A weird thing happened yesterday afternoon while I was listening to MSNBC’s coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, which morphed into its coverage of the murder of Charlie Kirk. (Yes, “listening to,” because my desk doesn’t face the TV.) I hadn’t been paying close attention to the discussion, but at one point after it was confirmed that Kirk had died, host Ari Melber closed a panel discussion before a commercial break by saying that Kirk’s career involved “goin’ around to talk to young people about ideas and society. […] He was peacefully engaging people in discourse, and he was shot down and murdered today.”
This is an accurate quote, because it was such a weird way to describe the late professional shitlord that I paused the DVR to make sure I got it right. To hear Melber describe him, Kirk was some kind of itinerant Buddhist monk traveling from campus to campus, challenging young people to examine their cherished beliefs and assumptions, or perhaps engaging them in Platonic dialogue to probe difficult concepts and come to an understanding. But then he was cut down as he tried valiantly to bring enlightenment.
Jesus P. God, it was embarrassing. Charlie Kirk “debated” like people on Twitter do: to score cheap points and to DESTROY your ideological opponent by trying to make them look foolish, logic and evidence be damned. His tour slogan, emblazoned on the awning above where he was shot, was “PROVE ME WRONG,” not “Come, let us reason together.”
But it turns out that a lot of people who should know better are talking about Kirk as if he were some kind of serious thinker, not as the low-rent troll he actually was. It’s really weird how rapidly the narrative switched from “Political violence is unacceptable” or even “Like any of us, he had the right to speak without being murdered” to “This victim of (apparently) political violence was a good man cut down in the prime of life, and we should all be more like him.”
Let’s be clear here: Charlie Kirk’s murder was a tragedy for America because it’s likely to lead to more political violence, and because we should be able to resolve political disputes through politics, not killing. But being the victim of a senseless assassination doesn’t ennoble anything the man did in his career of trolling, lying, and pushing hate.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who already lost a lot of us when he did that podcast where he hosted Kirk and joined him in attacking trans people, initially sounded like just about every other Democrat who went on social media to condemn Kirk’s murder. In his first social media message following the shooting, Newsom called the attack on Kirk “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible” and added, “In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.”
Oh man, if only he had stopped there. But about three hours later, Newsom went from that appropriate condemnation of violence into a virtual endorsement of Kirk’s rightwing activism, which, let’s be clear here, was aimed at white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred.
In a statement that started out fine but capsized into astonishing tone-deafness, Newsom first (appropriately, obviously) condemned the murder and expressed sympathy for Kirk’s family, but then devolved into a rose-tinted view of Kirk’s career that had little to do with reality:
“I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.
Charlie Kirk had no interest in “genuine debate.” He engaged in politics as rhetorical blood sport (with blithe indifference to actual bloodshed as the cost the Second Amendment demands).
Worse, Newsom closed by encouraging us all to pick up Kirk’s torch on his behalf, as if he really were the free-speech monk Melber invoked, which again makes me wonder if Newsom actually knew anything about the guy.
“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence.”
Charlie Kirk’s “work” involved pushing the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, arguing that the injunction in Leviticus to stone gay people to death was “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters,” and claiming, in defense of Elon Musk’s antisemitism, that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Kirk was never about good-faith debate or engaging across ideology. But he apparently snookered plenty of people into thinking he was.
But the most shameful example of Charlie Kirk hagiography (so far) comes from Ezra Klein at The New York Times (archive link, no gift link ad views for them), who was predictably all Ezra Kleiny about how Kirk “practiced politics the right way,” and holy shit how wrong can you get about what the right way is?
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.
As proof of how well Kirk did politics, Klein notes that lots of young people abandoned Democrats in 2024, going for Trump instead. Kirk did politics “right” because he managed to get a pretty sizeable number of young people to agree with him, so let’s not talk too much about how he did that, or the content of those beliefs. Literally, in Klein’s case: The sole example he includes of something that Kirk believes was his defense of “the Second Amendment, even admitting it meant accepting innocent deaths.” But surely he would have preferred it not be his own.
Not a word about the conspiracy theories, the insistence that Democrats literally hate America, the racism, the promotion of the antisemitic claim that “Cultural Marxism” is destroying America, or his insistence that being transgender is “a lie” and that trans people are “a hypervocal minority that itself will never actually be happy regardless of how many changes we make for the alphabet mafia.”
No mention of any of it, but golly, he sure energized people and got them interested in politics and vigorous “debate.” For Klein it’s always the horse race, and he may not even notice the horse has a swastika on its saddle.
This is why your classical rhetoricians despised the Sophists, who saw argument primarily in terms of winning, not in terms of actually reaching for truth, justice, or even reasonably priced love and a good boiled egg.
We’ll close with extremism expert Jeff Sharlet on Democracy Now this morning, accurately pointing out that Kirk was no free speech hero, he was an advocate for censoring views he disagreed with, at least after the Right wins. He was a McCarthyite through and through.
Sharlet calls attention to Kirk’s “Professor watch list,” which encouraged firing teachers who supposedly did “liberal indoctrination” in their classes, and to Kirk’s weird call for televised public executions (Facebook video) for a wide array of crimes, which he insisted should be required viewing for children over the age of 12, so they would never become criminals themselves.
Then again, a lot of college students in that Facebook video whooped and hollered at Kirk’s encouragement of killings as edutainment, so we guess he must have been doing politics Right.
OPEN THREAD.
Surprise, All Ends Of Political Spectrum Disgusted By Gavin Newsom Sucking Up To Steve Bannon And Charlie Kirk
Second Amendment Comes For Charlie Kirk
[Governor Gavin Newsom / NYT (archive link) / Scenes from a Slow Civil War]
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