Michelle Steel: Charlie Charged the Cockpit

It’s a fundamental human trait to mourn the loss of our loved ones.

But, national tragedies of collective grief and incomprehensible anguish, such as the assassination of Charlie Kirk, demand something more.

I can’t tell you the number of family and friends – most of whom had never even met Charlie — that were deeply impacted by his death.

As we collectively mourn, we need leaders to show us the path forward: to provide meaning, to give purpose and to restore order by reestablishing our common virtues and values as human beings.

That’s what we witnessed Sunday at Charlie Kirk’ s memorial.

Nearly 100,000 people packed into State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona for “the biggest Christian evangelical event since the first visit to America of Pope John Paul II, in October 1979.”

“This is the true sound and tone of the Republican Party right now,” former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

If President Trump’s first term was defined as the “Flight 93 Election,” Charlie Kirk’s Memorial will be identified as the seminal moment and rhetorical grounding for President Trump’s second term.

In the age of social media and dwindling attention spans, the Charlie Kirk Memorial was a unique moment when millions of Americans tuned in to watch five hours of speeches. They listened to Erika Kirk’s “courageous statement of forgiveness” and President Donald J. Trump’s resolute vision for the future.

“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” Michael Anton wrote under the pseudonym Publius Decius in September 2016 for the Claremont Review of Books. “The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation.”

Charlie charged the cockpit.

“We won’t back down. We won’t be intimidated,” Donald Trump Jr. said in his masterful eulogy. “Our message of faith, family, and country will not be silenced.”

Don Jr., a close personal friend of Charlie’s, not only shared his personal experiences of joining Charlie in his college campus debates, but also reestablished our American virtues.

“When people disagree with us, we don’t silence them. We don’t destroy them. And we certainly don’t sink to violence,” he said. “We don’t burn down their businesses.”

Don Jr.’s words echoed Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Eulogy for the Martyred Children.”

Sixty-two years ago this month, four members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16^th Street Baptist Church in a similar act of political terrorism. The terrorists killed four little girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.

“We must not become bitter, nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence,” Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in his epochal eulogy for “the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.”

Historians credit the speech with contributing to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Republicans passed only after overcoming a Democrat filibuster.

In a similar tone, Don Junior welcomed one and all to the MAGA movement.

“If you believe in faith, family, and freedom, then you are with us,” he closed his speech. “No matter your past, no matter how you’ve voted, no matter where you come from, this movement is your home.”

“If you’re not already seated at this table, we have a seat prepared for you.”

Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, shared in his heartwarming speech that Hillsdale College will be awarding Charlie a posthumous honorary degree. It’s a touching and appropriate tribute to a kid who never graduated college.

I predict, in the near future, Hillsdale College’s rhetoric department will be teaching Charlie Kirk’s Memorial alongside Pericles’s Funeral Oration and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

It was that significant for America.