At Utah Valley University, earlier today

Last updated on: September 10, 2025 at 11:31 pm by Dan Peterson

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At Utah Valley University, earlier today 2025-09-10T23:31:22-06:00 Dan Peterson

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On the Orem campus of This, I think, may be the very place on the campus of Utah Valley University where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The big news of the day, of course, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University. It’s a dark day for the university, for the state of Utah, and for the United States. And a horrible day, an indescribably horrible day, for Charlie Kirk’s family.

On a personal note: This one hit literally rather close to home for me. I live within (long) walking distance of UVU, driving past it on most days, and I served for several years on the high council for a Latter-day Saint stake serving single UVU students and then as a bishop in a singles ward adjacent to UVU’s campus. The security measures that unfolded in the surrounding neighborhood after the shooting even affected a third-generation unit in my family; a non-parental second-generation unit was obliged at short notice to pick the 3GU up early from the 3GU’s school. We’re in Oregon right now, of course, but reading coverage of the assassination and seeing photos from the scene was more than a bit surreal to me.

While broadly sympathetic to some of his political positions — I am, after all, a political conservative of the virtually extinct Buckley/Reagan/Friedman dinosaur tribe, and there is a certain amount of overlap between that point of view and elements of the MAGA persuasion — I was not a fan of Charlie Kirk. I paid virtually no attention to him and certainly didn’t follow him. In fact, I learned most of what I know about him from the excellent recent Deseret News profile of him and his organization that was occasioned by his pending visit to Utah, and which, given the tragedy that happened this afternoon, has now taken on a rather eery quality. Still, I recommend it.

One line in it struck me on first reading and, oddly, immediately concerned me. I think that I actually may have experienced a kind of premonition of something bad to come. Lacking specificity, but striking to me: Charlie Kirk told the Deseret News reporter that he had become “too big to ignore.”

I didn’t like that. It seemed to me ominous, and the kind of assertion that would attract the attention of angry, unstable loons who might want to bring such a Big Man down.

I thought, too, of RMS Titanic being pronounced “unsinkable.” I thought of the Greek tragic flaw of excessive pride or self-confidence, hubris. And I even thought of Átē (Ἄτη; literally “delusion,” “recklessness,” “folly,” “ruin”), the figure in Greek mythology who is known for inducing rash and ruinous actions among both gods and men, the very personification of moral error or moral blindness. (She may, significantly, have been the daughter of Eris, the goddess of strife.) Zeus cast Átē out of Olympus, but she remains on earth, working evil and mischief.

But Charlie Kirk absolutely didn’t deserve his violent, untimely death. I don’t regard him as a bad person. His murder is a horror and a tragedy, not least because he was a 31-year-old husband and father of two who (as both California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom and an editorial in the Wall Street Journal pointed out) sought to advance his case by means of open, civil, even friendly conversation and debate. That’s precisely what he was doing when he was murdered, which makes his killing even more atrocious and offensive.

I often see the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech invoked to defend pornography, though I’m confident that the Founders would have found the suggestion that they were enshrining a right to produce and consume porn completely absurd and transparently evil. What they were intent upon doing, however, was to protect free political speech. And, although it’s certainly possible that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was in some sense insane, or merely a pathological seeker of notoriety (an idea that becomes less plausible, it seems to me, the longer s/he eludes capture), the most likely motivation for today’s crime, I think, is a desire to silence political speech of which the killer disapproved.

I was very proud of what Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox had to say today about the assassination. He struck exactly the right tone, and I’m grateful that he’s representing my adopted home state today. I believe in freedom, the rule of law, and civil discourse, something for which Governor Cox has been campaigning over several years now. My conservatism includes not just policy ideas, a preference for free markets, judicial restraint, limited government, and federalism, but also mutually respectful moderation in civic discourse:

Very near where I’m staying at the moment (fair use from the Worldmark Gleneden Beach website)

I confess that I ate food again yesterday. And I shamefully admit that I enjoyed it. We had dinner at the Beachcrest Brewing Company, which is located in The Marketplace at Salishan, just a little bit to the north of us here in Gleneden Beach. I can’t speak to what our friends ate, since, although they professed to like their food, I myself didn’t actually taste it. But my wife and I shared a woodfired Salishan Supreme pizza, one of the best pizzas that I can remember, as well as an order of Burrata & Bread, a watermelon-cucumber salad with fresh burrata cheese and a balsamic dressing (accompanied by some woodfired schiacciata bread). I thought it was really, really good.

And I ate food today, too. (Clearly, it’s a kind of addiction.) We drove down southward along the Oregon coast past Heceta Beach, almost to Florence. We saw dramatic bays, rugged rock “haystacks” out at sea, California and Stellar sea lions, harbor seals, cormorants, spectacular bridges, forests, cliff overlooks, sun, and fog. Returning back up northward, we had dinner at Local Ocean, in Newport. I ordered their Grilled Halibut and Peaches, which the menu describes as consisting of grilled medium-rare halibut, grilled peaches, roasted poblano pepper, mozzarella cheese, and cilantro vinaigrette.

It was probably the best seafood dish I’ve ever eaten. Really. It was that good. Sorry to be piling on the superlatives, but it really was. Just so you know.

Now, of course, my more obsessive critics recognize that I have an eating habit and, rather than showing me charity, they lampoon my inability to follow their ascetic regimen of seldom if ever eating anything. And they’ll no doubt have a field day mocking me for regularly giving in to the urge to consume food, and, not only that, even to prefer that it have a pleasant taste.

I’m striving, though, to be of service. If at all possible, I want this blog to be practically useful to people who might happen to visit the places that I’ve visited. (Such visitors will mostly be exorcists, of course, or employees of disinfectant services. But maybe, from time to time, there will also be some who don’t come for occupational reasons.) And restaurant recommendations are one way that I can perhaps offer a little service even above and beyond my typical deep wisdom and profound insights. When I enjoy something, I like to invite others to enjoy it as well. And my critics enjoy mocking, condemning, and deriding me. Fortunately, my notes on dining out provide them a rich target for derision, condemnation, and mockery. So we should all be happy, albeit in our very distinct ways.

Political map of Africa (public domain, Central Intelligence Agency)

Finally, something that I gleaned today from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: “How Children Are Serving Children in Southern Africa: Primary General President Susan H. Porter Serves Alongside the Children” President Porter, the widow of my friend the late Elder Bruce D. Porter of the Seventy, is doing wonderful work. Umm, no. Wait a minute. What am I thinking? She’s poisoning everything.

Posted from Gleneden Beach, Oregon

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