Charlie Kirk Deserved To Live In Infamy
His death should not keep us from speaking the truth.
Voltaire wrote, “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed Wednesday at Utah University, had little respect for the living, especially if they were in any way different from him.
Kirk called all trans people a “throbbing middle finger to god” and “an abomination.” In a 2023 installment of his podcast, he claimed, “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” He conceded that “not every Jewish person believes that” but added “it is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans.”
Kirk claimed DEI policies caused him to question the qualifications of Black airline pilots. He accused prominent Black women of taking opportunities from more qualified white people through Affirmative Action. He said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and “not a good person.” When Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor, Kirk unleashed an Islamophobic screed.
Kirk mocked the brutal beating of Nancy Pelosi’s then-82-year-old husband, Paul, and suggested his audience should help bail out his attacker. He frequently promoted political violence against his perceived enemies. His organization bused people to that insurrection field trip at the Capitol on January 6.
Kirk complained during the 2024 campaign that women might “undermine their husbands” and vote for Kamala Harris. When Taylor Swift announced her engagement to NFL star Travis Kelce, Kirk said she should “submit” to her future husband. (Kirk was born in 1993.)
Kirk was an ignorant bigoted misogynist. That is the truth he deserves. Yes, I’m aware that Kirk had a family. This is an obvious and curious observation people make when someone like Kirk dies. That fact doesn’t make him exceptional. Everyone has a family of some sort — including the people Kirk actively demonized over the years. The mentally ill homeless person Fox News suggests summarily executing has a family. I think we should engage with everyone with the knowledge that they have a family, that someone out there loves them. It would change how we treat each other.
No one should die because they believed and said terrible things. Conversely, one should try to live so that someone can’t bury their reputation with their own words and deeds. However, Kirk is now a MAGA martyr in a post-truth reality. Republicans and even Democrats who should know better are helping preserve Kirk in death as someone he never was in life — an energetic thought leader, an affable Alex P. Keaton, who inspired a generation of young people. Ezra Klein wrote in The New York Times that Kirk “practiced politics the right way.” (He did not.) California Gov. Gavin Newsom even called on young people to “continue his work.” (They should not.)
Journalist Terry Moran posted online, “Charlie Kirk said many things I disagree with, and some I find downright hateful. But he was murdered on a tour of university campuses, under a tent that proclaimed his invitation to debate: ‘Prove Me Wrong.’ He was speaking. He was inviting speech that sought to counter him.”
I’ve seen (mostly) men express this sentiment, and it’s incredibly naive. Kirk’s intentions were aggressive and abusive, like the trolls who’d regularly challenge Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a debate. They don’t want to exchange ideas. They want to subdue and humiliate. You might recall all those YouTube videos with titles boasting about how some right-winger “owned” or even “destroyed” some liberal (especially a woman). That’s not reasoned debate. It’s a show of dominance.
Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” slogan was never in good faith. His debate style — similar to so many right-wing influencers in his mold — was like the guy who demands that a woman punch him in the stomach to prove how buff he is. But he just wants an excuse to punch her harder.
In truth, Kirk offered little to the world but hatred, which is neither a rare commodity nor a valuable work of art. No matter when you are born, there is too much hatred and distrust in the world and too little love and compassion. Spend your life filling the deficit not adding to the regrettable surplus.
I don’t plan to share many videos of Kirk because I have no interest in commemorating him. I’ll leave that to others. Besides, death has not made Kirk more pleasant to my eyes. However, this one clip is important, as it clearly shows how Kirk minimized gun violence to an almost sociopathic level. (Watch below.)
Kirk tells his audience, “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But … I think it’s worth it. 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. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”
Whenever someone invokes statistics this way, they usually don’t imagine themselves on the crappy end of them. Kirk was many things, most of them bad, so let’s be generous and imagine he wasn’t also a hypocrite. Perhaps he would’ve been fine with the senseless loss of his own life through gun violence so that Americans could have easy access to military-style weapons.
Conservative columnist David French posted Wednesday on social media, “Political violence is evil. I don’t care how angry you are at your opponents. We have a ballot box. We have courts. We have free speech. I’m sick with grief for Charlie and his family. I’m sick with concern for this country.”
I don’t disagree with this overall sentiment. Although Kirk himself might have. When expressing his willingness to sacrifice unseen statistics on the altar of the Second Amendment, he argued that guns were how we’d defend our “God-given rights.” That is inherently a call for political violence.
Kirk, like many people with simple minds, saw the world in very simple terms. He assumed when the next American revolution or dumbass civil war came, someone would ring a bell and we’d all go to our corners. Kirk and the MAGA faithful would all receive their white hats, and everyone they disliked wouldn’t have enough time to find hats. Game over. A Christofascist utopia is secured.
People will have very different ideas about when a government has become tyrannical enough that violent revolt is required. Some might assume it’s when a rogue state invades cities and detains people without due process. Others might feel moved to violent action over vaccine mandates. We could put it up to a vote, but people with guns often reject the democratic process. That’s why, like Captain Picard, I have “never subscribed to the theory that political power flows from the barrel of a gun.”
Civilian gun ownership has rarely helped “defend our God-given rights.” Historically, guns have more often denied people those same rights, especially the right to life. The same day Kirk died, someone shot two students at a Colorado High School. This is the gun violence that Kirk considered the price of his version of freedom. (Gov. Jared Polis ordered the state flag flown at half mast for Kirk but not these students.)
A society is only free if people can freely express themselves, even if others find that particular expression repulsive. This must apply to everyone. Charlie Kirk deserved to live in a free society even if he would’ve denied others that same freedom.
MAGA has already scapegoated liberals for this latest act of political violence, but Kirk didn’t die because people responded in kind to his hateful rhetoric. Words don’t kill. Someone murdered Kirk with the weapon he valorized. Utah has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation, yet no patriots with guns intervened to save him because that’s not how guns work. Utah University is an open-carry campus, and the shooter managed to escape and was still at large on Wednesday.
Thanks to the current White House occupant, Kirk’s death will likely fuel only more violence, directed at the most vulnerable. These are the times that make me recall Sherlock Holmes’s lament in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box: “What is the meaning of it, Watson? … What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
I like Ezra Klein yet his editorial left me speachless: Kirk did not do it right. His hate speech crossed the line. Certainly this does not justify violence but let’s stop pretending there are zero norms in society. If you listen to some praising Kirk you’d think David Duke might return as a Saint. I, for one, see him as a hateful bigot that no matter how smart, he’s still a bigot. We used to ostracize such people. Today, if they are very successful at creating political organizations to help elect other bigots to office, they are praised.
The lionization of this horrible, damaging troll by MSM and several Democrats has been just as disturbing as his assassination, so the only way to honor his legacy is by reminding them of all the horrible, damaging shit he said over the years.
And there is no shortage of it. In fact, he said so much terrible things there is a quote for everything.