As soon as Charlie Kirk’s death last Wednesday was confirmed, his ascension to MAGA martyrdom began. Kirk had created some of the “few places with open and honest dialogue between left and right,” per JD Vance. Kirk is now mourned as “the embodiment of the First Amendment,” a champion of “bipartisan dialogue,” a bridge-builder who tried to stop “allowing people to villainize each other” through his use of “good-faith debate.”
Of course the political right lionized a slain man who helped build the modern populist right. Incredibly, they’re now joined by liberals and centrists who, beyond denouncing the man’s assassination, are actually celebrating his legacy.
Per liberal commentator Ezra Klein’s New York Times op-ed, Charlie Kirk was “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion,” a heroic figure with “moxie and fearlessness” who was “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” Klein paints Kirk as a noble opponent in a genteel game, fawning over his skill and good sportsmanship.
For those not on the right to hold up Charlie Kirk as some sort of martyr for democratic politics and reasoned debate is dangerous. For one thing, it’s providing cover for an unprecedented wave of political repression aimed at crushing… well, democratic politics and reasoned debate. For another thing, it’s simply not true.
Kirk was an outspoken Christian nationalist who founded Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action, playing a “critical role” in Trump’s 2024 victory. Kirk was a Western chauvinist, an outspoken Islamophobe, and a racist who warned that white Americans were threatened by “prowling Blacks.” He thought abortion was worse than the Holocaust and that the execution of gay people was “God’s perfect law.” His mission was to polarize civic discourse and activate young right-wingers in the service of his reactionary, theocratic politics. He was wildly successful.
I’m nobody to discourage others from taking sides in contentious political debates and trying to win. But that’s just not the same thing as promoting civility and political decency. It is, if anything, the precise opposite.
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If Charlie Kirk believed in free expression, Turning Point USA wouldn’t host a Professor Watchlist to shame academics who share “anti-American views” in the classroom.
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If Charlie Kirk believed in reaching across the aisle, Turning Point Action wouldn’t have foregone moderate voters to rile up the far-right base in the 2024 election.
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If Charlie Kirk believed in civil discourse, he wouldn’t have edited his campus debates into “gotcha” moments to “own the libs.”
Charlie Kirk wasn’t a martyr for political moderation and bipartisan understanding. He was a partisan brawler who wanted to humiliate and crush his enemies. His legacy is making political discourse in the United States cruder, meaner, and more cruel. Charlie Kirk wanted to make this country a more inhospitable place for immigrants, queer people, Muslims, and people of color, and in his 31 years of life he accomplished that goal. We are under no obligation to admire his success in doing so.
The fact Kirk promoted odious politics in a mean-spirited fashion is no cause to celebrate a man’s death, but…
Before mourning Charlie Kirk, we should ask ourselves: would Charlie Kirk have mourned for us?
Charlie Kirk didn’t mourn for his neighbors struggling with gender dysphoria. Charlie Kirk didn’t mourn those forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term within their own bodies. Charlie Kirk didn’t mourn for the victims of American extraction and imperialism around the world. He didn’t mourn for migrants dying of exposure in the brutal desert expanse south of the US-Mexico border. He didn’t mourn for whole families obliterated by American bombs or slowly starved to death, day by day, in Gaza. He didn’t mourn any of this suffering and death because he not only agreed with it—he promoted it, publicly, for years.
Charlie Kirk was no advocate of free speech. He was an advocate of theocratic politics who used “debate” as a tactic to belittle and isolate his opponents. And Charlie Kirk’s death is the occasion for one of largest assaults on the freedoms of speech and association that we’ve seen in generations. People ranging from airline employees to university workers to national television correspondents have all lost their jobs because of statements critical of Kirk in the wake of his death. Libs of TikTok villain Chaya Raichik is calling for civil war in response. Vice President Vance announced a crackdown on left-liberal nonprofits, a phantom “NGO network that foments and facilities and engages in violence,” while The Federalist CEO Sean Davis wrote of his hope that “Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho-terrorist network [???] that has been terrorizing Christians in this nation.” Anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo called for the federal government to repeat the anti-communist Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, when suspected radicals were rounded up and deported en masse.
These chilling plans are abetted by the casting of Charlie Kirk not as an ideological partisan but some kind of all-American hero. Imagining Kirk as the defender of everything good and decent in American society justifies violent repression against his enemies, whether that’s the left, the Democrats, or oppressed communities generally. This wave of political repression is now upon us.
We should act accordingly. We must speak more courageously, struggle more intensely, build stronger relationships of solidarity and care. We must not allow a revanchist far right to organize unopposed.
We don’t need to celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death. But we do need to dismantle his legacy.
This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.