It’s moral blindness to conflate Kirk’s worst hot takes with calculated political murder.
It’s hard to recall a public figure whose assassination produced more efforts to discredit the victim than we’ve seen in the case of Charlie Kirk. While some of this is simply driven by the fact that Kirk was a two-fisted participant in the scrum of our current politics, an awful lot of it seems to come from the desperate inability of Democrats, liberals, and progressives to acknowledge that their own political side produced a great and violent wrong against a political enemy who did not deserve to be murdered.
The latest endeavor to draw an equivalency between Kirk and his assassin — or at least, between Kirk and the people cheering his killing — is to claim that he called for Joe Biden to be killed, so he kinda had it coming, and certainly shouldn’t be remembered as any sort of champion of free and open debate. This is scurrilous nonsense.
Start with the truth. It comes from an offhand remark — an aside — on Kirk’s podcast in 2023, discussing the relative merits of Biden and Kamala Harris as opponents, in the context of a longer discussion of shady Biden family foreign business dealings: “I’ll tell you what, she would be a lot easier to beat than Joe Biden. Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer’s, corrupt, tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” To anyone not pantingly motivated to play the “whatabout” game, this falls rather comfortably in the category of stupid political hyperbole that we have been hearing since the dawn of the American republic. There is a basic and fundamental difference between saying that a political figure has committed crimes that justify imprisonment or execution through the criminal process and calling for or celebrating their assassination. If you can’t grasp that or refuse to acknowledge it, you may have missed the entire point of why we have a government and laws.
Treason is a capital crime, and it carries the death penalty. The Founding Fathers very wisely insisted that the Constitution adhere to a strictly-written standard for defining and proving treason, and even the ugliest reading of Biden’s receipt of corrupt money from hostile foreign regimes through his family members (family members he later pardoned) doesn’t meet that standard. So, it was dumb for Kirk to toss this out there. But the reason why the Framers insisted on that standard was precisely that they knew how easily people in the whirlwind of factional politics could rationalize accusing their opponents of treason, and experience has proven them right.
In our current era, Donald Trump has often both accused his opponents of treason and been accused by them of treason. In 2017, referencing Donald Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, Tim Kaine argued that “This is moving into perjury, false statements and even potentially treason,” and Richard Painter concurred that “the dictionary definition” of treason and the “common understanding” is “a betrayal of one’s country, and in particular, the helping of a foreign adversary against one’s own country.” In 2018, former CIA Director John Brennan called Trump “treasonous” after a 2018 Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, Berkley professor Stephen Fish added that it was “textbook treason,” and the New York Times published a column by Charles Blow entitled “Trump, Treasonous Traitor.” That’s even before the outpouring of such commentary after January 6, such as MSNBC’s Glenn Kirschner saying that Trump’s conduct “qualifies as treason” or John Nichols in The Nation publishing an article on “187 Minutes of Treason.”
That’s just scratching the surface, but all of those people were speaking directly to the topic, unlike Kirk’s aside. They were all just as overheated as Kirk. But I would not commit the category error of concluding that they were thereby the moral equivalent of someone cheering an extrajudicial assassination in its immediate aftermath.
And yet, we see all manner of supposedly respectable commentators committing that precise error. No less a figure than Ta-Nehisi Coates, the most lavishly-praised figure in the history of American letters, has a column in Vanity Fair that consists entirely of attacks on Kirk’s character that aims to frame him as a dangerous man with “a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.” It will surprise nobody familiar with Coates that he compares Kirk to – wait for it – the Confederacy. (The unsubtle title is “Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause,” and the parallel is made explicit in Coates’s conclusion.)
As I’ve noted before, Kirk spent a lot of time talking, and inevitably that means saying some regrettable or poorly-phrased things. We know the very worst of his turns of phrase – some of them ripped badly out of context – because left-wing groups, notably Media Matters, compiled opposition dossiers from tracking everything he said. Rather than make any effort to grapple with Kirk as a whole, Coates offers a series of citations to Media Matters; readers will notice that in all but a very few cases, he quotes only a word or phrase without excerpting so much as an entire sentence. He piles on with a few examples of stray quotes from people in Turning Point USA’s hundreds of chapters with many thousands of members nationwide.
Coates quotes Ezra Klein saying “political violence is a virus,” but adds: “This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words.” What is his evidence that Kirk endorsed political violence?
In 2022, when Kirk was frustrated, for instance, by the presence of Lia Thomas on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team, Kirk did not call for “spirited discourse.” Instead, while discussing a recent championship tournament, he said he would have liked to have seen a group of fathers descend from the stands, forming “a line in front of [Lia] Thomas and saying, ‘Hey, tough guy, you want to get in the pool? ’Cause you’re gonna have to come through us.” Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump’s deployment of federal troops to DC. “Shock and awe. Force,” he wrote. “We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.” And in 2023, Kirk told his audience that then president Joe Biden was a “corrupt tyrant” who should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”
What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life?
Notice how smoothly Coates slides from “execution of the American president” to “executed himself,” as if Kirk was judicially tried, convicted, and exhausted his appeals in the legal system – as if it is no great escalation to move from a one-line aside on his podcast to his cold-blooded murder. That Coates sees that distinction as a quibble tells us just as much about his worldview as does his justifications of Hamas in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Is deploying the National Guard to stop carjackers really the same thing as assassination? Maybe Coates thinks so, just as segregationists said such things when Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock. Otherwise, all he really has is the argument that fathers should lock arms to stand between Lia Thomas and their daughters. Shows of that kind of solidarity don’t sound much like shooting somebody in the throat to me, but maybe those are details of little significance to Coates. In fact, Coates has been manufacturing false equivalencies in order to excuse political violence as far back as when he was comparing the 2014 Ferguson riots to the Boston Tea Party.
Kirk’s willingness to take his message to campuses, even when he knew that he faced threats of violence, was admirable. His public statements weren’t always admirable, or wise, and they sometimes reflected an excess of our era’s bare-knuckles politics. But it’s moral blindness to conflate his worst hot takes with calculated political murder, and one must blanch at what else such deliberate blindness will excuse, and why.