I WILL NOT ATTEMPT to eulogize the martyr. Others have done this already—and done so with such skill 1that anything I write would not measure up. I will do something else here: explain, in sober and measured language, the significance of Kirk’s life to the American right. Like most great men, Charlie Kirk symbolized something far larger than himself. You will not understand why his murder feels so cataclysmic to so many if you do not first understand what Kirk meant to millions of young Americans and to the movement they joined.
See especially Joshua Trevino, “Charlie Kirk, Maytr,” American Mind (11 September 2025).
This understanding is rare outside the ranks of populist politicos. Only a portion of this blog’s readership comes from those ranks: many of you are not from the United States and thus do not have a native view of its politics. Many of you are nonpartisan types whose main passion is military or diplomatic affairs and therefore do not have a fine-grained understanding of conservative politics and its internal controversies. Many of you work in Silicon Valley and do your best to avoid anything political. Many of you are boomers and thus do not pay close attention to what young politicos are doing on the internet, or you are traditionalist conservatives who never “really understood the appeal” of Charlie Kirk.
If you fall into any of these categories, you probably think of Kirk as a YouTube shock jock eager to provoke his way into virality. If you know him only through the stray references made to him in the occasional New Yorker piece, you might assume he was a committed white nationalist egging the right toward authoritarianism.
Neither of those sentences accurately describes Kirk or his life’s project. Charlie Kirk was not just a piece of internet bombast; his main field of action, in fact, was not on the internet. Kirk was one of the most effective institution-builders and coalition-crafters in the United States. He was less an influencer than a power broker; everyone in MAGAland acknowledged the leadership role he played in building and holding together Trump’s coalition. No man save Trump himself did more to pioneer the electorally viable conservative populism that now defines the Republican Party—not just in terms of its ideas and aesthetic style, but also in terms of its institutions, leadership, money flows, and personnel networks. Kirk’s assassination was not just an attack on a certain point of view; it was an attack on a pillar of Republican power.
But Kirk did have views—views that he fiercely defended and tirelessly spread. How he chose to express these views, and where he chose to express them, gave them a special power. Charlie Kirk’s role as a living symbol starts here—and it is what distinguished him from talking heads like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, and other names you might recognize. There is a unique emotional weight to Kirk’s murder that I do not think would be felt if one of those other men had been assassinated in his stead. I will try to communicate the emotional weight of his loss as best I can.
My convictions here stem from the time I have spent over the last few weeks thinking about Kirk and his mass appeal. I began to study him with special care in August, when a producer for his show contacted me. Kirk had decided that his knowledge of China and Taiwan was insufficient and that he was looking for guests who could come onto the show to talk about those issues with him. His team reached out to me. I told his people that I would be glad to appear on the show—and I began to watch as many episodes as I could to prepare. I asked several fans of the show to explain what they loved about it and about Kirk. I viewed many of his other videos, especially the campus videos, which are extremely compelling and somewhat addictive.
All of this was done for the sake of an episode that will never be filmed. I never met Kirk. Now I never will. I thus cannot speak about Charlie Kirk as a friend, host, or family man. I can only speak of Charlie Kirk the coalition broker and Charlie Kirk the symbol—the two roles through which he had the greatest influence on the greatest number of my countrymen.
We can start with Kirk’s role as a coalition broker. Charlie Kirk had immense influence over the Republican Party and the conservative populist movement that animates it. His influence was derived from four sources of power. The first was the size of his audience. Kirk’s radio show had 500,000 monthly listeners; his YouTube channel has 4.3 million subscribers; his Twitter account, 5.3 million followers; and his TikTok, 7.8 million followers. Across platforms, his most popular video was viewed some two billion times. Few Americans have such a large megaphone at their disposal.
Kirk’s second source of power came from his leadership of Turning Point USA and its spin-off organizations involved in state politics and Christian ministries. Two years ago, I wrote an essay on the organizational genius of 19th-century Americans—in those days, the American nation built one mass-membership organization after another to accomplish various civic and political goals. Today’s civil society is different, dominated by expert-led NGOs with no mass component.2 Kirk was a fantastically successful builder in the 19th-century pattern. TPUSA has some 850 chapters across the country. Turning Point Action mobilized tens of thousands of voters—Kirk claimed hundreds of thousands—and likely made the difference in several 2024 swing states, especially Arizona. He used this mobilizing power to primary half of the Arizona GOP—a strategy he was soon going to take to the rest of the nation.
See Tanner Greer, “Lessons of the 19th Century,” Scholar’s Stage (3 April 2023) and “A School of Strength and Character,” Palladium (30 March 2023).
Kirk’s third source of power came from his role as the central node in a network of the talented and the powerful. TPUSA was a leadership incubator for a generation of conservative activists. His success with TPUSA made him a favorite of the Republican donor class. His show gave him a ready excuse to interview politicians, think tankers, and media personalities across the right. All of this gave Kirk an impeccable Rolodex—he had access to a vast network of conservatives who mattered and an unerring eye for up-and-comers who should matter. He was constantly connecting politicians with donors, statesmen with staffers, and media outfits with the next brilliant young producer or marketer. There are a good four dozen people in the Trump administration who owe their appointments to an introduction Kirk made on their behalf—and this was true not only of the Trump administration, but also across Congress, in state governments, and in news agencies like Fox News.
The final source of Kirk’s power was his relationship with the president. Because of his loyalty to Trump, the resources he could mobilize, and the wisdom he gleaned from constant interaction with ordinary Americans on campuses across the United States, Charlie Kirk was a valued political advisor to the president. He had a direct line to President Trump and a host of other prominent leaders: the Vice President, many cabinet officials, a dozen senators, and several governors as well.
All of this explains, in part, the reaction to Kirk’s assassination. He personally assisted an entire generation of young leaders and staffers on their journey into power. Many powerful and influential figures are thankful to him for connecting them to important donors or feeding them worthy staffers. Many received his aid before their political ascent. Many of the individuals now leading the U.S. government—including the president himself—are where they are today because of Charlie Kirk’s labors on their behalf. For the populist right, he was the indispensable man. Behind the scenes, he was constantly building bridges, brokering peace, and greasing the wheels of the MAGA political machine.
It will be very hard to replace him.
However, all of that is only half the story. The emotional impact of Kirk’s murder has less to do with his position in the structure of American power and more to do with what he symbolized in the eyes of so many of his followers—and his critics—on the right.
To understand these emotions, you must first understand what the young Republican on campus was feeling at the height of the Great Awokening.
The young Republican felt afraid.
The young man who believed that a transgender woman is not a woman, or that white privilege is not a national crisis, or that Donald Trump should be president, was a young man who lived in fear. He feared what would happen if he expressed his beliefs. He feared humiliation. He feared that his classmates would blackball, bully, or haze him. He feared becoming the subject of a viral wave of hate. He feared having advisors and professors turn on him, damaging his grades or sabotaging his future career. (While I have used “he” here, all of this was even more true for the conservative young woman, who faced even greater social pressures to conform and more vicious tactics when she did not.)
These young conservatives feared because they took the rhetoric of their professors and classmates seriously. They expected to be treated with the same grace, respect, and friendship that the median progressive reserved for the Ku Klux Klan. Time and again they were told that their beliefs were the functional equivalent of a Klansman’s. In this environment, only the most disagreeable or the most courageous were willing to stand up for their beliefs.
It was in this air of fear that Turning Point USA began to rise. For years progressives have looked at Charlie Kirk’s campus events and lampooned him for spending so much time debating 18-year-olds. They missed the point of these events. By walking onto hostile campuses and planting TPUSA chapters, Kirk showed young conservatives that they were not alone. By arguing with anyone willing to stand in line—professor or protester, heckler or hanger-on—Kirk was demonstrating that conservative beliefs could withstand the scrutiny and social pressure of the college environment. Their creed could take the blows and keep its shape. Every clip he uploaded was evidence that a man who openly championed this creed could walk away looking better and wiser than the progressives who attacked him—no matter how many of these attackers there were. Kirk cut against the spirit of the age. He was no anon. He did not hide behind a handle or bury his convictions in the darker corners of Discord. Every time Kirk or his proxies praised Trump or made some inflammatory declaration, they were showing young conservatives that they could not be silenced.
Behind all of this was one overarching message: Do not fear. You have truth behind you. An entire fellowship of young conservatives stands behind you too. Charlie is here today to show you that conservatives like you can stand tall in hostile spaces. You can also do this. You should also do this. They do not own the public square. You do not need to be afraid.
That was the message of the man who was murdered this week.
This message had an obvious corollary: if we show up, then we will win. Recall that Trump did not win the 2016 popular vote. This caused a lot of nihilism among young conservatives. Many believed that the American people were too corrupted for a conservative movement to win majority support. Others thought that the American power structure—the en vogue term was “the cathedral”—would never allow a fair fight and would grind actual resistance to dust. He who believes thus either retreats from the public entirely or looks to less democratic solutions to the nation’s problems.
Charlie Kirk thought otherwise. He insisted that conservative populists could win the fight for the public square even if that fight was rigged against them. This faith was the foundation of his public persona and the engine that propelled the organizations he led. Kirk went out of his way to debate his ideas openly with opponents from the other camp. As a true populist leader should, he moved among the people, constantly talking with ordinary citizens of all persuasions. Kirk thought in terms of ballots, not bullets. When many to his right fantasized about Caesar and Sulla, he chased votes. He did not think nationalists needed to adopt extreme measures to win. Persuasion and mobilization—the traditional tools of self-government—would be enough.
Kirk saw America as he saw college campuses: the problem was not that America lacked conservatives or populists, but that too many of the conservatives it had were inexperienced, apathetic, or afraid. All they needed was an invitation to show up. The organizations Kirk built did this inviting.
These were the methods of the man who was murdered this week.
Not everyone on the right, especially the young right, shared Kirk’s faith in constitutional liberties, popular mandates, and retail politics. Many of these young men were animated by a hatred for modernity that Kirk believed was spiritually destructive. He was convinced that one of his missions was to steer these young men to straighter paths. Here is how he described that mission in the last interview he ever gave:
“My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said. “This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.” 3
Brigham Tomco, “How Charlie Kirk became ‘too big to ignore’,” Deseret News , 7 September 2025.
That was the mission of the man who was murdered this week.
Kirk often expressed his opinions in intentionally inflammatory ways (though you will notice that this was usually on his show; when he engaged with leftists in person—even those extremely hostile toward him—he did so politely and sometimes with great compassion). He and his lieutenants could be merciless on the attack, never more so than when targeting anti-Trump elements in their own party. It would be silly to pretend otherwise.
But nothing in that last paragraph captures what Charlie Kirk represented to the young right. He was the living symbol of a certain mode of politics. In his world, conservatives would win. They would win through courage, personal virtue, and constant contact with the American people. The central task was gathering and training a leadership cadre that might fan across the country. They would persuade the hesitant, cheer the weary, stiffen the spines of those inclined to silence. This sort of persuasion and mobilization has been core to the American political tradition since the 19th century. Charlie Kirk’s life work was evidence that this tradition was not dead. He told the rising tide of the young right that they were the heirs to that tradition. He told them they were strong. He told them that they did not need to fear.
And now he is dead.
I do not think liberals, progressives, or even older conservatives understood the amount of slime thrown at Kirk by those to his right. His eagerness to work with the new establishment inside established political forms, his program for the right’s spiritual renewal, and his generally pro-Israel line made him a constant target of Nick Fuentes and the “Fuentards” who follow him. His commitment to populist coalition-building made him an enemy of people like Laura Loomer, who described Kirk as “a political charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next” just a few weeks ago. While they were happy to show up on his show, many figures on the dissident right—who, as a rule, are not fond of populism and do not have faith in the American people—were privately derisive of Kirk’s project. Their anon counterparts constantly attacked him for not “knowing what time it is,” for not understanding that the left speaks the language of bullets, not ballots.
The man who assassinated Charlie Kirk was not speaking the language of ballots.
The poasters feel vindicated. They have not been shy in stating their vindication. Some have done so in very ugly ways that I will not link to. The more restrained version looks like this:
None of these responses are worse than the TikToker who celebrated his death with the exclamation, “The best part of this is he is not even martyr material!,” but they stir anger nonetheless. I only have so much tolerance for anonymous posters who have made nothing of their lives trying to convince us that Charlie Kirk accomplished nothing with his.
Kirk’s legacy is real. TPUSA lives on. The Arizona GOP has been remade in his image. Donald Trump won the popular vote. His administration is staffed by dozens of men Kirk handpicked. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousand—of young Republicans have the courage to be young Republicans because of him. The Republican Party is now a populist, nationalist institution. Save for the life and labors of Charlie Kirk, none of this would have happened.
A reckoning is due. Justice must be served. But we should not forget why Charlie Kirk was assassinated: he figured out how to make conservative populism work. His conviction that nationalist populism could win in America has been vindicated by events. His strategy proved so powerful that his enemies were left with no recourse but to murder him. It is up to us to decide whether the victory-path Kirk cleared dies with him.
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If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on politics and history worth your time. For a meditation on the role that violence has played in American history and politics, read “On Sparks Before the Prairie Fire,” “On Days of Disorder,” and “ Scrap the Myth of Panic,” For a discussion of various intellectual currents and controversies on the right, you might consider “The Eight Tribes of Trump and China,” “The Problem of the New Right” and “Further Notes on the New Right.” For my takes on the sort of organization building and campaigning Kirk engaged in, see “Lessons From the 19th Century” and “Culture Wars are Long Wars”, To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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Good and very fair essay. As someone who’s basically on the New Right, I do feel a little twinge of shame for not acting like Kirk. Not enough of a twinge to make me do it, but enough to notice. I really don’t think the Right is going to vote their way out of this, but it would be nice, and I’ll give him credit for trying longer than most of his alternatives. RIP
I’m wondering who you think killed Charlie Kirk and why?
I’m assuming it’s the kid from Utah they are posting pictures of and the motive is some combination of personal instability and buying into mass hysteria. I’m not that invested in either of those assumptions and am not that interested. Also not sure why you are that curious, when my comment doesn’t reference the shooter.
I’m asking because the essay as I read it positively establishes a “they” who are supposed to have killed Mr. Kirk, and names a motive that seems (at least at this point) in no way attachable to the murderer. I just don’t see how “some unnamed large group that hates nationalist populism is responsible for Kirk’s” can be seen as a good and fair kind of conclusion.
Believe it or not, I was responding to the gestalt of the essay. I understand what the author meant well enough and feel no need to hyperfixate on an ambiguous sentence.
What is the ‘new right’?
Thanks, Tanner. That was a very helpful explainer for those us outside of the movement and its politics.
“ His strategy proved so powerful that his enemies were left with no recourse but to murder him”
This reads as if you are putting the actions of one man onto the entire left.
Ryan–
I did not expect the second to last sentence of this essay to cause the reaction that it has. Mostly, I saw it as an effective set-up for the final sentence of the piece, which is the most important of the essay.
But with that said, I will note a few things.
First of all, this sentence should be read in the context of the rest of the essay. Earlier in this essay I describe the leftists that Kirk debated as “opponents,” not as enemies. The general claim of this essay was that Kirk was a believer in small r-republicanism who believed that mobilization and persuasion were the tools of choice. The entire essay is an endorsement of those tools. I think it is very difficult to read this essay as anything else. I would read the phrase “enemies” in this context–Kirk’s enemies were the people who would stop the right from engaging in mobilization and persuasion through the use of violence. One of these people murdered him.
I was ambiguous about the identity of these enemies intentionally. He came from a community that endorses murder as a political act, but it was not clear if he came from a milieu of violence on the left or on the right. Unlike many pieces of this sort this essay specifically points out some of the communities on the right who might be interested in Kirk’s death. But I went out of my way not to speculate on the identity and group affiliation of the assassin until more is known.
I do think that group affiliation matters. If the kid comes from a discord gamer culture that lionizes political murders, then yes, there is shared responsibility across that culture for Kirk’s death, and their sympathies make them, almost by definition, an enemy to Kirk’s project (as well as to his person). I think it is irresponsible to assign corporate guilt at this point but also think it is absurd to write it off as the actions of some lone gunman. We should hold the assassin and the world from which he springs to the same standard we would Brenton Tarrant.
I just think there is an inherent problem with repeatedly invoking the idea that “they” killed him while leaving the content of that “they” ambiguous; Especially in the real-world context within which we live, where the President of the United States has so eagerly, effectively, and dangerously filled that blank in for millions of his very devoted followers.
But you go beyond that. You take these ambiguous co-murderers – that could be anyone from angry gamers to trans-rights activists to The Proud Boys to the administration to society as a whole – and affirmatively name their motive. “They” had no other recourse, because “they” so badly wanted to stop conservative nationalist populism. You’ve gone to some lengths to insist you aren’t implying a particular “they,” but this makes that certainly feel like a fudge.
It isn’t “absurd” to treat this as the action of a lone gunman, I think you’ve miswritten that. That’s absolutely what it is, that is quite simply the case. Of course it would be absurd to insist that the action of the lone gunman had no context, sources, or history beyond itself, that this isn’t worth exploring. But affirmatively stating that this expansive “they” is who killed him, and naming the ultimate reason “they” did so – rationally objecting to his political project… that just ties this thing up in knots for me.
I’m grateful to have been introduced to some of your other work through this link. And I did find this essay helpful. This particular aspect though I think is a bit of a howler.
“Kirk was a believer in small r-republicanism who believed that mobilization and persuasion were the tools of choice”
He also praised Jan 6 and advocated for OT biblical law, so I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘mobilization’ and ‘persuasion’. He supported state regulation of behavior that goes far beyond mere persuasion, and as you have articulated he was a quasi-state agent (which is why the flags are currently at half-mast and the VP commandeered his show to announce state repression). His efforts at persuasion, meanwhile, largely consisted of publicly broadcasting the humiliation of children. For the sport of it.
Outside of that, it is enough to note that imprecatory political prayers are made in Christian Nationalist churches all over America every Sunday. That is the environment TR grew up in, the environment that propelled Kirk to riches and fame. Kirk himself routinely criticized the dead (notoriously George Floyd) and denounced empathy as weakness. To suddenly say that he is exempt from his own style of politics does a disservice to the life and work of Charlie Kirk, a man who called for Joe Biden to be publicly executed.
It appears TR had a falling out with his MAGA father in the days before he made this terrible decision. Perhaps he didn’t feel Kirk’s style of ‘persuasion’ was the only force being used against him. Who knows. But it’s not the first time an under-educated kid from a gun-loving conservative family, with no direction and no prospects, has taken a potshot at a conservative leader recently. Something tells me it won’t be the last.
My opinion agrees with you. The article may not have been meant to have any “bring us together” moments. There were plenty of negatives in Kirk’s rallies that drove the L and the R further apart and, in my opinion, this article does the same. Maybe it was meant to.
“If you know him only through the stray references made to him in the occasional New Yorker piece, you might assume he was a committed white nationalist egging the right toward authoritarianism.”
He absolutely was. Being an institution-builder and coalition-crafter means he was not just another internet troll, but it does mot mean he was not a white nationalist authoritarian. One can build institutions and coalitions for any political purpose. If an institution-builder and coalition-crafter habitually implies that black people in positions of influence must be unqualified and were chosen for those positions solely because of “DEI”, or that immigration is a plot to make the United States less white, and declares that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”, that purpose is white nationalism. If an institution-builder and coalition-crafter declares that gay people should be stoned to death, kept a list of college professors who he considered his political enemies and thereby enabled his allies to harass them with death threats, and encouraged his allies to bail out a man who tried to take the Speaker of the House as a hostage, that purpose is authoritarian.
I am sorry, I just don’t take seriously the idea that the guy who gave this speech was a white nationalist. Nick Fuentes, sure. But Charlie Kirk?
He was certainly a staunch advocate for mass murder. As one of those whose death he sought, I do not feel as admiring about his organizational skills. Rather, I feel relief that he is gone, and not readily replaceable.
What an absolutely bonkers, demonic statement. Thank you for illustrating the moral and intellectual depravity of the left.
Keep going, you’re doing great!
He was a budding American Hitler who singled out a minority population (Gays) that he could blame like Hitler did the Jews for everything wrong he saw in our society.
Unlike Hitler who survived many assination attempts in the 30’s, Kirk did not.
Thank you Lord and God Bless the United States of America.
This is a gross defamation of his character and it is gross that you would make it.
“ His strategy proved so powerful that his enemies were left with no recourse but to murder him”
This is an unfair point in my opinion, putting the monstrous act of one man on the entire left.
When you call people like him fascists and Nazis, then proceed to talk about how great it is to punch said fascists and Nazis, what did you expect?
An interesting question. People should take responsibility for the consequences of their words. This is why conservatives took responsibility for the shooting of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, yes? or the 2022 beating of Paul Pelosi by an assailant looking for Nancy Pelosi? Or the recent assassination of the Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Hortman, by a gunman who was targeting a long list of Democratic state lawmakers? It’s why conservatives take responsibility for the majority of terrorist and politically violent acts in the US being committed by right-wingers, yes? (as established by a DOJ report that was coincidentally taken down in the last few days by the government, and by other independent research groups in separate studies)
Words have power, and people should use them responsibly. That’s why, when Springfield, OH was plagued by bomb threats and anti-immigrant harassment, JD Vance and Donald Trump took responsibility for spreading spurious rumors of cat and dog eating, right? Conservatives take responsibility for their words, unlike leftists. That’s why they apologized for charged racial rhetoric after Ahmad Aubery was gunned down while jogging on video, I assume. Similarly, when trans youth (or maybe you think they’re just mentally confused) commit suicide because of bullying and social ostracism, conservatives take responsibility for their words and respond with compassion and understanding, right? After all, one must think of the children.
I grew up in a conservative church where the word of God was that Democrats were all child-eating demon worshippers. That kind of rhetoric had nothing to do with the many elected Democrat officials who have been attacked over the years, I’m sure. Conservatives do not speak irresponsibly, they’re very careful about the impact of their words. After hundreds of shots were fired at the CDC, killing one police officer, conservatives retracted their years-long smears of the CDC, of Covid-era pandemic responses, of doctors and vaccine science generally. Right?
We would never want to accuse conservatives, who are responsible and god-fearing citizens, of being Nazis or fascists. Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt recently explained, very clearly, that America is not a universal nation, that is a nation founded by European settlers for their European-based descendants. He was very happy to defend the genocide of thousands of indigenous nations in the name of Manifest Destiny. I have no idea why anybody would think that sounds like Nazism or fascism. None whatsoever. Besides, despite being a duly elected official, it’s not like Eric Schmitt represents the American right. Those were just private remarks he was making, in the very private setting of…the National Conservatism Conference in DC. I have no idea why anybody would take those words seriously.
Faugh.
Oh, excuse me, I should correct my comment–it was Ahmaud Arbery who was gunned down, “Ahmad Aubery” is a misspelling that slipped by. How like a leftist, to be so irresponsible!
Is there a reason you’re deleting comments critical of the wording in your last paragraph?
I did not delete any such comment — I just did not check my comment moderation que in as timely a manner as you would like. All of your comments have been passed.
“His strategy proved so powerful that his enemies were left with no recourse but to murder him. It is up to us to decide whether the victory-path Kirk cleared dies with him.”
This is essentially conspiratorial. Are you suggesting that Kirk was killed by someone other than Tyler Robinson, a terminally-online gun enthusiast soaked in right-wing culture through his youth and politically incorrect internet culture for the last several years?
Can neither “side” understand that the rote left/right eschaton narratives they’ve soaked themselves in are actually not remotely in control here? How is there no mention of the actual killer in this piece, but multiple references to a “they” that has supposedly killed Kirk? I find this piece informative in that I was unaware of the depth of political influence Kirk parleyed from his online influencer/ political entertainer status. I find the insight about the psychological importance of his creating a campus safe-space for fearful right-wing students compelling. But ultimately I think spinning this tacit narrative of conspiracy… (one that proves the groypers right???!) just intellectually embarrassing.
See my reply here: https://scholars-stage.org/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of-charlie-kirk/#comment-23695
I did see it there, I don’t see how it addresses the matter. The continued insistence that you don’t mean any positive content to this “they” framing you insist on is belied by, among other things, positively naming a motive. And this motive – stopping the ascendant “nationalist populism” that you declare could be not be stopped any other way – seems to be made up of whole cloth.
I’m sorry, I really cannot take this seriously.
You’re correct in pointing out Kirk’s virtues as a political operative and organizer, his significance to the right, and the ways other figures on the right attacked him. A rhetorically moving defense of Kirk and his vision of American politics!—indeed a “moderate” vision of politics compared to some of the Blood-and-Soil forces circulating now. You speak of how Kirk rallied the right when conservatives felt fear on college campuses. I remember those times. Despite not being a conservative, I found myself defending conservative classmates and conservative ideas as a student and, often enough, catching fair flak for it. There was plenty that was objectionable at that time. You describe it like this:
“The young man who believed that a transgender woman is not a woman, or that white privilege is not a national crisis, or that Donald Trump should be president, was a young man who lived in fear….They expected to be treated with the same grace, respect, and friendship that the median progressive reserved for the Ku Klux Klan. Time and again they were told that their beliefs were the functional equivalent of a Klansman’s. In this environment, only the most disagreeable or the most courageous were willing to stand up for their beliefs.”
It is telling that you and so many other conservative commentators gloss over what some of those “conservative” beliefs actually were/are. You treat it as self-evident that Kirk and the people/beliefs he stood for were not the equivalent of the KKK, do not deserve to be treated as such, and therefore do not have to bow down. Let’s look at them.
Kirk thought (as of 2023) the Civil Rights Act of 1964-the legal end of segregation! The actual fulfillment of America’s civic promises for black Americans!-was a mistake, because it was later (in his telling) misused. Kirk argued on Jubilee not so long ago that black people were better off under segregation and the terror of the KKK because they committed less crimes (though, sure, he “compassionately” admitted that lynch mobs were evil). Kirk was happy to stoke modern-day racial fears by spreading dubious stories about “prowling blacks [who] go around for fun to target white people.” Kirk was eager to question the qualifications of every black person, particularly black women, as affirmative action picks—whether they were at the highest levels of government (like Ketanji Brown Jackson) or just working everyday jobs (like airline attendants and service workers).
THESE are the beliefs and behaviors that self-evidently should not be treated as the equivalent of a Klansman’s? I suppose that until a segregationist marches around with a white hood and a noose, they should just be given the respectful benefit of the doubt and a place in the room?
Or perhaps you think the dividing line is that Charlie Kirk and the conservatives he rallied believed in debate—that however objectionable a belief, it should be tolerated so long as it remains speech and not violence. Kirk, however, was happy to tolerate violence—celebrating David DePape’s attack on Paul Pelosi with a hammer and calling for some American patriot to bail him out. Kirk had no problem whatsoever with the deaths of black people at the hands of the police, from mocking the death of George Floyd to spreading spurious lies about Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend.
It’s not clear to me that Kirk saw such a sharp line between speech and violence! But I suppose that since Kirk himself did not swing a hammer or fire a gun, there was nothing wrong with whatever he might’ve said or cheered.
In college, I defended many conservative classmates when people would throw slurs at them or degrade their character. Then and now, I’ve defended many conservative ideas as worth engagement and interest even if I ultimately disagree with them. But I’ve also sat there while conservative classmates told black friends of mine they were wrong to feel afraid of the police despite being mistreated by them, despite knowing people who were killed by them. I remember what these debates were like before The Great Awokening. I sat there while people told me *to my face* that the mass starvation of Indians under British colonialism was worthwhile, that Native Americans had no worthwhile culture and deserved no respect for being the losers, that millions of deaths in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq were justified while Vietnamese and Afghani classmates sat nearby. THIS is the conservatism that needed defending? Today, due in no small part to Charlie Kirk, that conservatism has become one where neighbors of *mine* have been disappeared into vans and people tell me, an immigrant, that immigrants are murderers who should be deported by the millions. THIS is the nationalist populism that Kirk so successfully nurtured?
You’ve written a brilliant hagiography about Kirk, you’ve keenly traced the *shape* of Kirk’s beliefs and how he tried to remake America. You conveniently skip over the *content* of Kirk’s vision for America. Kirk played more successfully than many within the bounds of American discourse. In doing so, more successfully than many, he attacked the foundation of that discourse and its inclusion of those who were barred from it for so long. You talk about his devotion to the marketplace of ideas, though his *idea* was that life was better when millions of Americans were terrorized out of that very marketplace. You talk about his politeness and compassion, though he was perfectly happy to mock the suffering of others. You talk about ballots and bullets, as though people don’t cast ballots *for* bullets over and over and over. You talk about the shape of Charlie Kirk’s legacy without discussing the content; an easy way to launder the ugly into something respectable. If this is the conservatism to celebrate, what actually *is* conservatism but power for one’s own? I am disappointed.
Tanner has often mentioned his political leanings, but I haven’t really seen him list what his beliefs are. Like you, I’m amazed he wrote this entire essay while barely scratching Charlie’s actual ideas. The short quote you cited (“…white privilege is not a national crisis…”) appears to be the sum total of what Tanner wanted to share. Maybe he thinks both the Left and the Right already knows what Charlie (and his) political beliefs are that he doesn’t have to rehash them?
Or maybe when he was talking about the fear of young conservatives to share their views, he was expressing his own apprehensions? I’ve gotten the impression that Tanner doesn’t share his views (unless I’ve missed it) because he understands it will impact his China-focused readership, most of which probably isn’t conservative.
If that’s the case, then how can he blame us for failing to recognize the difference between Charlie’s views and those of the Klan?
I’d *guess* Tanner believed the primary distinction is that Charlie didn’t believe in violence (although he did advocate it) and favored achieving power through the vote, based on this article. But what would the conservatives do with that power? Do they prefer to suppress hated communities such as the trans with respectable state power, as opposed to mob or terrorist violence?
The Civil Rights Act did lead to Affirmative Action and Disparate Impact, both of which were complete failures and caused untold damages. Even something like the public accommodations portion has been used to constantly harass Jack Baker because he would not bake a cake for a gay wedding. The fact that merely stating these positions labels someone as the KKK is why Charlie got shot. You are part of the problem.
I’ll set aside your dubious blame game for Kirk’s death. If you think affirmative action, disparate impact, and the overuse of the public accommodations framework today are *worse than the legalized segregation and societal terror that was then faced by those now protected by the Civil Rights Act,* I really have nothing to say to you. If you think, as Charlie Kirk did, that black people were *better off in 1940* than they are today-that black people benefited when they were barred from voting, barred from employment, barred from housing, barred from schools-then you have almost nothing useful to say about the American project. Nothing whatsoever you say about liberty, equality, civil discourse, the marketplace of ideas, etc. can be taken seriously. I mean that. I am proud to be considered “part of the problem” by one such as you.
This response strikes me as part of the problem. Give me a break states that he disapproves of AA, disparate impact, and a particular interpretation of public accomodations, all doctrines which stem from the Civil Rights Act. Your response is to state that Charlie Kirk wanted to rewind the clock on civil rights to the 1940s and insinuate that is also what GMAB wants.
Now until this week I had not thought about Kirk for several years, and I’ve never had much interest in his YouTube channel, TikTok, Twitter feed, what have you. If Kirk asserted something of that order, then it would be abhorrent and reflect poorly on him (but it would still have been wrong to shoot him for that). What I find more incredible is the implication that there are two extremes, one of which is that AA, disparate impact, and an absolute position on public accommodations are the law of the land, and the other is disenfranchising all black people and banning them from higher education, public transit, and participation in general in the wider economy. I do not believe a majority of Americans desires either outcome (actually, based on Pew polling, I would guess that a majority of Americans is very strongly opposed to both).
Our host once wrote a very thoughtful piece about extremist politics (https://scholars-stage.org/a-brief-model-of-extremist-politics/), the relevance of which here is that if you are trying to advance a deeply unpopular position, for instance, the presumption that any business or educational establishment whwre the proportion of underpresented minorities does not exactly mirror or exceed the general population, you must be engaged racial discrimination, and you would have an incentive to imply the same, with the goal of pushing people who want facially neutral (eg “color-blind”) competitive processes towards actively weighing the scales in favor of the unrepresented. Of course the problem here is that not everyone who supports facially neutral applications for universities and jobs would immediately pivot to supporting AA and disparate impact theory. Others would believe offensive beliefs of the opposite stripe (eg the idea of the “DEI hire”)!
As things currently stand, the person who shot Charlie Kirk probably did so because he thought that Kirk was a deeply evil man, who wanted to reinstate segregation if he could, and slavery if that was possible (“put y’all back in chains…”), who thought blacks were subhuman, would herd transgenders into camps if he could, etc etc. if you seriously believe these things, in particular, if you seriously believe the administration Kirk supported also believes these things, it begins to seem rational that removing this man with a bullet is a far more productive course than removing his clients with ballots. Kirk may well have believed these things, I certainly would not know, but I am personally doubtful because as the events of the past week have shown, he commanded the regard of so many, the vast majority of whom I do not think believe such things. Taking seriously our host’s point in the Extremist Politics post, insinuating (particularly if the insinuation is false) that Kirk, and especially his devotees, *do* believe that, for instance, AA and disparate impact are bad because they want to turn the civil rights clock back to that of 1940, serves no purpose except to promote the idea that those beliefs are good. And if the dominant beliefs of the American people *are* such a belief, then I genuinely have to question how you can abide any of us in the first place.
Major legislation always has many consequences. Some of the consequences of the Civil Rights Act may be AA, DEI infrastructure, what have you (though even this account is a dire oversimplification, and maybe wrong). That said, clearly AA is not an inevitable consequence of the Civil Rights Act, seeing as it has been banned multiple times in states like California. So it is in this context that we must evaluate a claim like Kirk’s that the passage of the Act was a “big mistake.” Examining this example also helps us mediate the broader debate about how the media ought frame particular quotes. I cannot deny that certain left-leaning media outlets (e.g. The Nation) have either misleadingly quoted or outright lied about the nature of Kirk’s views. These mistakes I roundly criticize. Less egregious are accurate quotes of Kirk that are presented with little in the way of context. For instance, many mainstream news outlets like the NYT have presented his line about the Civil Rights Act to the reader on its own. In context, we might be able to muster some mitigating evidence that really Kirk was being gratuitously inflammatory (let his adorers not be in fear!) while in support of a somewhat more milquetoast project of criticizing the modern DEI bureaucracy or whatnot.
But just as the media ought to be careful in responsibly quoting someone’s views, a public figure must also be responsible in sharing his ideas. Whatever the context, whatever the fundamental project, proclaiming the Civil Rights Act as a mistake is simply irresponsible–at the very least. Let us not forget the unending evils of the Jim Crow era, the mass project of subjugation and terror of Black Americans. I hope I do not seem a radical leftist when I say that in many ways the Civil Rights Act and its accompanying political and cultural shift represents the foundation of modern America. How can we say that the America of Jim Crow bears any resemblance to what I would have thought would be the uncontroversial vision of an America built on shared fraternal ideals of political participation?
I bridle at the idea that this indulgence in gratuitous inflammation and, frankly, in stupid memes, was anything more than a childish rebuttal to overwhelming cultural dominance of liberal ideas in many institutions. Okay, you can criticize AA, the DEI bureaucracy, whatnot, of course. But the idea that one has to do so by arguing that a founding piece of legislation of modern America was a mistake? This idea is absurd and intellectually offensive.
I’ve been trying to reply to this for days, and I’m not sure why my comment has not been showing up, even though a later comment I wrote has been posted. This is just a test comment.
You may come in good faith, but neither you nor GMAB seem interested in engaging with the actual words Kirk spoke nor with the outcomes he sought. Both of you have admitted this. GMAB claims that Kirk was “merely stating [that there are arguably negative consequences that stem from the Civil Rights Act],” and that this is not worth comparing someone to the KKK. GMAB is simply incorrect.
Kirk was open about his beliefs: the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, it is responsible for the rise of black crime, black people are disproportionately criminal and their problems are cultural and their presence in broader American society (whether as politicians, Supreme Court justices, airline attendants, or service workers) is the grotesque outcome of affirmative action and DEI hiring. Kirk made NUMEROUS remarks to this effect, whether or not his supporters would like to take them seriously. This is not respectable conservatism. These positions are not merely “provocative,” they are not subtle, they are not open to a multiplicity of interpretations. They are open betrayals of America’s civic promises.
I could go on. I could exhaustively spend time picking out noxious statements Kirk made (do I need to provide you sources for Kirk’s vile rhetoric about black people? His frequent assertion that black people everywhere are DEI hires?) but why should I do this piecemeal? Scores of people are falling all over themselves to frame Kirk’s beliefs and actions as noble and worthwhile, and many people (particularly those, like yourself, who aren’t that familiar with Kirk) just buy it based on trust and reputation. But the frames are empty glitter; the actual substance of Kirk’s beliefs were troubling and got worse over time. If someone says that “Kirk is merely pointing out some problems with a very significant law, why would you think this means anything more serious,” I am not going to extend the benefit of the doubt and patiently sort out exactly what every someone means or how familiar they are with all these OTHER statements Kirk made.
(I had originally included links for all of the above claims, but that comment isn’t posting for whatever reason. I can easily back up everything I’ve said here.)
I do not assume that everyone is an extremist. But I am not the one conjuring extremes. For years, neo-Nazis have marched in America’s streets with the approval of its current president. People are being whisked into unmarked cars and exiled (not deported) to foreign prisons. Democratic lawmakers have been gunned down in their homes, in my state. When people defend extremists, I will not assume they are solidly in the middle. This is a time of extremes, whether people like to admit it or not.
We are here, in part, because the ugly has been made clean and what was recently unthinkable has become more and more acceptable. Charlie Kirk played no small part in this. I will not pretend otherwise. Of course you can find clips of Charlie Kirk being pleasant and affable and a reasonable interlocutor; he was a media figure who knew how to play different roles. But no amount of framing will erase the ugliness of Kirk’s words and actions. The attempt to do so does NOT make me respect Charlie Kirk more; it makes me respect the framers far less. The more people insist Charlie Kirk was the “respectable conservative,” the less respectable I find conservatism. A fist in velvet is still a fist.
When you look at rates of violent criminality, out of wedlock births, and community disfunction, the results of the Civil Rights Movement are quite ambivalent. While a black person had many things going against them in 1940, they were much more likely raised by a married mother and father, as well as less likely to be a violent criminal or suffer at the hands of one.
And I don’t know what Kirks firm position is, my position is that the Civil Rights Act should have only addressed government discrimination, as all of the major problems with Civil Rights Law comes downstream of the regulation of private behavior.
If you don’t know what Kirk’s firm position is, what in the world are you doing accusing me of misreading him or exaggerating? How can you attack me with a straight face when you know not what you defend? As I wrote in another comment, with additional links, “Kirk was open about his beliefs: the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, it is responsible for the rise of black crime, black people are disproportionately criminal and their problems are cultural and their presence in broader American society (whether as politicians, Supreme Court justices, airline attendants, or service workers) is the grotesque outcome of affirmative action and DEI hiring. Kirk made NUMEROUS remarks to this effect, whether or not his supporters would like to take them seriously. This is not respectable conservatism. These positions are not merely “provocative,” they are not subtle, they are not open to a multiplicity of interpretations. “
As for the problems you’re citing—laying them at the feet of the Civil Rights Movement is rich. Yes. You’re right. Black crime has nothing to do with black populations cordoned in impoverished ghettos by redlining and white flight/wealth extraction. Black gang culture has nothing to do with a crack epidemic that the US government ignored or indirectly abetted by funding the Contras (a conclusion drawn by a Senate subcommittee report). The lack of black fathers has nothing to do with the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration of black men for petty crimes that oft receive nothing more than a wink and a nod in white suburbs. The dysfunction of black communities has nothing to do with their healthy and wealthy neighborhoods being razed for highways (as happened in cities all over) or with abusive police more interested in casual brutality and financial extraction than in actually ensuring safety or solving crimes (as has been clearly documented by DOJ reports in the case of Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD, among others).
No. None of that has *anything* to do with why black communities continue to suffer. Those are just coincidences that could plague *any* community. The problem is the Civil Rights Movement. The problem is that black people spent decades fighting for their rights while being clubbed and fire hosed and attacked by dogs. The problem with black communities is that *we ended segregation and public terror.* Truly, you have remarkable powers of historical analysis. What would we do without compassionate conservatives like yourself.
Incidentally, you and others in the thread might genuinely and in good faith not know this: there’s a good chunk of research suggesting that black fathers, when able, are *more* involved than white or Hispanic fathers. And I can tell you, having spent some years in mixed/majority-black neighborhoods, that I have seen no other community spend more time trying to encourage and support and aspire to fatherhood. None. Black Americans have striven mightily to form and maintain families—in the face of chattel slavery and rapacious slave owners two hundred years ago, in the face of redlining and segregation and humiliation one hundred years ago, in the face of poverty and incarceration today. You would think family-oriented conservatives would try to support family-oriented black Americans in their fight against the problems in their communities. Instead, it seems some of you…let me check my notes…think that the main problem plaguing black communities is the law that finally allowed black Americans to fully participate in American society for the first time since the founding of this country.
> maybe hundreds of thousand
should be “maybe hundreds of thousands”
Context : French center left guy with an enduring love of the US and a hobbyist interest in its politics. Also a great fan of your writing, reading recs and your brilliant work over at CfSS.
I was aware of Kirk’s existence before his death, but without any specifics. To me he was part of the wider Trump-aligned conservative new commentariat, like a Rogan or Loomer. On this I realized reading your post that this was an inadequate categorization, and I thank you for this perspective.
However I also read the many pieces that listed the unsavory things he had said repeatedly on race, women, or even political violence. The comment above provides a nice summary.
I value your judgment, especially when I disagree with you, for there is always something to learn. But here ? Do you think these words that are blamed on Kirk do not matter ? Are fake or were made in jest ? Were taken out of context ? Or that in the grander scheme of things they are minor compared to the good he made in building the infrastructure of Trump 2 ?
Watched from afar, and I will certainly admit to a limited recent experience of the US on the ground, it looks like your country is engaged in a transformation that will make it weaker, isolated and on the wrong side of the fight to save the planet. You sound remarkably sanguine about this, and your paean to Kirk even points to active support. I should probably take that as a cause for optimism, that the situation is not so bad or is overly painted black by the MS media (FT and Le Monde in my case). Or it means that even the most cultured, thoughtful, and interesting minds on the conservative side have finally capitulated.
There are some things Kirk said I agree with; there are other things he said that I do not agree with. Many of his quotes are taken out of context, some were made lighly, or were intentionally provocative to drive headlines. Some were not. One must discern.
I am extremely sympathetic to conservative populism, and believe that Republicans must have a large tent–both the “new right” and the “old right” needs to be in that tent. We will have populism–it is just a question of whether it is a good populism or a bad one.
I want to be sympathetic to your eulogy. We certainly need more honor and respect in conservative politics. And as someone who has watched with dismay as my more leftist friends verbally attacked my other friends who happened to be veterans, or gone the snob treatment to people not in perfect conformity with the latest in an ever shifting language of gender political orthodoxy, I sadly acknowledge the way the left lost so much of the argument on college campuses (to say nothing of the broader cultural milieu of the United States). And yet, I find you walk a puzzling tightrope here, omitting the clear implications of just who it was that killed Charlie Kirk.
You say “A reckoning is due. Justice must be served,” but you do not have the guts to spell out that the reckoning you speak of is with your own party’s relationship with (and dependency on) race-baiting language, or all the ways that hatred-loving Proud Boys, “3 Percenters,” and etc are given subtle nods and brought into the fold to win their votes.
I believe that you want a right wing in this country that practices dignity and respect. As a long time social justice activist, I welcome that, honor it, and wish you success. But do not claim that Donald Trump, of January 6th and everything else, is not a manifestation of John Birch style conservatism’s ultimate triumph in American politics.
If Charlie Kirk was a key part of that, then there is a certain irony that he was ultimately killed by a representative of Fuentes’ group, who thought Kirk was merely humoring their bloodthirsty atavism and not a true enough believer.
Let me put it plainly: Perhaps the reckoning you need is with the divisiveness and hatred that has been so key to the Trump movement’s success.
I agree with some of what you say, but your claim that “[Kirk] was ultimately killed by a representative of Fuentes’ group” is almost certainly false, and frankly I have no idea where you are getting that information from. I think you should rethink your approach to media ingestion if you have arrived at that view, especially with such confidence.
“If Charlie Kirk was a key part of that, then there is a certain irony that he was ultimately killed by a representative of Fuentes’ group, who thought Kirk was merely humoring their bloodthirsty atavism and not a true enough believer.”
You have to be kidding! There is zero evidence this guy was a groyper, and a mountain of evidence he was a leftist. It’s comments like this that make the case for the dissident right. Leftists like you are uninterested in truth and just want power.
Yeah, he looks like a real leftist. Gleefully posing with military guns and his conservative family. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15092815/Charlie-Kirk-Tyler-Robinson-killer-guns-childhood-Utah-family.html
As for whether he was specifically a groyper or not, I think one can say with certainty that he was immersed in the extreme irony and nihilism of 4chan memelord culture, which is fertile ground for Fuentes’ group — much less so for any kind of leftist.. Fuentes has of course tried to distance himself from the mess, but right now I’m going with “walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.”
I agree that Fuentards had motive; I disagree that there are not a huge number of leftists nvolved in 4chan memelord culture. The whole Chap Trap House world came from that culture; you can find dozens and dozens of 4chan type memes from leftists accounts making fun of Kirk’s death on twitter right now!
Many people raised in conservative environments swing leftwards. You have yet to provide any evidence that he held specifically rightwing beliefs, while several people who new him said he had veered significantly left in recent years. He was also in a relationship with a Trans person, and was in several left wing Discords.
Seriously, there could be a video released tomorrow of him saying “I killed Charlie Kirk because he was a fascist, racist, and transphobe” and you’d still try to call him a Groyper.
The real problem with the blame game is that everyone political is going to read whatever serves their own political identity from the cipher this kid presents. They’ll be reading the wrong things in the wrong language, and it’s really thoroughly anti-intellectual.
The most certain thing we can or will be able to say is that it’s not going to be a simple case in any event. It’s our politics, and our increasing insistence on making our politics our identity, that demands stupid simplicity and insists it must be caused by politics.
Personally I think this is going to turn out to be a story that exists loosely in an old framework- someone in love, caught between two worlds, is driven to madness and ultimately destruction of both of them. I think that will likely end up to be the most true of the simplified, falsified, fictionalized narrative frames.
That this guy is some warrior of the various right or left conspiracies that everyone sees in their cheerios is just palpably ridiculous. That it’s the inevitable result of people loudly noting similarities between 1930 Germany and 2025 American is palpably ridiculous. That it’s the result of Trump calling people vermin and ‘poisoning the blood’ is palpably ridiculous. This is all internet brain-rot, not that far off the internet brain-rot that likely helped destabilize this Mormon gun-enthusiast infatuated whackadoodle.
I think Rigoletto or Hamlet is probably more instructive.
I’m center-left to left-wing by political nature, and I’m glad that this essay is the only real* response to Charlie Kirk’s death that I’ve read. I’m glad Kirk chose ballots over bullets and I hope more people follow in his footsteps.
* Nate Silver’s meta-discussion of media incentives after a shooting doesn’t count, I think.
I’ll preface this by saying: thanks for writing an interesting and informative post. Before all this came up, I knew Charlie Kirk only tangentially, as a blacklister of professors and, as you put it, “YouTube shock jock”; your post fills out the picture.
I can’t help noticing, however, the way you downplay very prominent aspects of his career. If he “often expressed his opinions in intentionally inflammatory ways”, this was merely “on his show”; he was much politer and more compassionate in person. But the number of people who ever met him, no matter how good at networking he was, is surely dwarfed by the number of people who saw his deliberately viral video clips; any fair assessment of his impact has to take the effects of the latter seriously, whether the persona he projected in them matched his “real self” or not.
Talking to Islamists living in Muslim countries, I’ve sometimes noticed a certain kind of bitter, semi-naive puzzlement: all the things we want are self-evidently good, and we only want to achieve them through peaceful means such as winning elections, yet somehow all these other people – nominal Muslims! – are persecuting us for working to put God’s laws into place. It’s shameful; they should realise that we’re the moderates, not like those hotheads itching to use force to impose correct practice! When everyone in your social circle shares more or less the same values, and has never actually seen them imposed by anything sharper than peer pressure, it’s hard to take seriously the reactions of those whom your ideals would punish.
You’ve undoubtedly hung out with a wide enough range of people to avoid falling into such a trap personally; indeed, you may be thinking it reminds you more of certain types of liberal than of any young American conservative. But that’s what a eulogy of Kirk ends up sounding like to an outsider – at least to this outsider – when it minimises his very visible “intentionally inflammatory” side. For every viewer who got the message “You do not need to fear”, how many got the message “Prepare to live in fear”?
When I talked about “in person” I meant his viral college campus clips (which I linked to). Kirk had two main modes of content: viral clips where he is debating, politely, leftists on college campuses; and his internet show where he would talk with his team or interview other right wing figures.
[This is all through some basic online searches, so apologies if I’m wildly off-base.]
I have a comment about the TPUSA being a “mass organization”. I want to contrast that with the ACLU.
It seems to me that TPUSA had a non-profit structure with a CEO (Kirk). It had a lot of affiliated chapters on various universities. There are “supporters” who can donate, but they don’t have any formal say in governance. There are about 300k supporters.
The ACLU, in contrast, is a membership based organization. There are state chapters, and they hold elections for representatives to the affiliate boards. It’s kind of like a democratic federation. It has about 1.5 million members who pay dues.
So, is it really correct to describe TPUSA as a “mass organization”? It seems to me that it’s a fairly normal NGO which runs on donations.
Chapters activities and bylaws are decentralized, even if funding for the central org relies on large donors instead of dues. I would count that as a mass organization–though I agree that the ACLU fits the type even more.
Is very much like to see Loomer’s X post with a reference to the date it was originally posted. I also wonder if she’s since deleted it. Thanks.
Unfortunately, she has since deleted it, which is why I linked to that sreenshot.
I do not understand how the young man you describe could love and trust a man like Trump.
I enjoyed your commentary. It is an honest look at the effects Charlie had on the conservative party. I think you missed one of Charlie’s main strengths, and that was his love and faith in God.
In Paul McGuire and Troy Anderson’s book, “Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (Babylon Code),” they assert: “While a simply conservative revolution can never succeed, a revolution inspired by Christianity certainly can, because it draws its energies from the existence of the biblical God, the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his second coming, the truth of the Word of God, and the power of the Holy Spirit.
It’s these factors, and these alone, that ignited the American Revolution. A true ‘Christian Revolution’ can never happen unless the church, individual Christians, and Christian leaders really believe what they are teaching and then act upon it. Only a holy fire can ignite the hearts of men and women. Mere intellectual acknowledgment of the truth of the gospel will never release the explosive energies of heaven. The human heart, mind, and will must be absolutely gripped with the truthfulness of God’s existence and his purpose for their lives and the destiny of mankind. When and only when this happens will the Christian Revolution occur and radically change our world.”
Charlie had that holy fire. Charlie possessed strong conviction and showed steadfastness, guided by the belief that, as followers of Christ, it is ultimately the approval of God that matters. He was aware of the risks involved but remained assured of his faith and its implications for his future. I cannot explain why God let this happen; however, on September 10, 2025, God decided that Charlie’s time had concluded on earth. Had his life not been taken by an assassin’s bullet, it would not have sparked a change in this country that could ignite a Christian Revolution.
Your assertion that Charlie intended to win in the marketplace of ideas is at best a charitable interpretation but at worst probably intentionally martyr-painting a charlatan.
Charlie Kirk wasn’t someone who was looking for honest debate. He was a political operative spreading hate and divisiveness. When you show his fans his racist, sexist or bigoted rhetoric quotes, admittedly taken out of context- they defend it by saying “That’s not (racist, sexist, bigoted) – it’s true.” And that was his goal.
The whole “Prove Me Wrong” setup that made Kirk famous wasn’t really about proving anyone wrong. It was about creating content. Kirk mastered a specific type of performance that looked like debate but functioned more like a carefully orchestrated show designed to make his opponents look foolish and his positions seem unassailable.
The basic formula was simple – set up a table on a college campus, invite students to challenge conservative talking points, then use a combination of rhetorical tricks and editing magic to create viral moments. What looked like open discourse was actually a rigged game where Kirk held all the advantages.
First, there’s the obvious setup problem.
Kirk was a professional political operative who spent years honing his arguments and memorizing statistics. He knew exactly which topics would come up and had practiced responses ready.
Meanwhile, his opponents were typically 19-year-old students who wandered over between classes. It’s like watching a professional boxer fight random people at the gym – the outcome was predetermined.
Kirk used what debate experts call a corrupted version of the Socratic method. Instead of asking genuine questions to explore ideas, he’d ask leading questions designed to trap students in contradictions or force them into uncomfortable positions. He’d start with seemingly reasonable premises, then quickly pivot to more extreme conclusions, leaving his opponents scrambling to keep up.
The classic example was his approach to gender identity discussions. Kirk would begin by asking seemingly straightforward definitional questions – “What is a woman?” – then use whatever answer he received as a launching pad for increasingly aggressive follow-ups. If someone mentioned social roles, he’d demand biological definitions. If they provided biological definitions, he’d find edge cases or exceptions to exploit.
The goal wasn’t understanding or genuine dialogue – it was creating moments where students appeared confused or contradictory.
Kirk also employed rapid-fire questioning techniques that made it nearly impossible for opponents to fully develop their thoughts. He’d interrupt, reframe, and redirect before anyone could establish a coherent argument. This created the illusion that his opponents couldn’t defend their positions when really they just couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
The editing process was equally important. Kirk’s team would film hours of interactions, then cut together the moments that made him look brilliant and his opponents look unprepared. Nuanced discussions got reduced to gotcha moments. Students who made good points found those parts mysteriously absent from the final videos.
What’s particularly insidious about this approach is how it masquerades as good-faith debate while undermining the very principles that make real discourse valuable. Kirk wasn’t interested in having his mind changed or learning from others – he was performing certainty for an audience that craved validation of their existing beliefs.
The “Prove Me Wrong” framing itself was misleading. It suggested Kirk was open to being persuaded when the entire setup was designed to prevent that possibility. Real intellectual humility requires admitting uncertainty, acknowledging complexity, and engaging with the strongest versions of opposing arguments. Kirk’s format did the opposite.
This style of debate-as-performance has become incredibly popular because it feeds into our current political moment’s hunger for easy victories and clear villains. People want to see their side “destroying” the opposition with “facts and logic.” Kirk provided that satisfaction without the messy reality of actual intellectual engagement.
The broader damage extends beyond individual interactions. When debate becomes about humiliating opponents rather than exploring ideas, it corrupts the entire enterprise of democratic discourse. Students who got embarrassed in these exchanges weren’t just losing arguments – they were being taught that engaging with different viewpoints was dangerous and futile.
Kirk’s approach also contributed to the broader polarization problem by making political identity feel like a zero-sum game where any concession to the other side represented total defeat. His debates reinforced the idea that political opponents weren’t just wrong but ridiculous – a perspective that makes compromise and collaboration nearly impossible.
The most troubling aspect might be how this style of engagement spreads. Kirk inspired countless imitators who use similar tactics in their own contexts. The model of setting up situations where you can’t lose, then claiming victory when your rigged game produces the expected results, has become a template for political engagement across the spectrum.
Real debate requires vulnerability – the possibility that you might be wrong and need to change your mind. Kirk’s format eliminated that possibility by design. His certainty was performative rather than earned, and his victories were manufactured rather than genuine.
The tragedy of this approach is that college campuses actually need more genuine dialogue about difficult political questions. Students are forming their worldviews and wrestling with complex issues. They deserve engagement that helps them think more clearly, not performances designed to make them look stupid.
Kirk’s assassination represents a horrific escalation of political violence that has no place in democratic society. But it’s worth remembering that his debate tactics, while not violent, were themselves a form of intellectual violence that treated political opponents as objects to be humiliated rather than fellow citizens to be engaged.
This is a bit silly. You can watch unedited hour long videos of his appearances on campus. His most watched video is literally an hour long! You can just sit and watch the whole thing. It is not editing magic.
Moreover, many of his debates involve him saying things like “we are going to disagree on this, but that is ok….” and all other sorts of mollifying things. I link to some of those in the piece.
More broadly, I think you missed the point. I did not say the main purpos eof his college campus events was to convince the kids who were debating him so much as to convince the conservative kids in the audience that they could stand for their own beliefs. That was more important than the internet content — the internet content was in some ways secondary to building up TPUSA and its cadres, which was the real purpose of these events.
This sort of partisan gaming is very old — very 19th century– very much a part of the American tradition. It constrasts sharply with the approach advocated by some on the right, inspired by less American examples.
Jake says that Kirk used a combination of rhetorical tricks and editing to make conservative-morale-boosting-videos where he engaged in bad-faith “debates” that were never actually open to an honest exchange of ideas. You say that Kirk didn’t edit *some* of his videos (with nothing said about the specific rhetorical tricks Jake pointed out, or about his heavily edited viral clips that you are fully aware of), that he was polite enough to say “mollifying things” in some of those debates, and that these debates were never about an honest exchange of ideas anyway; rather, they were…to boost conservative morale and organize conservative cadres. You are not actually saying Jake is wrong in any meaningful way. You’re basically agreeing with him. You just don’t like that it makes Kirk sound worse than you want us to believe.
Yeah, Kirk released unedited videos, which is why we can see his rhetorical tricks and bad faith “debating” on full display. We can look at his Jubilee video, for instance, where he openly says black people were better off pre-Civil Rights Act. Kirk constantly chooses to take on unprepared college students rather than actual left intellectuals. He pivots from one point to another, rather than standing and fully defending any one claim. When faced with a counter-point, he refuses to engage (at times even saying “that may have something to do with it” but never actually considering it alongside the point he insists on making) and insists on framing any given debate in his terms. He’s deft at interrupting his opponent’s train of thought, peppering them with questions designed to fluster them before they can actually deliver their own point. When faced with something he can’t directly dispute, he redirects the conversation instead of letting his opponent more fully develop a picture of how things are. As said—these are not “debates,” they’re performances.
In addition, Kirk was happy to bullshit, in the academic sense—to just assert “facts” without any attention to whether or not they hold up. For instance, he claimed that black people had better income per capita pre-Civil Rights Act, without offering any numbers or historical data to support this. That’s a claim that doesn’t hold up to any basic examination of the relevant historical/economic data; if there’s a more sophisticated analysis that agrees with Kirk, I haven’t seen it. He says these things with complete certainty, as though we all know them, and depends on his opponents to either 1) accept his falsehoods as truth out of good faith, for the purposes of the debate or 2) to dispute them piecemeal, which generally takes more background knowledge and time than he affords them. Most people will not do so, because it bogs them down in a quagmire—which is exactly why Kirk does it.
The unedited videos do NOT make Kirk look better; they make him look far worse, frankly. Without edits, you can see so obviously that all the claims of being a good faith debater, respectful participant in civil discourse, etc. ec. are just smoke and mirrors. For a time, I *was* a debater. These aren’t novel rhetorical tricks Kirk invented, they’re pretty common when you’re trying to make your opponent look bad in front of a judge or audience, irrespective of the truth or untruth of your position. You and many others say that Kirk was a polite and honest debater, perhaps because he generally refrained from openly calling his opponents insidious traitors out to ruin America and Christendom to their faces. But this style of debate, his style of debate, was all performance, no substance; all rhetoric, no truth; all dominance, no comity. Plato (who I’m sure Kirk paid lip service to somewhere) has words about this kind of “debate” in the Gorgias:
“Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?—is not that the inference?…And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know? …the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind: this habit I sum up under the word “flattery”…[it] is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working deceitfully…”
(part 3 due to posting issues)
But you’re right, none of this is *new*–as you say, much of what Charlie Kirk did echoes very old, very American, very 19th century traditions. Kirk’s agitation about the Great Replacement of white Christian Americans by uncivilized newcomers is very much in line with 19th century fears of immigrants–the Yellow Peril of Chinese immigrants, among others. Kirk’s insistence that black people were better off *before* their liberation from segregation and public terror is descended straight from the 19th century insistence that blacks were better off as slaves than as sharecroppers and poor laborers (and better off as slaves than godless cannibals in Africa, too). Kirk’s openly stated belief that Jewish money was funding cultural Marxism and the overthrow of America pretty nakedly echoes 19th century anti-Semitic conspiracies, though I’m sure that had nothing to do with the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. yes, Charlie Kirk surely was a proud offshoot of 19th century American traditions.
Incidentally, when was the KKK founded?
(part 2, due to posting issues)
But then, as you say, the point was not really to convince people. The real point was to convince conservative kids that they could stand up for their beliefs. Charlie Kirk and TPUSA provided the necessary support for good, honest, god-fearing, conservative, Christian Americans taht were spuriously accused of being like the KKK. You’re right, I remember those days, I remember people being rude to conservatives and the religious and religious conservatives. It’s important to provide a safe haven so conservative kids aren’t unfairly attacked for saying innocuous things like “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like [eff] them all…I hate blacks. End of story.” or “If they would have killed 4 more [n-words] we would have had the whole week off.” I don’t know why ANYBODY would think conservative kids who say things like that are tantamount to the KKK!
(part 2.7 due to posting issues)
I’m not really sure what’s going on with my comments, if I’m running into an auto-filter or if some comments just have to work through the queue. Darkly ironic if an auto-filter is stopping me for (previously) quoting Kirk and (now) TPUSA members. For the record, if my actual comment doesn’t make it through, the above quotes (part 2) are from TPUSA leadership: Crystal Clanton, the former national field director for TPUSA, and Meg Miller, the president of University of Missouri’s TPUSA chapter. Clearly, no reflection on Charlie Kirk or TPUSA or the ideas that found shelter under their wings.
I don’t think my comment is silly, and I didn’t miss your point. I’ve watched the hours-long videos, much to my dismay. Perhaps I viewed them from a lens according to my politics – admittedly left of center – but he doesn’t argue in good faith with kids, quite frequently as Chelcicky has pointed out.
Your assumption of Kirk’s aim — to win the support for or of college kids with the audacity to be heterodox thinkers in a politically homogenous atmosphere — would be laudable, but based on the videos, it doesn’t seem to be his aim. It rather seems to be what I originally stated: a content machine for indoctrination content that lacks the same critical rigor he’s railing against universities for lacking on the other side of the aisle (more completely documented in the other comments)
To address the other comments Chelciky made here, you stated:
“The young man who believed that a transgender woman is not a woman, or that white privilege is not a national crisis, or that Donald Trump should be president, was a young man who lived in fear….They expected to be treated with the same grace, respect, and friendship that the median progressive reserved for the Ku Klux Klan. Time and again they were told that their beliefs were the functional equivalent of a Klansman’s. In this environment, only the most disagreeable or the most courageous were willing to stand up for their beliefs.”
What Chelciky is probably trying to get to is that regardless of Kirks’ tactics, students (or anyone) must be accountable for the *content* of their beliefs in our assumed marketplace of ideas. Truly believing that black people are worse off for the Civil Rights act, and that a segregationist society is better for all races is indefensible by the same religious moral frameworks purportedly held by Kirk, and by any other really. To call this position racist is not an attack: it’s an accurate assessment of the content of that position. I pick on this example because Kirk stated it not just once, but rather proudly confirmed it repeatedly in his podcast and on campus. Are we to give unequivocally racist politics equal position in the marketplace of ideas? Popper’s paradox comes to mind; in an open society we must tolerate all positions except intolerance itself, inelegantly stated. The left’s (reprehensible) reaction to Kirk’s death is, at least to me, a mixed-up assessment of the ignoble content of his politics, his popularity with the current administration, and their (justifiable) fear of losing the battle for the American soul as we slide alarmingly fast in to authoritarianism. That’s why you’re seeing a lot of posts from leftists along the lines of “No one should be murdered for their political beliefs, but… (fill in harsh assessment of Kirk’s politics)”
It’s worrying how much hagiography of Kirk has occurred. NFL-stadium-sized memorial services with the president don’t seem to be business as usual. I wonder if the fallout (Kimmel, the memorial service, etc) has changed how you view Kirk and his impact on the right. Martyrdom of Kirk has the stink of propaganda for more silencing of free speech.
No unbeliever could possibly blaspheme God as much as you so-called Christians do every day. At least the Jews had the sense to turn away from their golden calf. I pray the Lord shows you mercy at Judgment.
The man should not have been murdered. No one deserves what happened to him, to both be killed and to be killed in so painful and awful a manner. His daughter does not deserve to have had her father brutally murdered in front of her. And no one should be murdered because of their political views.
But (you knew there was a but I’m sure) his methods included sending buses of people to DC on January 6th. His mission included defended what actually happened there after the fact, to the hilt. His methods included promoting the lie that Paul Pelosi’s assailant was his gay lover, and encouraging his (Kirk’s) audience to bail the assailant out of prison. His message included cheering on the federal government sending in troops to jurisdictions where no one wanted them.
Please don’t pretend he was anyone other than who he was: an incredibly bad actor helping us along the path of authoritarian consolidation. Being the victim of an atrocious crime does not entitle him to a whitewashed history.
Rebecca Watson summed it up best. With his advocacy for political violence and widespread access to guns, “Charlie Kirk made the world a worse place for everyone in it, including himself.”
A great man? Public people who die before their time are usually elevated to sainthood. Do some investigating to see who many of them were. I find it utterly ridiculous that you labeled this guy great. He was hungry for fame, fortune and glory. He should have been home with his family. America which is a violent dangerous country is no place to pretend that you are a political wizard when after all he was actually an entertainer. His lust for future power cost him his life. Great man? Accomplishments please.
I believe the piece explains why he was more than an entertainer. The accomplishments are listed.
The state of exception will never be long enough. I’m disappointed you didn’t get out over Jan 6.
My opinion agrees with you. The article may not have been meant to have any “bring us together” moments. There were plenty of negatives in Kirk’s rallies that drove the L and the R further apart and, in my opinion, this article does the same. It seems to put a guilty label on every progressive. Maybe it was meant to.
There are peoples in the left that are nonviolent yet here it makes everyone one the left to be extreme on the bullets not the ballots- totally false. I was saddened to hear of Mr Kirk’s death. Those of us on the left that are still human are deeply saddened & sorry. What I got from Mr Kirk was that as his slogan said “Prove Me Wrong,”- he stated many times it’s ok to disagree in a peaceful/ nonviolent way! It’s ok to say we agree to disagree! It’s our Right as he said to agree to disagree! But He Did So without violence or Hate! As we all should honor his memory without violence or Hate! RIP Mr Charlie Kirk from a left admirer!
When I was a teenager, Charlie and I talked regularly on a Facebook group. We agreed on many things and he invited me to write for SOS Liberty, his predecessor to Turning Point. I assumed he went to my university; we talked for weeks via Facebook messages before I realized that he wasn’t even a student anywhere. He was a master of networking and making people feel not just like volunteers but personally important to him and the conservative mission.
Your characterization of his incredible organizational energy is dead on.
Nonetheless:
> “He was the living symbol of a certain mode of politics. In his world, conservatives would win. They would win through courage, personal virtue, and constant contact with the American people.”
The new conservative have abandoned personal virtue and integrity as core values. Charlie was no exception. He became a charlatan and sacrificed integrity for power when he joined with Trump. But for that decision, he could have led a conservative revolution built on virtue. I believe he had the charisma and intellect to do so. But he chose the quickest path to power, and the world is worse for it.
Thankyou for this Tanner. I had no idea who Charlie was. And now his death seems like even more of a tragedy. We have such a lack of communication in our country. We don’t want to listen, only be against the other. We should celebrate (and cherish) all those who are trying to talk to the other side. It’s powerful when done with sincerity.
I encourage you to watch some of Charlie Kirk’s “debates” and see just how sincerely he tried to talk to the other side. The picture painted of Charlie Kirk by his supporters and his actual words and deeds are very, very distant.