Whitewashing Charlie Kirk Promotes Political Violence

The murder of Kirk was evil. Lying about him is also wrong.

Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, most Democratic politicians and journalists have denounced political violence in general and the attack on Kirk in particular. That is as it should be; Kirk’s murder was horrific. We don’t know anything about the shooter or their motivations, but we do know that whatever the motivations, murder is wrong and evil. As Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said, “He was someone’s son. He was someone’s husband. He was a father to two young children.”

Some people, however, have gone beyond the denunciation of the violent attack on Kirk, and have argued that Kirk’s cause, and his political life, were virtuous. Most notably, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published an op-ed declaring that “Charlie Kirk was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein in the piece argues that Kirk forswore political violence and extremism and championed rational nonviolent debate on college campuses.

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.

The main problem with this is that it is a lie. Kirk was not especially interested in persuasion. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the January 6 insurrection; his organization, Turning Points USA, bussed people to the coup—including one man who stormed the capital and beat police with a fire extinguisher. Kirk continued to defend the insurrection and TPUSA’s role in it for years.

Kirk’s assault on democracy did not start on January 6. TPUSA has been touted (by Klein and others) as some sort of righteous free speech advocacy group promoting debate on campus. But that (again) is a lie. In fact, TPUSA’s main purpose is summed up by its “Professor Watchlist” a website which lists teachers and professors who TPUSA believes “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

In short, the Watchlist is intended as, and functions as, a mechanism to stifle academic freedom by targeting those on the left—especially women and BIPOC professors—for stochastic terrorism and harassment. Professors on the list say that they regularly receive hate mail and death threats—and that the threats accelerated after January 6, the insurrection that TPUSA supported. The link to the recent firing of a children’s literature professor reported by a conservative student for talking about “gender” is quite clear. TPUSA was a leader of a conservative moral panic designed to terrorize liberal professors and drive them from the academy—a moral panic which has metastasized into Trump’s unprecedented, openly ideological campaign to defund universities.

Kirk has also just openly called for political violence himself; he praised as Biblical and “perfect” the idea of stoning LGBT people to death, and argued that gun deaths were “worth it” to preserve Second Amendment rights. Klein says it’s not fair to argue that Kirk deserved to die by gun violence because he was opposed to gun control, and that is true. What Klein refuses to grapple with, however, is that, Kirk claimed that the Second Amendment needed to be preserved through violent death. That’s an argument which explicitly says that we should see children killed in school shootings as an inevitable necessary sacrifice to politics. It’s a justification of political violence

Kirk was not a proponent of democracy or of free speech. Nor was he an opponent of political violence. To say he was is (one more time) a lie. It’s also an insult to Kirk’s victims—including professors, those who died on January 6, and LGBT people who he threatened with violent death, just for starters.

Worse, though, by cosigning Kirk’s political approach, Klein cosigns Kirk’s contempt for democracy and his embrace of political violence. Klein thinks that by reaching across the aisle and praising Kirk’s free speech while ignoring the content of the speech, he is doing good work to ratchet down political animosity and political violence. But he is not. Instead, what he is doing is giving the far-right cover to terrorize, harass, target, and even (in the case of January 6) murder opponents. Klein is saying that political violence against the right is wrong, but that political violence perpetrated by the right is “practicing politics the right way.”

Is Klein unaware of Kirk’s actual views? Does he not know of Kirk’s involvement in January 6? Is he deliberately obscuring Kirk’s violent rhetoric and actions because he thinks it’s politically expedient, or because he thinks it will advance his own career?

I have no idea. But I do know this: praising Charlie Kirk’s politics, erasing his efforts to destroy democracy, will not help democracy and is not a way to reduce political violence. You cannot solve our current fascist nightmare with lies, and certainly not by pretending that the fascists aren’t fascist, or that they forswear violence.

Yes, we should oppose political violence. That means opposing the kind of vicious assassination that targeted Charlie Kirk. It also means opposing the harassment, the insurrection, and the assaults on marginalized people which Kirk promoted throughout his life. Violence against Charlie Kirk is wrong. But Klein and those like him seem to have embraced the idea that the only violence that matters is violence against Charlie Kirk and those like him. If we memory hole and ignore the violence that Kirk spent his life promoting, we end up with fascism. And fascism is not, to put it mildly, a route to peace or democracy.