk did not hold any office but he was the leader of a movement and - had he not been assassinated - it is very possible he might have run for office (and won). This was perhaps the plan for him, before he began to deviate from it. His assassination occurred, curiously enough, in near congruence with his public questioning of that which he had previously never questioned; i.e., the nature of the "special relationship" between the state of Israel and the United States. It is a term of a piece with "peculiar institution" in the antebellum South in that it is meant to soft-voice a thing that ought to be discussed more openly and forthrightly. That is what Charlie did and it is probably what got him assassinated. He had to go because his questioning of the "special relationship" was causing his millions of young followers to question it.
Charlie is gone, but the questioning remains. If anything, it has gotten louder and more demanding. Why is the political leadership of the United States - of both parties (as if there weren't just the one) - so beholden to this "special relationship" ? What do the American people get out of this "special relationship," other than taxes and war and lectures about how they are "anti-Semites" if they question any of it ? These are the kinds of questions Charlie was asking shortly before he was prevented from asking such questions ever again. It does not mean we can't ask them.
It means we ought to ask them more forcefully - and demand answers.
Who will be Charlie's inheritor ? This is the wrong question to ask because looking for leaders is how people become followers. What's needed instead are millions - terns of millions - of leaders, each refusing to become a follower. There is immense, unstoppable power in this. It cannot be stopped by assassinating - or de-platforming - a single person. That is why so much effort (and our money) is spent on government (do not call them "public") schools, by the way. These are not places where children are taught how to think but rather what to think - which is functionally the same thing as teaching them not to think at all. Orthodoxies are instilled by rewarding the regurgitation thereof (and socially as well as academically punishing heterodoxy). American children are pumped full of half-truths about history and everything else, such that when they graduate, they know what the system wants them to think they know. Charlie thought he knew some things but then he began to think - for himself, that is. Worse, he began to speak about these new thoughts he was having.
What was done to Charlie is what the forces who did it intend to do to anyone else whose thinking becomes a threat. The problem, for them, is how to do it. They can't Charlie Kirk us all. Well, they might try. Such things have been tried in the past and with success - as in the case of Soviet Russia, where tens of millions of people like us were assassinated. The way to stop this, as Solzhenitsyn explained, is to not permit it to happen:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
This attitude would have ended "COVID" by the summer of 2020. It is the only way to end such things. Not just "COVID." Thomas Jefferson understood this and so did most Americans, once upon a time. That was before the government got into the business of "education."
The "special relationship" has beset this country for a very long time, as was true of the South's "peculiar institution." People who have learned to think know how to question such bromides and Charlie was teaching the young to do both things. He was awakening, becoming his own man. His assassination has served to awaken countless millions more. The forces that sought to silence Charlie only dispersed his spirit. It is probable that his assassination will one day be seen plainly for the inflection moment it was; i.e., that assassinating him was something like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
Note that his Turning Point USA operation is dead now that he is. That his wife is regarded with disgust. Meanwhile, the questions he had are being asked by more and more Americans.
This is why Charlie Kirk was a great American. He learned to think.
This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.