National Review senior editor Charlie Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, defended the Sunday memorial service for Charlie Kirk against those in “elite circles who looked at that and could not comprehend it, had no sense of what it was.”

“I’m not merely talking about what Erika Kirk said,” Cooke stated. “We saw, for example, the Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams saying that he felt completely alienated from it and that he had more in common with people in Greece than he did his fellow Americans. I must say, I find that strange.”

Cooke said that “Charlie Kirk’s politics crossed sometimes with my own, but aren’t my own. . . . But I recognized what was on display there immediately. And I didn’t feel alienated from it, and I didn’t feel confused by it.”

“If you’re going to have a properly small ‘l’ liberal, small ‘d’ diverse pluralist society,” he pointed out, “then you’re going to have to engage with those who aren’t like you. So I was a little bit disappointed by the responses to this that moved from, on the one hand, ‘This is awful and just like Hitler,’ which is of course ridiculous, to ‘Hmm, what the heck is this?’”

The event, Cooke said, “was a strange combination of politics and religion . . . and it was reflective of the broad and sometimes incoherent coalition that Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and others have put together that at the moment is sufficient to win.”

“It was a wonderful ecumenical display of American-ness at one level. . . . And as far as progressives don’t like that, that’s fine, they don’t have to. But they might benefit from understanding a little bit more where those who took part were coming from.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.