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Charlie Kirk went to Utah Valley University to engage students in a debate over MAGA values. Photos of Kirk, early in the event, show him tossing red MAGA baseball caps to enthusiastic kids in a jubilant audience — minutes before a bullet sliced through his neck. 

It obviously wasn’t the debate that killed Charlie Kirk, but an argument can be made that his death resulted to a certain extent from the values that he was in Utah to promote. His murder, outrageous as it is, may constitute the most dramatic argument possible in the debate that Kirk was about to present to the students. 

A staunch advocate for the Second Amendment, Kirk had previously said that he considered the right to carry guns so important that it was worth losing a few people killed each year just to preserve it. 

Now he is one of those “few people” — who actually number in the tens of thousands.  

As for the Second Amendment, any constitutional scholar knows that the amendment was drafted not because anyone wanted to protect American rights, but because the state of Virginia, the most populous of the former colonies, refused to ratify the Constitution unless the Constitution guaranteed that its militia could bear arms in the hunt to track down and capture escaped slaves. 

Slavery is long gone, but the damage caused by the amendment lingers on. 

In Utah, no one can stop you from carrying a concealed weapon, including the kind of rifle that killed Kirk. No one seems to have spent much time on considering the use that such a weapon might be put to. 

In fact, the GOP-dominated Utah Legislature recently moved to make it easier to carry guns on campuses.

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The Second Amendment and the right to carry a concealed tool for killing people is one thing. The other aspect of the MAGA values that very likely contributed to killing Kirk was the return to 19th century racism, xenophobia, and divisiveness that the movement advocates, often with less finesse than Kirk. 

Donald Trump, the less-than-subtle leader of the MAGA herd, immediately attributed the murder to violent rhetoric from radical left-wing liberals. Trump was particularly angry at increasing comparisons of his administration to Hitler’s fascism. 

Trump’s remarks expressed anger over the loss of Kirk, whom he genuinely felt close to, but they also seemed likely to enhance the divisiveness that could make someone like Kirk a potential target. 

Far from being radical and left-wing, the liberals Trump denounces are to a large extent that residue of American thinking that still supports traditional American values. If Democrats have been accused of anything, it’s of not being radical enough when it comes to trying to stop Trump’s wanton dismantling of the American government, and of America’s global position as the self-styled “Leader of the Free World.” 

America does not necessarily need to be a superpower running the world, but it has traditionally believed in democracy and that is what the MAGA crowd, especially its Silicon Valley billionaires, seeks to change. The argument we hear increasingly from these advocates is that autocracy can be more effective than democracy. 

If Trump’s efforts to redefine what it means to be American are increasingly compared to the arguments used by Hitler, it’s because, to a great extent, they increasingly resemble fascist thinking in the 1930s. There has always been a minor strain of thinking in America that preferred Hitler’s concept of a new world order governed by a master race to the democratic ideal that holds that all men should be treated equally under the law. 

Trump’s attacks against anything that hints at ethnic or racial diversity, and his attempts to deny the US Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in America, can easily be seen as an understated echo of Hitler’s belief in German Aryan superiority. 

Right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson have increasingly given space to MAGA followers who ask whether the US didn’t make a mistake in fighting Hitler and should have let Hitler demolish Stalin instead. The fact is that the US might never have entered World War II if Japan had not managed to awaken us from our inattentiveness to the rest of the world by bombing Pearl Harbor and sinking the US Navy’s Pacific fleet.

Now it looks like the MAGA crowd wants to take us back to the isolationism of the 1930s, and undo America’s dominant role following World War II. If that means following the fascist model, so be it. It’s been done before. 

Trump’s efforts to turn the National Guard of compliant states — along with an exploding army of masked ICE agents that have drawn comparison to Hitler’s stormtroopers — into a national police force that he himself can direct; his decimation of US intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department; his intimidation of the Supreme Court; and his vicious, ad hominem attacks against individual judges and against the rule of law in general: These all follow a pattern that Hitler used to dismantle and eventually control Germany, which had previously been one of the most advanced countries in Europe, but which his policies eventually reduced to a shattered ruin. 

Kirk, who dropped out of college himself, tried to take this messy package and make it more presentable to American college youth. Utah seemed fertile ground when it came to finding acceptance for his ideas. Kirk spoke to and nurtured a widespread cultural nostalgia for an America in which individuals were not afraid to act or bothered by intellectual or philosophical considerations, were not afraid to shoot first and ask questions later. That America — as depicted in hundreds of shoot-‘em-up Western movies — really only ever existed in the fevered minds of Hollywood screenwriters. 

When I was in the US Army, I was initially assigned to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, TX, which had once served as a crossroads for gunfighters in the Old West. On more than a few street corners there was a plaque commemorating a specific gun fight that had taken place at that spot. 

One I remember described a deputy sheriff who was arrested for shooting a gunfighter in the back. “If he shot him in the back,” the presiding judge later commented, “it showed good sense. If he shot him facing him, he is damn lucky to be alive.” 

Is that the America we want to return to?

To a certain extent Kirk was successful in convincing a number of American college kids that the 19th century and the values of the MAGA crowd are where we want to be. What he failed to realize was the consequences one faces when these outdated, retrograde notions actually do become a reality.