In the days since the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the overwhelming response on the left has been shock and horror. No one of prominence has justified the killing; hundreds, from Democratic Party leadership on down, have condemned political violence.
But below the unanimity is a subtler debate: not about how to respond to Kirk’s death, but how to think about his life.
On the one hand are sober commemorations of Kirk’s approach to democratic politics. Kirk, these authors say, had an admirable commitment to free discourse — going on tours where he would debate all sorts of people on often-hostile college campuses. He was killed while doing exactly this, answering a question about mass shootings.
I recently watched a video, posted on his own channel, of him debating a student about eating animals. The student easily beat Kirk, who wasn’t prepared for the arguments of a pro-life vegan weightlifter. Yet Kirk didn’t shirk from the challenge, taking the young man seriously and trying to rebut as best he could. There’s something admirably democratic about that.
He wasn’t just a guy who went around debating, but a plugged-in political operative close to the Trump White House who actively promoted extremism.
The other side argues that this portrayal leaves out crucial context. Kirk’s political activities, they argue, were often destructive of the democratic process he’s been suggested to embody. He wasn’t just a guy who went around debating, but a plugged-in political operative close to the Trump White House who actively promoted extremism. Mourning him uncritically whitewashes his role in the degradation of our politics.
Kirk vehemently defended Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election and sent seven buses of activists to the January 6 rally that culminated in the storming of the Capitol. His organization, Turning Point USA, maintained a “professor watch list” designed to chill left-wing speech on campus and lionized vigilante killer Kyle Rittenhouse. He endorsed authoritarian policies, demonized his political opponents, and said a tremendous amount of objectively bigoted stuff — warning of “prowling Blacks [who] go around for fun to go target white people” or that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
So how should we remember Charlie Kirk — as someone who engaged in the process of democratic deliberation, or someone who degraded or coarsened it?
Both. Or, maybe, neither.
Kirk didn’t die of old age or even natural causes. Our posthumous conversation about his life is, at least for the moment, inextricably bound up with the manner of his death: He was assassinated in the midst of a public political debate.
Whenever a prominent political figure is killed, it invariably creates mistrust between political factions — something the extreme right is counting on in their post-Kirk killing push for a violent crackdown on the left. It is incumbent on every citizen in a democracy to think about how the way we talk about the killing plays into this dynamic: whether it intensifies partisan hatred or signals a renewed commitment to peaceful civil discourse.
I take that to be the intent of the people praising Kirk’s willingness to engage in the democratic process. But I think it’s possible to do so without sanitizing the ways in which his persona and political approach degraded that very same process — and how such whitewashing can provide cover for the further degradation of our politics in the weeks and months to come.
Threading this very fine needle, however, requires thinking carefully not just about what we say, but the way we say it.
I want you to think about two sentences.
The first: “Charlie Kirk had terrible politics, but no one should be killed for their beliefs.” The second: “No one should be killed for their beliefs, but Charlie Kirk had truly terrible politics.”
Semantically, the two sentences are the same. Yet the shift in syntax subtly, but fundamentally, changes the message being communicated.
The first sentence puts its emphasis on the killing: The concluding thought, the dominant consideration, is that political killing is wrong. When the speaker cops to their dislike of Kirk, they are doing so to emphasize that Kirk’s killing was an awful thing, even though I detested Kirk and what he stood for.
The second sentence, by contrast, uses an observation about Kirk’s badness to attenuate the condemnation of his killing. The speaker is signaling that the emphasis shouldn’t be on Kirk’s killing, but on his low moral character and malign political influence. At worst, such a formulation can seem like a coward’s justification: an attempt to insinuate that Kirk deserved to die without risking the social opprobrium that comes with outright saying it.
There is a certain strain of the Kirk conversation on the left that comes across as a lengthier version of that sentence. When the bulk of an article or video is about attacking Kirk, perfunctory condemnations of his killing do not change the impression that what you really want to say is that he kinda had it coming.
Which, to be clear, is an evil sentiment that must be rejected.
The killing of Charlie Kirk is, first and foremost, a tragedy for his family. This was a human being, no more or less human than the rest of us. He was the father of two young children; they and their mother now have to face life without him.
It’s also a nightmare for the country. Democracies shouldn’t have political killings, or even killings that seem political. They endanger the foundation of the system, the mutual trust between citizens that allows them to place their faith in elections to resolve their disputes.
Standing for democracy means standing on that principle — with no qualifications or cowardly clauses.
At the same time, I also think that there is some reason to prefer the first formulation — “Charlie Kirk had terrible politics, but no one should be killed for their beliefs” — over the shorter, simpler, “no one should be killed for their beliefs.”
Why? Because CBS just hosted Jack Posobiec to eulogize Kirk.
Posobiec is a serially dishonest political extremist who represents everything wrong with our politics. He became famous in 2016 for spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which led to a man opening fire in a Washington, DC, restaurant under the delusion that he was rescuing trafficked children hidden in its basement. Posobiec spent years associating professionally with white nationalists, including personally targeting Jewish journalists for harassment.
Yet in 2021, Kirk hired him at Turning Point USA and brought him into his confidence. As a TPUSA contributor, his behavior has remained extreme.
In 2024, Posobiec gave an allegedly ironic speech at a conservative conference where he called for “the end of democracy,” holding up a cross and saying, “We will replace it with this, right here.” I say allegedly because his 2024 book, titled Unhumans, explicitly states that “democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans.” These “unhumans?” Pretty much the entire political left.
The point is not that Charlie Kirk’s life can be reduced to his elevation of Jack Posobiec. Rather, it’s that Posobiec is an illustration of the kind of politics that Kirk helped drag into the Republican mainstream. When CBS chose to bring him on, on Thursday, to give a fawning interview about Kirk’s virtues, they were allowing Kirk’s posthumous glow to shine onto a living man who is currently working to set our politics aflame.
In fact, in that very interview, Posobiec implicitly calls for violent retribution. Inexplicably asked by host Major Garrett whether Kirk would prefer an “Old Testament” or “New Testament” response to his killing, Posobiec leaves little room for doubt.
“Charlie was a big fan of the Old Testament,” Posobiec says. “Justice needs to be done here.”
We cannot, as a polity, allow our horror at Kirk’s killing to rob us of our moral and political senses. We must not let people like Posobiec, who literally declares his political enemies “subhuman,” be given a perch to call down Biblical vengeance on the left merely because he had some proximity to Kirk, who knowingly embraced radicalism while alive. Just in the past few weeks, Kirk called for arresting anti-Trump mayors and accused Rep. Jasmine Crockett (who is Black) of being part of an “attempt to eliminate the white population in this country.” The method of his politics may have been democratic, but its substantive ends were bent towards repression and exclusion.
We can — and we must — full-throatedly condemn Charlie Kirk’s killing, without any cowardly “buts.” Yet we must also not allow the further degradation of our politics by Kirk’s living allies, who would turn him into a martyr to the cause of assailing democratic freedoms.
There are lines in both directions. And neither can be crossed.
