Murder is reprehensible and wrong. So is the whitewashing of extremists.
Charlie Kirk was murdered this week in Utah during a public event. The video footage of the act is gruesome, and we rightly recoil when we watch it. We should nonetheless demand that journalists and public servants react with cooler heads and do not whitewash the victim’s life.
Ezra Klein, an influential columnist, writes that Charlie Kirk practiced politics the right way. Governors Jared Polis of Colorado and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania ordered flags to be flown at half-mast. Czech Cardinal Dominik Duka will celebrate a Mass for Charlie Kirk in one of Czechia’s biggest and most iconic Catholic churches.
We normally reserve honors of this magnitude for people who have provided exceptional service to the country or to mankind. Charlie Kirk was a hateful racist troll, and the best that can be said about him is that he was slightly better than the groypers.
And as we rightfully condemn the murder of a person, we must also denounce the extremism that has festered on the alt-right podcasting circuit and on the AM radio before that.
Jamelle Bouie, in my view the best current New York Times columnist, writes, “There is no doubt that Kirk was influential, no doubt that he had millions of devoted fans. But it is difficult to square this idealized portrait of Kirk as a model citizen with the man as he was.”
Kirk, allegedly a free-speech hero, urged his followers to report professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The Professor Watchlist still exists, and it is a clear intimidation tactic. Much in the same way, Kirk’s sycophants are now creating a new list of tens of thousands of people who have said anything critical of their idol.
Anyone with access to Google Search can find for themselves the endless vile statements by Charlie Kirk. “Playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you,” Kirk said. On his podcast, Kirk urged authorities to establish a “citizen force” at the border to defend “white demographics” against what he described as “an invasion of the country.” He promoted white pride rhetoric and cautioned about the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
Kirk was obsessed with “Black crime,” and on the last episode of his show before he was killed, he devoted a segment to “the ever-increasing amount of Black crime,” telling his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.” “We must ban trans-affirming care – the entire country,” he said in 2024. He referred to Democratic lawmakers as “maggots, vermin, and swine.” This might seem like a long list, but it actually only scratches the surface of Charlie Kirk’s racism, transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny.
A small thing in the grand scheme of things, but disturbing to me nonetheless, was how vile he was towards Simone Biles after she had the “twisties” and could not compete at the Tokyo Olympics. Ironically enough, at that time, he did not yet have the marching orders that Russia was his friend.
Which brings me to the two probably most consequential positions of Charlie Kirk. Like the rest of the MAGA movement, he, for all intents and purposes, joined Russia and its propaganda machine against the efforts of the USA to support Ukraine. He also helped organize the failed auto-coup of the defeated President Trump, as his organization Turning Point USA was busing participants to the January rally.
As Elizabeth Spiers, a former editor-in-chief of The New York Observer, writes,
“There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins ‘Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children’.”
Ken “Popehat” White, an actual free-speech absolutist and a First Amendment litigator, noted on Bluesky: “I don’t particularly buy the notion that being willing to go anywhere and say shitty things to anyone makes you a hero. Does it make you better than someone willing to go anywhere to beat anyone up? Yeah, I guess. […] So I question the proposition that just because Charlie Kirk didn’t go around killing people, but went around belittling and demeaning and dehumanizing them instead, that he’s inherently admirable. Would I be a hero if I said I will debate ANYONE about whether black people are human? No.”
I do fear that the load-bearing institutions of our democracies are falling apart. I wish we lived in a world where people are not murdered in broad daylight for their speech, or otherwise. But I also wish we lived in a world where gutter racists like Charlie Kirk would not get even 1% of the audience they now get.
Elizabeth Spiers concludes:
“Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome. I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.”