Charlie Kirk was no saint, and the overtime effort to beatify him is nothing short of apostasy.
There’s a line in the movie, Absence of Malice, “ a lot of news is bad news for somebody and pretty soon those somebodies start adding up”.
That’s Charlie Kirk’s epitaph. He took it as carte blanche that he could say the most egregious things, and he would never pay a price for it.
As the entire world knows, again and again, he did pay a price for it. In a properly governed country with good gun laws, there is no doubt in my mind that Kirk would still be alive. The real tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s sad demise was not just that his strident extremist voice was silenced, but that he was the 18,533rd gun death in the United States so far.
On the same day that Kirk was killed, three students were shot at a Colorado High School. You would never know that if you were listening to prominent Republicans, now would you?
The level of adoration and hyperbole in describing his life has descended into levels that can be defined as nothing short of obscene.
More importantly, factually and morally inaccurate.
Kirk’s “career,” such as it was, was all a carefully constructed grift that was funded by horrible people who hate democracy and the rule of law. That’s the factual truth about Charlie Kirk. All of the praise of him as an “advocate for free speech and honest debate” is just thoroughly untrue. Kirk was anything but.
When you quote Charlie Kirk in discussion with one of the demented souls who loved him, they almost always will tell you that we are taking his words “out of context”.
My response remains the same, “ How? If you look at the full length of his clips, he comes off as even a bigger asshole than he seems simply quoting short statements of his.”
Somehow, this seems to enrage them to no end.
These adoring fans may not like that, but it does not change the facts and minutiae of a life not well lived. And did considerable damage to the country that he claimed to love so much. There are really only two things Charlie Kirk loved: money and preening arrogance. Anything else that he did was a sideline that contributed to his outstanding ability to grift money. A modern-day Elmer Gantry was he.
Consider the origin story he used to tell, until it became inconvenient for him to do so. The details of how he got into extremist teabagger politics can be found here. It’s a good read of how, as a young man, he was manipulated and financed by some horrible people in the American political landscape.
In 2012, Kirk applied to, but was not accepted by, the United States Military Academy at West Point. Kirk always referred to it as being rejected by them in favor of a less qualified candidate.
Kirk said he was “really disappointed” to not get into West Point. He said that rejection was a “gift God has given me.” The New Yorker in its December 2017 profile of Kirk wrote that “the slot he considered his went to [quoting Kirk here] ‘a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion’ whose test scores he claimed he knew. (Kirk said he was being sarcastic when he made the comment.)”
Yet in April 2018 Politico in its profile of Kirk wrote that “Kirk told me — and has said in public several times — that in high school he received a congressional appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but lost that slot to a different candidate — a person he told me was of ‘a different ethnicity and gender.’ He believes the other candidate may have been admitted because of affirmative action. (West Point officials have said they do consider race in admissions, but only for candidates who also fully meet their admission criteria.)”
As someone who served and was commissioned as an officer, it is readily apparent that this was nothing but an excuse and a rationalization. If Charlie Kirk had been serious about serving his country, there were many paths he could have opted for, assuming he didn’t get into West Point on a subsequent application. I would remind you that some of our greatest military leaders did not get accepted the first time they applied (e.g., George Patton). Cadets have to come from all 50 states. And there are only 975 slots available per year. If he had been serious about being an Army officer, there were other paths: Academy Prep School, the Senior Military Colleges, ROTC, and OCS. Thousands have done the same and gone on to successful careers.
It just didn’t fit his narrative of grievance.
I’m convinced he abandoned any “love of country” once Bill Montgomery talked him into the path of Wingnut Grift. Of note, Montgomery was an avid COVID denier, and like Charlie Kirk, died of a preventable reason in 2020. ( A noted mocker of wearing masks, he died of COVID in 2020).
Kirk talked less and less about West Point as he got more famous and wealthy. He did, however, ramp up the level of emotional violence in his campus appearances and TV work. When he died, he was personally worth 12 million dollars, and he funneled far more than that to many particularly heinous causes. His personal holdings included three high-end homes: a $4.75 million estate near Phoenix with sweeping desert views, a nearby apartment, and a beachside condominium on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Just like Joel Osteen, only his gospel was that of fascism and Christian Nationalism.
And that’s the point, as one well-known pastor told us in a sermon this last Sunday, Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley, the senior pastor at Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria.
That’s an excellent summary. And it’s pretty much the summary of Charlie Kirk’s adult life. You can go to many sources and read the many hateful things he said on many subjects. Don’t you dare call it “honest debate” because if you do, it means you agree with what he said — or, as I suspect, Kirk himself knew, you just enjoy crossing the lines of acceptability in American society just to somehow “own the libs”. Kirk preached hate and violence as a matter of routine. Charlie Kirk dedicated his entire adult life to aiding and abetting the overthrow of liberal democracy in America — which is not something anyone should celebrate.
And if you do, then it’s time to hold you in the contempt you have earned.
Charlie Kirk was not “practicing politics the right way.” His work should never “be continued.” He embodied everything corrosive about American politics today. He turned the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ panic of the 2024 election into the centerpiece of his message, fueling many of the political ads that blanketed the country — ads rooted in narratives he and his network of far-right allies manufactured. He called for Nuremburg trials of gender-affirming care providers. He started a “professor watchlist” which called on his followers to report “leftist propaganda” in the classroom, which reportedly led to the families of those on the list being terrorized with death threats. His model of politics was not dialogue, but trolling: hopping from campus to campus to bait students, churn out sound bites, and spread hate. And his rhetoric was not debate — it was violent, dehumanizing, and designed to put targets on people’s backs.
You can stand against political violence, as anyone with a conscience does. You can call for a politics rooted in kindness — something we desperately lack today.
Two things can exist at the same time. Kirk’s killing is indeed horrific, inexcusable, and all political violence should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. It is also true that he was no saint and that he made his living by being hateful and divisive. Charlie Kirk was one of the bad actors who worked hard to destroy the United States of America as a democratic republic. We must not posthumously sanctify a life that was hateful and destructive to the nation he claimed to love. Resolutions in Congress, flying the flag at half-mast, using his death as an excuse to go after freedoms codified in the Bill of Rights, are disgusting testaments to how far off the cliff this wretched nation has gone.
Charlie Kirk is no hero. He is not a worthy martyr. Kirk has been canonized as a martyr. This has allowed the right to ramp up their language of war and retribution on political enemies. That cannot be allowed to continue. Enough is enough.
Charlie Kirk may have spoken often in the name of principle, but he consistently betrayed the values he claimed to defend. His career should be a cautionary tale: proclaiming ideas loudly in politics is no substitute for engaging honestly and humbly. When debate becomes propaganda, public discourse itself begins to rot.