From Frontier to Franchise, Tradition in Ruins:
Thoughts after the Death of a 'Rugged Individual' in Utah
Thoughts after the Death of a 'Rugged Individual' in Utah
By Kat Ulrike
In the shadow of modernity’s crumbling edifice, the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University is less tragedy than revelation. It exposes not unity, not martyrdom, but the hollow center of American "conservatism". His death, like his life, was spectacle — the influencer as statesman, the talk-radio cadence as philosophy. Spengler once wrote: “In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which all the life of broad regions is collected, while the land lies fallow.” Kirk belonged to that late-civilizational metropolis, where politics is no longer blood and soil, but performance and branding.
Kirk trafficked in the tokens of freedom: free speech, gun rights, individualism. To his admirers, these were shields of the republic. To his critics, they were weapons of cruelty. But for all, they were emptied of substance. For Ernst Jünger, the worker was “the figure of a new order,” forged in technology and war. For Kirk, freedom was an alibi for the marketplace. His invocation of the gun was not Jünger’s “organ of a new form of life,” but a stage prop. His free speech was not a forge of truth but a license for provocation without risk.
Carl Schmitt observed: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Kirk was no sovereign. He never dared decision against the order itself. His enemies were not capital or empire, but the weak — minorities, victims, the powerless. By branding them threats to “freedom,” he fortified the very liberal-capitalist order he claimed to resist. Even his anti-globalism was theater: railing at “elites” while safeguarding the circulation of money and spectacle that dissolve borders.
This is why his assassination strains belief. An outdoor rally, no checkpoints, no searches — a man long threatened, suddenly exposed. Was it negligence born of hubris, the myth of the rugged individual carried to absurdity? Or was it staged carelessness, a path to martyrdom? His defenders now invoke him as saint of speech and tradition. Yet martyrdom demands sacrifice for principle. Jünger reminded us: “The heroic is not the opposite of the comfortable, but of the merely useful.” Kirk was never heroic. He was useful — to sponsors, to networks, to capital.
Consider the American myth he embodied: the self-made man, the frontier ethos transmuted into apology for capitalist order. For over a century, this narrative has disciplined the masses: work harder, obey, distrust solidarity. Economic collapse becomes a warning against laziness, civil rights a disruption to “order,” social upheaval a threat to be quelled. Kirk cloaked himself in this tradition, mocking empathy as weakness, not because he despised feeling, but because feeling endangered the machine he served.
Yet true conservatism, if it is to exist, cannot be obedience to neoliberalism. It must be radical return, a re-rooting of man in soil and duty. Spengler again: “World history is the history of the victory of the strong over the weak.” But Kirk was not strong. He was a salesman for strength, a Randian kid peddling egoism to the atomized. He borrowed the costume of rebellion while reinforcing the reign of money. Even his flirts with “replacement” were diluted — not a challenge to capital’s homogenizing flows, but a nativist echo calibrated for ratings. The controversial Pol Pot once declared: “If our people can grow rice, they can conquer the world.” Crude, brutal, but at least rooted in the recognition that sovereignty is material — land, labor, production. Kirk, by contrast, offered sovereignty as spectacle: slogans without soil, identity without power. His anti-globalism ignored that the true architects of dispossession are corporations, dissolving borders while preaching discipline to workers. He opposed symptoms, never causes.
And so his death is not exception but symptom. He lived by the rhetorical sword, slicing at the marginalized while shielding the powerful, and died in the chaos he cultivated. Critics call it justice; defenders, martyrdom. But both inflate a figure whose significance lies in exposing the emptiness of the political form he embodied.
The deeper reckoning is with “free speech” itself. Is it a neutral shield for all utterance, even dehumanization? Or a civic contract that binds rights to responsibilities, asking who pays the cost of speech? For Kirk, it was neither law nor principle but performance — a loyalty test, an alibi for cruelty. Every critique he faced became an attack on liberty itself, dissent reduced to a foil for his populist theater. The same hollowing applied to his defense of gun rights. Once conceived as the weapon of sovereignty — the rifle as guarantor of hearth, homeland, and resistance to tyranny — in Kirk’s hands it became a stage prop, a slogan shouted at rallies, a license for spectacle rather than a serious reckoning with the responsibilities of an armed citizenry. Tradition too suffered the same fate. Instead of binding man to duty, to soil, to ancestral continuity, it was invoked as costume — nostalgia packaged for applause, emptied of obligation. Faith, finally, which for centuries anchored communities in transcendence and sacrifice, was in Kirk’s language reduced to branding, a badge of belonging for the already converted. What emerges, then, is a paradox: speech without truth, arms without duty, tradition without continuity, faith without transcendence. Each ideal was wielded as symbol, but stripped of weight. And so in death, the question is not only whether liberty can survive when invoked to excuse cruelty, but whether a society can endure when its highest goods — speech, arms, tradition, faith — are reduced to tools of performance.
Here lies the paradox. Conservatism, once defined by its suspicion of money power and its defense of rooted communities against the corrosions of the market, now kneels as capitalism’s priest. Where it once spoke of limits, duty, and soil, it now sanctifies growth, accumulation, and profit as if they were eternal virtues. The liberal, for his part, hymns “innovation,” “opportunity,” and “progress”; the conservative hymns “tradition,” “faith,” and “family.” Yet beneath these rhetorical costumes lies the same liturgy: keep working, keep consuming, keep believing that the endurance of suffering is the mark of freedom. Both parties become administrators of the same machine, quarrelling only over its language of justification.
Charlie Kirk embodied this fusion. He was no Jünger, whose Storm of Steel sought a new human type forged in fire, nor Schmitt, who grasped the essence of sovereignty in the exception, nor Spengler, who diagnosed cultures as living organisms bound for decline. He was instead a Randian personality, a Friedmanite preacher, a Sowellian pundit — fleeting, functional, derivative. His “ideas” were less doctrine than merchandise, packaged in slogans, circulated like commodities, consumed in rallies and podcasts as easily as fast food. And so his “martyrdom” rings false. Martyrdom presupposes sacrifice for something higher than the self. Kirk sacrificed nothing; he performed. What he leaves behind is not the seed of renewal but a mirror, reflecting the society that made him possible: a culture where “free speech” is no longer the forge of truth but entertainment value; where compassion is mocked as weakness because it threatens the abstractions of the market; where politics, stripped of statecraft and destiny, has been reduced to influencer spectacle — the algorithm dressed as ideology.
Let him be mourned or not. The real task lies elsewhere: to reclaim freedom from its degradation, to strip conservatism of its hollow inheritance, to build again on soil, sovereignty, and spirit. Until then, Kirk’s assassination will stand not as end but emblem — proof that a civilization content with spectacle cannot escape decay.