On Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk, the ubiquitous conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA, was assassinated while speaking to students at Utah Valley University.

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Shortly after the news of his death broke, Fox News’s Jesse Watters declared, “This is not a controversial person. This is not a polarizing guy, a divisive person, a firebrand that he’s being described as in the media.

“This is the kind of guy if you came back with your daughter, you’d say, ‘Thank God, we got a good one.’ He’s a great athlete, he’s a great person, he’s a great Christian.”

Watters got it half right. Kirk was, by the account of everyone who knew him, a loyal friend, a committed family man, and a devoted Christian. He was also an unquestionably divisive figure. 

One need only survey the depressingly diverse set of reactions to his murder to discern as much. After the 31-year-old husband and father of two fell, there was a disturbing cohort of not only professional progressive Democrats but also colleagues and neighbors across the country who emerged as celebrants. How else to explain that other than by the life he led?

Sometimes, Kirk was controversial for all the best reasons. Much of his work consisted of articulating simple, vital truths — the kind that America’s progressive Democrats punish others for acknowledging. His business, changing hearts and minds, demanded conviction, and he boasted it in spades.

But sometimes, it must be said, Kirk played the role of fire-breathing bomb-thrower. His politics were well to the right of the average American, and he made a career of broadcasting as much. That alone could be enough to elicit primal screams from some, but Kirk’s inflammatory rhetoric also drew the warranted sort of scrutiny.

The Charlie Kirk known to readers of left-wing “watchdog” sites such as Media Matters over the last several years was the eponymous host of the Charlie Kirk Show — and a caricature. Other programs aired alongside Kirk’s on Real America’s Voice include Steve Bannon’s War Room and Jack Posobiec’s Human Events Daily. For reference, Bannon once boasted about creating a “platform for the alt-right,” and Posobiec is most famous for his embarrassing role in 2016’s Pizzagate saga.

On his show, Kirk appealed mostly to an audience that rewarded content creators for hurling a steady stream of invective against the Left, pushing the boundaries of civility, and flirting with conspiracy theories. It was a red meat-heavy show designed to attract and maintain a carnivorous fan base. 

While wearing his shock jock hat, Kirk crossed lines relatively often, such as when he suggested in one 2023 monologue that then-President Joe Biden was “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.” There was also the time when, mere days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, Kirk gave air to the idea that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had intentionally allowed terrorists to cross into his country to murder, rape, and kidnap his own citizens.

It’s comments like these, in addition to any number of fabricated and out-of-context quotes, that Kirk’s detractors on the Left have resurfaced in the days since his murder in a transparent and tactically misguided effort to shift the national conversation from his grotesque murder allegedly by a radical left-winger who was seemingly motivated by his commitment to the failing transgender political project. 

That effort will fail miserably. And not only because the vast majority of the country is revolted by both Kirk’s murder and the attempt to distract from it, but because Kirk’s legacy is much richer and more complicated than the country’s academic, media, and entertainment establishments are willing to recognize.

The first and most straightforward reason Kirk’s footprint will not be so easily washed away is that he earned the respect of millions of his ideological bedfellows for his industry and courage. On his watch, Turning Point USA, the institution that Kirk dropped out of college to build, transformed from an unknown entity into one of the most powerful organizations in the world — one whose influence can be felt in not just college event spaces but every corner of the country, including the halls of the White House. 

Though younger voters’ rightward drift in recent years is attributable to the work of countless people, as well as numerous environmental factors, Kirk’s work has played an undeniable part in bringing about this tectonic shift. And while there’s plenty of evidence to marshal in support of this claim, perhaps the most telling is that Turning Point’s political arm was entrusted with helping lead the 2024 Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort in the seven swing states on which the election hinged.

“Donald Trump and his campaign have put a lot of faith in Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point network of nonprofits,” read the lede of an October NPR piece asking if Kirk could be effective “beyond campuses and churches.” The answer? Trump prevailed in all seven. Kirk’s work wasn’t done yet, though. According to Vice President JD Vance, “He didn’t just help us win in 2024, he helped us staff the entire government.”

How did Kirk build such a juggernaut and accrue so much influence? By spending a decade-plus marching into enemy territory to spread the conservative gospel fearlessly. Kirk was a talented communicator with a knack for putting butts in seats and gluing eyeballs to screens, and his campus tours were the thing that first put him on the national radar — and for good reason. 

Is it any wonder that the Right, long locked out of America’s commanding institutions, admired a young, self-made man who disrupted one of them while building his own formidable one from scratch?

The other remarkable thing about his activism, though, is that while Kirk on the airwaves spoke to an in-group, Kirk on campus was a compelling evangelist. During his colloquies with hostile students, Kirk struck a compassionate, even-keeled chord that hardly resembled the aforementioned caricature. 

“Hardly resembled,” rather than “didn’t resemble,” because Kirk didn’t give any ground or say things he didn’t believe during debates. There were no mealy-mouthed apologies issued or equivocations made, yet his exchanges with his interlocutors were often respectful and even friendly.

Kirk has been smeared as a homophobe over his faith-based opposition to same-sex marriage, and some particularly shameless actors have misconstrued his words to accuse him of favoring the death penalty for gay people. A viral video of a young, gay conservative asking Kirk about his message for his community belies those smears.

“First of all, welcome to the conservative movement,” Kirk answered. “You are a complete human being, and I’m sure you treat people well.”

“If you asked from a perspective as a Christian, I don’t agree with that lifestyle. But politics is about addition and multiplication. I imagine you agree with a lot of what we talk about, right? Strong borders, strong country. And for that, you know, we welcome you to the conservative movement,” he continued.

In another instance, a woman introduced herself to him as a “transgender male.” 

“Are you comfortable telling me your story?” he inquired, and after she did, he replied, “First of all, thank you so much for that,” before offering the following answer: “I’m going to have an opinion that very few people will ever tell you, which is I want you to be very cautious about putting drugs into your system in pursuit of changing your body.”

“My prayer for you, and again, very few people will say this, I actually want to see you be comfortable in how you were born,” Kirk said. “I know you might not feel that way, but I think that is something that you can achieve. I think with the right team, and the right people, you don’t have to wage war on your body, you can learn to love your body.”

Try as the false accusers might, they won’t be able to convince anyone who watched Kirk in action that he was consumed or motivated by hate.

When a nervous student tripped over their words, he praised them for their bravery. Signing off the worldly Whatever podcast, he told his interlocutors that “Jesus loves all of you, and He can transform your life — He transformed my life.” 

And despite the best efforts of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson to capitalize on his death by asserting that he had, in his last days, resolved to set out down the same antisemitic road they’ve trodden, Kirk made a healthy habit of embarrassing every groyper and other kind of Rothschild-obsessed Reddit addict who tried to commandeer his platform to spread hatred.

“Don’t look at your phone, look me in the eye,” he instructed one such cretin. “You said that I’m what, a tool of the Jews? So look at me in the eye like a man. … You cherry-picked something off the internet that makes Jews look bad.” 

Some politicos are dumbfounded by Americans’ admiration for Kirk. That’s because the former group is unfamiliar with the charitable, principled advocate that the latter knew so intimately.

The final, and perhaps most notable reason why Kirk, warts and all, will be remembered fondly is that he was a man in the arena, a la William F. Buckley Jr. The comparison may appear strained at first, but George Will, the legendary columnist and vociferous Trump critic who counted Buckley as a mentor, was the first to raise it. 

“Kirk, like Buckley, was a teacher unconfined to a classroom,” Will observed. Both men counted themselves among the commentariat, yes, but they were also so much more than that. They were builders who conceived of and established institutions that would outlive them. They were political actors who helped swing elections and manage coalitions. And they were confidants of paradigm-changing presidents. 

Kirk’s unique, multifaceted, and indeed Buckleyesque role within the conservative movement should buy him more grace in death than he was afforded in life. At a young age, he willingly took on weighty responsibilities that would have challenged 10 men should they have shared them. 

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Moreover, Buckley is remembered today as a scholarly gentleman who purged the Birchers and shaped a generation. He was all of that, but in the years before he became as much, he also expressed opinions on race, civil rights, and myriad other issues that were at best misguided. Buckley developed into the great man he’s remembered as over the course of a lifetime. Kirk was cruelly denied the same opportunity. 

Clear-eyed Americans of all creeds mourn not only the man he might have become but the imperfect, indefatigable one he was.

Isaac Schorr is an editor at Mediaite.