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Charlie Kirk, who was murdered a short time ago, became one of the internet’s most posted altered memes. The only other one that comes to my mind that I have seen with such repeated frequency is the replaced subtitling of Hitler losing his temper from the fantastic piece of cinema that is Downfall, but nearly as common is the image of Charlie Kirk, mug in hand, sitting behind a portable table with a sign that reads “Change My Mind.” I really have no idea what he was challenging people to change his mind about in the original, but the endless alterations can be quite humorous.

Setting aside the funny memes of a Gorn challenging people to change its mind about Cetus III being an invasion, there’s something more important in the phrase “change my mind.” It is a challenge, not a debate. It is a statement from a person who already holds a committed position, not one from an open mind seeking honest inquiry. It is an Objectivist challenging you to prove that selfishness is not a virtue, a Scientologist challenging you to question the authority of L. Ron Hubbard’s vision, or a born-again Christian challenging you to change his mind on the existence of God.

None of this was actually about whether Charlie Kirk’s brand of conservatism yielded better governance than a more liberal philosophy—it was performance art. Kirk, it seemed to me, was like a stand-up comedian, but with all the stand-up stripped away so that all that remained was the comedian and the hecklers, and he was very good at dealing with the “hecklers.”

Dealing with hecklers is performance, not philosophy. Nothing justifies the man’s murder, and his surviving spouse’s call for forgiveness is an astounding act in the true Christian faith, but the man, like any talented liberal Hollywood actor, was a performer and not a political thinker.