The Time To Do Something is Right Now: Charlie Kirk National Park and Other Proposals

Mourning, doing something, institutional response, symbolic response, Charlie Kirk National Park, The Smithsonian Exhibit to the Woke Era

Grief

Like many this morning, I feel strongly compelled to do something. I had to have a conversation last night with my 10 year old son to explain that the very nice man he met a few months ago and who graciously walked us around his TV studio and signed him a book was killed for having the same political beliefs as his dad.

This is the kind of conversation that changes you.

It can lead you into some very dark corners. Many, I suspect, have had versions of this conversation with their children or loved ones over the last 24 hours. If they have not had the conversation explicitly, the thought is there, just under the surface. Charlie Kirk was the center of American conservatism. He was neither extreme in his rhetoric nor in his disposition. He was the nice version. He was sincere. Political media is filled with some of the worst people you can imagine. The most selfish and cynical and transactional people anywhere. Charlie was not like this at all. Just a loveable, happy-go-lucky guy who really believed he could talk to people he disagreed with in good faith and try to change their minds.

If he’s what the media calls a divisive and polarizing and hateful figure (as NPR did this morning), what does that make the rest of us?

Charlie, in many ways, was the absolute best we have to offer. As an X mutual said yesterday, “Everyone in this country should be going to bed every night giving thanks to God for still allowing America to produce men of Charlie Kirk’s caliber.”

As many have articulated over the past day, Charlie very much embodied the virtues of the American Republic, so much so that it is almost a cliche to summarize it all. He was nearly a caricature, and maybe if I had not personally met him, I would think these descriptions were merely caricatures, wishful manifestations of a high school civics lesson––a man of profound faith, guided by his love of Christ and his hunger to understand God more deeply, a devoted husband and father, an unapologetic patriot and pious defender of our civil religion, and a model of the bedrock civic virtue of free speech and open debate. On top of all of that, according to every first-hand report, he was a loyal friend and trusted organizer, one whose personal integrity and leadership was beyond any doubt.

It was precisely these qualities that drew sneers from the small and the cynical, yet they are the very virtues that anyone of worth, however privately, longs to have more of. This was, and is, certainly true for me. I am more than ten years Charlie’s senior, but I look up to him in many ways. He is an aspirational figure, not in his achievements or notoriety, but in his character. We would all be better off to be more like Charlie Kirk.

Now What?

There is another side to Charlie. He was a fighter. He understood the game and he knew how to win it. He did not shrink from opportunity. He never cowered and never allowed himself to be neutered. Whatever energy was out there in the world that could be put to positive use, no matter its source, was energy to be seized for concrete ends.

We should not be shy about using this event to fight for the things Charlie believed in. He would’ve demanded this from us. And it is our duty to see it through. The death of Charlie Kirk marks the most consequential political assassination in America since Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in 1968. The gravity of such a moment demands a proportional response, and there will inevitably be two.

The first will be institutional. Here I mean the category of responses that will fall in the realm of hard governance, and must be circumscribed by the legitimate use of state-sponsored action. Laws will be written. Extremist organizations will be dismantled. Assets will be seized. Individuals and institutions that cultivated the conditions for this climate of violence will face criminal liability. These are necessary measures of statecraft that will in large part determine whether we get another Red reign of terror, or whether we emerge from this with our nation intact.

The second response will be symbolic. This will answer how we choose to inscribe Kirk’s legacy into the memory of the nation. Symbolic responses shape the story that a people tells about itself. It is what produces the unspoken norms and directional attitudes that guide our thinking and, more importantly our feeling, which in turn produces the stuff for our ways of being. The symbolic is not secondary to the institutional. These are partner responses. While the right has had some measure of recent success in the institutional battlefield, it is still too often negligent of the symbolic space in which those successes must be permanently enshrined. If we do not fix this event into the national imagination, it will fade and become, like so much leftist violence of the past, a mere historical footnote.

It is this symbolic register that requires our attention now, before the media cycle moves on, and before this moment is deliberately downplayed or replaced by the next Thing or otherwise is abandoned to the arena petty partisan dispute.

The correct course of action must live up to the gravity of the moment and be both bold and durable.

I propose a two-pronged symbolic response that matches the gravity of this moment. The first is the creation of Charlie Kirk National Park, a lasting memorial that fixes his sacrifice into the American landscape and ties his legacy to the 250th anniversary of the Republic.

The second is the establishment of a Smithsonian Exhibit on the Woke Era (2012–2024), a national reckoning that will preserve the memory of this dark chapter and honor those who resisted at great personal cost.

Taken together, these initiatives would ensure that Charlie Kirk’s life and death are remembered as part of a larger struggle to defend truth and free speech and the enduring ways of being of the American People against forces that sought, and have always sought, to extinguish them. One proposal grounds his legacy in the permanence of the land while the other secures it in the permanence of the national record. Both are necessary if this moment is to be commemorated with the seriousness it demands.

Part 1: Charlie Kirk National Park

A Lasting Memorial

• Monuments can be renamed or removed.
  

• Statues can be toppled.
  

• But a national park endures. It embeds memory in the land itself and makes commemoration inseparable from the American landscape.
  

Marking the 250th Anniversary

• The designation should coincide with the nation’s semiquincentennial.
  

• This ensures Kirk’s legacy is woven into the story America tells about itself now and forever. If there is a single figure who ought to represent the best of America as it is, Charlie is as good as it gets.
  

The Meaning

• The park would symbolize the unconquerable American spirit of free speech, the whole suite of civic and personal virtues Charlie embodied, and standing firm even in the face of mortal danger.

The Site

• Utah is the natural location, specifically Grand Staircase–Escalante, with the option of adjoining land in Arizona where Kirk’s organization was based.
  

• It is an impressive and worthy landscape.
  

• Kirk was killed in Utah, binding the site to his life and death.
  

• Democrats have already insisted on its protection, making opposition politically untenable.
  

The Political Value

• Charlie Kirk becomes a lasting signifier of MAGA and the youth movement it inspired.
  

• The park would cement Trump’s legacy by permanently embedding his tenure in the land itself.
  

• The 250th anniversary is marked by a gesture that secures MAGA and free speech as a living principle.
  

Part 2: Smithsonian Exhibit on the Woke Era

A National Reckoning

• The “Woke Era,” spanning roughly 2012–2024, marked a period of radical ideology that sought to undermine our national identity and its spiritual and moral frameworks.
  

• The exhibit would preserve the memory of this tumultuous and deranged chapter in American public life.
  

The Purpose

• To compel the nation to confront the social and moral degradations of the era brought upon by its own institutional authorities.
  

• To honor the men and women who, often at great personal cost, resisted its revolutionary ambitions.
  

• To affirm America’s enduring commitment to free speech and it civil religious virtues.
  

Exhibition Elements

• A historical timeline tracing the rise of woke ideology from academic origins to institutional dominance.
  

• Documentation of the “race revolution” and the violence, riots, and divisive politics it unleashed.
  

• Examination of the gender and sexual revolution, especially the trans movement and its medical abuses.
  

• Analysis of anti-American campaigns to rewrite history and erase shared memory.
  
  

• The story of resistance: parents, citizens, and civic leaders who pushed back.
  

The Political Value

• Establishes a definitive public record of the Woke Era’s harms (and its historic origins).
  

• Forces confrontation of these derangements and abuses of public trust so that the establishment figures and institutions responsible for it are held to permanent account.
  

• Ensures clarity about what was endured and what was defeated.
  

Clarity

None of this brings Charlie back. None of this ensures our political life becomes normal again. And to reiterate, this all depends on concurrent acts of hard governance to root out the networks and ideologies promoting the breakdown of our ways of life. Real consequences must be imposed on people. The symbolic, on its own, is not nearly enough. But without the symbolic, this will easily evaporate into fuzzy abstractions that within a generation, if not a few years, can no longer orient our preferences or ambitions.

If I was writing this about anyone else, I would finish this draft and send it to Charlie and his team. He would read it and give me feedback. If he liked it, he’d invite me on his show to evangelize it and turn it into something real. Charlie’s not here to do that. But we are. And we owe it to him to do something.