Certainly the dead tend to be thought of more fondly than they were in life. Still, it's quite disorienting to watch American institutions obediently line up to display the utmost solemnity for a bigot, whose career achievements were pushing for hatred and violence toward those he saw as inferior to him.
Charlie Kirk, 31, was fatally shot at an event Wednesday at Utah Valley University. At the moment of his killing, which was captured on multiple videos, he was about to debate a student about mass shootings in the United States. Authorities announced on Friday that they had apprehended a suspect, although the motive is still unclear.
Kirk was a well-known figure in the right-wing movement. In 2012, while still a teenager, he founded Turning Point USA with the support of Bill Montgomery, an Illinois businessman who invested in the organization and served as Kirk's mentor. The mission was to make conservative politics appealing to the youth by visiting them where they were, and having someone their age speak to them. Over the years, the organization grew and collected more money from the Republican elite and dark-money donors. Kirk cultivated a connection with Donald Trump Jr., then cozied up to his father; TPUSA became the Trump ally that would ostensibly mobilize younger voters, organizing buses to the Jan. 6 rally and promoting anti-vaccination rhetoric during the pandemic. TPUSA also launched the Professor Watchlist, a Canary Mission-style initiative that existed to organize a list of college professors who could be efficiently harassed or fired for not respecting conservatives enough.
In the last couple years, Kirk was no longer a youth speaking to his peers, but a man in his 30s who still traveled from campus to campus in order to pick on college students for engagement. He stuck to this level of competition because he often found it more difficult with older foes. Kirk was both carnival barker and dunk-tank clown, telling anyone to step right up and "Prove Me Wrong." He would size up an opponent his audience was primed to recognize as the blue-haired freak or pro-Palestine idiot, then try to make them look stupid for the assembled crowd, as well as any internet user unfortunate enough to stumble upon his work. His YouTube videos offered wish fulfillment to those who couldn't win arguments themselves, with algorithm-friendly titles such as "Charlie Kirk VS the Wokies at University of Tennessee," "Charlie Kirk Hands Out Huge L's at University of California San Diego," and "Charlie Takes Down Extremely Bouncy Cambridge Student."
From time to time at these campus events, the person at the mic would reveal—directly or indirectly—their own aspirations to build a career like Kirk's. In this way, his tour functioned as a sadder version of a reality competition: It was unlikely that they would win, but maybe they could at least squeeze a little clout out of it. Kirk's participation was for a similar reason. He wasn't just trying to lure more young voters to conservatism with free hats and epic leftist fails, but to boost his own status as well. The less famous participant in this type of conversation was at least more transparent about it.
It's important to be specific about what Kirk argued for when he was holding a microphone. He hated Muslims. He hated trans people. He referred to the Civil Rights Act as a "huge mistake." He supported Israel and its role in the Gaza genocide. When asked in a debate if he would support an abortion for his 10-year-old daughter if she had become pregnant due to rape, he said he would make her carry the baby to term. He saw minorities as inferior, immigration as poisonous to the United States, and gun violence as a necessary price of preserving a perverted vision of freedom. "I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights," Kirk said at an event in 2023. "That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe."
Many of the remembrances of Kirk gloss over these details. When the New York Yankees held a moment of silence for him before Wednesday's game, the team referred to him as "a fixture on college campuses," and TPUSA as "a youth activist group." In a New York Times column, Ezra Klein called Kirk "one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion." There have been comparisons of him to Martin Luther King Jr., whom he once called "awful"; President Donald Trump and his administration have treated Kirk like a national hero, ordering all federal flags at half-staff for a few days and planning to posthumously give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In the same way that so many institutions capitulated to rolling back diversity initiatives or further suppressing pro-Palestine speech after Trump took office, there is now a rush to present Kirk as something he wasn't. He was not trying to spread healthy debate across the country, or "practicing politics in exactly the right way," as Klein wrote. A sense of pundit class solidarity, or simple dimwittedness, may have prevented Klein from accurately describing Kirk's beliefs, but those who Kirk actually spent his life speaking to will have had no such trouble. Kirk wanted to show the younger generation that it was popular and noble to ridicule those who were fighting for dignity, to take their rights away. He argued to bring in more guns and resentment, and let there be suffering in the interest of America first. He was not shy or euphemistic about any of this.
It makes sense that right-wing provocateurs who work to make the world worse would mourn one of their own. There is no obligation for anyone else to accept the false premise that political violence is equally bad on both sides, or that conservatives are the ones protecting the sanctity of free speech. Who would be credulous enough to agree to disagree, when the State Department is vowing to target any immigrants who use their free speech in a way unpalatable to the right wing?
At least be honest about who died, and what he did in life. When someone like Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy criticizes anyone celebrating the killing of Kirk, months after wishing for Israel to bomb a humanitarian boat to Gaza, they do not care about holding contradictory views. Pointing out the hypocrisy doesn't lead them to have a change of heart or see the error of their ways. They only care that it's happening to someone with whom they share common interests and goals. Winning a debate only gets you so far.
