Charlie Kirk was gunned down on stage in Utah. A young father, a husband, a man who gave his life to speaking boldly about America, was murdered for his beliefs. Conservatives everywhere feel what any decent person should feel: rage. The urge for vengeance. The demand for payback.
That anger is not wrong. It is the emotion of righteousness. It means you loved Charlie, or at least what he stood for—and that love recoils at injustice. But the question before us is what to do with that rage. Because our tradition—the Western tradition—insists we draw a line between vengeance and justice.
Vengeance and Revenge: The Fire We All Feel
Vengeance is the emotion of anger turned to action, without the virtues of prudence and justice. It is a natural reaction to what angers us that says, “They took from us, I feel violated, I will take from them.”
It is human. It is primal. It is what every human feels when someone they love is struck down. And if you feel it now, you’re not wrong.
But if all we live by is vengeance, the cycle never ends. Our ancestors knew this. That’s why they built the institutions of the West—so that blood feuds and endless retaliation wouldn’t consume us whole.
As F.A. Hayek explained in The Fatal Conceit, civilization itself is an “extended order”—a fragile achievement that depends on rules which often run against our instincts. “Man has been civilized very much against his wishes,” Hayek wrote, because the habits that sustain markets, law, and freedom restrain the natural impulse to strike back in kind.
Justice: The Harder, Nobler Path
Justice is harder. It asks us to restrain our fury so that the punishment of a killer is not merely satisfying but true. Justice insists on evidence, neutrality, process, and proportion.
That doesn’t mean being weak. I fear we must both avoid falling into being nice and avoid being wrathful. It is not easy to restrain oneself. It means making sure the man and any organization that did this face the full weight of the law—not a mob’s anger, but a society’s judgment. That’s stronger than vengeance, because it carries legitimacy for generations to come.
Justice is how we honor Charlie—by showing that we do not abandon the traditions he fought to defend.
The Western reliance on this “extended order”—the trust that our institutions will deliver real justice—depends on faith. Faith in the courts’ robust and wise implementation of the law, law enforcement’s competence, and the eventual disclosure of truth with more transparency. But today that faith is at record lows. And the more inept or anemic the government’s response to Charlie Kirk’s murder appears, the greater the danger that people will abandon justice and take vengeance instead. When institutions fail, men return to the ancient instinct: to strike back.
That’s why the energy of the right must come together, not to indulge vengeance, but to demand justice in its truest form. That means fighting any effort by the administration to twist this tragedy into an excuse for new “hate speech” laws. It means insisting on complete transparency in the investigation, so the public can begin to rebuild trust in the institutions of justice.
Given this moment of social media real-time open source investigations, let me be clear. Confidence in our justice system means calling for a real inquiry into every angle of this crime: the individuals who came into contact with the suspect, any organizational affiliations, and yes, whether Antifa or similar groups played a role. Justice is only justice if it is thorough, transparent, and unflinching.
Uphold and Pass Down the American Tradition
Your anger is right. It means you have a soul. To feel nothing would be to dishonor Charlie’s death. But our duty as fathers is not only to feel that anger ourselves—it’s to show our sons what to do with it. They are watching us. They are learning from how we carry our grief, our rage, our demand for justice.
If all we teach them is vengeance, then they will inherit only a cycle of blood feuds and bitterness. But if we show them the harder path—the path of justice—then they will learn how to fight back with strength and restraint, with courage and principle.
That is how we prepare the next generation to defend our civilization: not by surrendering to our lowest instincts, or the enemies of civilization, but by proving that real men must master their passions and channel them toward something higher, something lasting. Make your children hard targets, make them men and women, and make them moral.
Charlie Kirk’s death demands justice. Let us rage, let us mourn, let us honor him. But let us not forget the wisdom of our ancestors: vengeance belongs to God, justice belongs to a people who know their rights, find the guilty individual, and punish them.
Then let the hate pass. Let it go. Don’t be consumed by it. Learn from it. Look it dead in the eye. Then—Let. It. Pass.
If we abandon that tradition now, we lose more than Charlie. We lose the very civilization he spent his life trying to save.
is a Young Voices alum, featured in the American Thinker and the Mises Institute. He is the host of the Human [Re]Action podcast and works as a media and political consultant. Find him at David-Rand.net and HumanReactionPod.com.
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