Political Violence Is Wrong. Charlie Kirk Didn’t Think So.
The murder of Charlie Kirk was a moral travesty. We can recognize that without ignoring that he repeatedly fanned the flames of political violence himself.
No one should be subject to violence because of their political views. But we don’t need to pretend Charlie Kirk was someone he wasn’t to affirm that principle. (Tristan Wheelock / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
It should be a basic, universally agreed-upon principle that people shouldn’t be killed because of the things they say or believe in. That’s not just because it’s morally wrong but also because it’s socially corrosive, contrary to the continued existence of a free society, and only fuels cycles of violence and recrimination; because the real political work that creates lasting, transformational change — organizing, persuasion, debate, criticism, and so on — is impossible if someone can be marked for death simply because a person who disagrees with them can get their hands on a gun.
The only way the concept of free speech works in practice is if it applies even to people whose views are ugly, ignorant, vile, even hateful — people like Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist who was just shot and killed in Utah for reasons that are still not clear. Once you start making exceptions to this rule for this view or that comment, you’ll find the whole foundation of the idea collapses in on itself. It turns out that everyone has their own opinion about what’s acceptable and what’s beyond the pale, and that those opinions are often wildly at odds depending on your personal background and politics.
This is the way democracy and a free society work: We accept that we have to tolerate hearing things we vehemently disagree with, because it guarantees our own right to speak and act freely in ways that others might vociferously detest.
But there is something dishonest and slightly absurd going on right now in the collective reaction to Kirk’s murder. Because rather than simply restate and defend this principle — you have a right to air your views without fear of violence, even if your views suck — a variety of prominent voices are now rewriting Kirk’s history to present him as someone who wasn’t an implacable foe of this very value.
“Charlie championed” the cause of “freedom of expression that’s enshrined in our founding documents,” Utah governor Spencer Cox said after his alleged assailant was caught. There is a copious outpouring of tributes from the political right about Kirk’s supposed commitment to free speech and open, civil debate. It’s not surprising to see this from Kirk’s conservative allies. But it has also come from the liberal center, with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein declaring that “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”
As plenty of people have pointed out by now, Kirk held and espoused a variety of ugly views and regularly insulted and demonized whole groups of human beings just trying to get on with their lives: not only trans people, whom he was falsely blaming for mass shootings at the precise moment he himself was shot (by a nontrans man, based on what we now know) but also Jews, Muslims, immigrants, black people, homosexuals, federal workers — the list goes on. That of course doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed, but it is dishonest — and actually detrimental to the defense of free speech — to pretend these weren’t his core, heartfelt beliefs.
But it’s not even really Kirk’s bigoted social attitudes that are the point. More important is that Kirk was very much on board with the political violence that is now rightly being decried in the wake of his murder.
A History of Advocating Political Violence
Take a look, for instance, at a 2024 interview he did with Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator known for spreading the #Pizzagate mythos and for his association with various out-and-out white supremacists, none of which stopped Kirk from employing him for years in his organization Turning Point USA and cohosting a podcast with him. It was “one of my favorite conversations I’ve ever had with him,” Kirk told listeners after interviewing Posobiec for his book Unhumans:The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), which argues that right-wing dictators were right to torture, kill, and otherwise repress the Left, and that today’s conservatives might have to take a page out of their book.
That is not hyperbole; it is literally what the book argues and is about.
And there is no indication that any of it gave Kirk any pause as he allowed Posobiec and his coauthor to hold forth unchallenged about how the Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco and the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders between them — were “great men” who “had a father’s heart for their country” and were their countries’ equivalents to George Washington, whose great deeds are only remembered badly now because an omniscient, all-powerful left has infiltrated education and entertainment and rewritten history. Franco simply had to do what he did — including concentration camps, mass rape, torture, and hundreds of thousands of killings — because he “was fighting a war,” and doing it “the same way that [William Tecumseh] Sherman fought a civil war,” they explain.
Kirk didn’t push back on any of this. As Posobiec explained that he endorsed killing his political opponents — the “unhumans” of the book’s menacing title — Kirk personally talked about how conservatives needed to stop being “nice” and said he wanted to emphasize the bit about “how to crush them,” meaning the modern liberal-left. He talked about how he wanted to see “a right-wing revolution.”
The only remotely challenging question Kirk posed was about whether it was truly possible to eliminate their opposition without using violence. Posobiec’s reply was that the United States could merely rerun the earlier Red Scares and round up and expel thousands of people whose politics they disagree with — the supposedly “moderate” solution — and that the only times violence has been used is when right-wing forces were faced with violence already. The keen-eyed reader may note that this is a thinly veiled permission structure for conservatives to engage in political violence, if they can construe any violence against themselves as having been inflicted or incited by their opponents.
“Are communists channeling the demonic?” Kirk asked at the close of the interview. His subjects explained that communists, a label that to them describes ordinary liberals and Democratic officials, operate in the same way as Satan and demons do.
This is not an isolated example. We have an idea of what kind of “revolution” Kirk was thinking of when we look at his critical role in trying to help Trump illegally overturn the 2020 election. That didn’t just include using his massive platform to spread lies that Trump had won the election but also busing people into Washington to try to storm the Capitol and stop the certification of the election.
How does trying to annul an election result by force because your side didn’t win fit into the image created five minutes ago of a Charlie Kirk who abhorred violence and believed in debate and persuasion? It clearly doesn’t. But as Kirk elsewhere admitted, “I’m not a fan of democracy.”
In 2021, an audience member asked Kirk at what point conservatives had the green light to use guns on their political opponents, and while Kirk took care to at first “denounce” the question, he went into a longer answer that suggested he didn’t really disagree that much with its premise. Kirk’s sole objection to the idea, he explained, was that it was strategically foolish because it would create a pretext for a Democratic crackdown on the Right. He went on to suggest that the line for when it would be okay to take up arms and hurt people would be “when we exhaust every single one of our state[’s] ability to push back against what’s happening” — in other words, if his movement didn’t succeed through the normal political process. Two years later, he reiterated this, warning listeners that “you have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president,” so they should “buy weapons” and carry them around all the time in public in case they have to fight back.
Kirk called for former president Joe Biden to be put in prison, to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, even to be given the death penalty, just as he repeatedly urged that, if his side took power, they should launch criminal investigations into other prominent Democrats. He advocated for a left-leaning commentator (and US citizen) who had a position on the COVID-19 pandemic that he disagreed with to be deported. He called for the military to be sicced on migrants and for “lethal force” to be used on them, and advised his viewers to arm themselves to potentially kill these migrants themselves, because “they mean harm to the American homeland.”
Heated Rhetoric
Even his more “moderate” efforts were not about winning the political day through debate and persuasion but about silencing people and institutions through blacklisting and intimidation. Kirk partly rose to fame by launching a “Professor Watchlist” to expose and intimidate academics who “advance leftist propaganda” and “promote anti-American values.” He deleted that second bit later, but as Kirk’s friendly interview with Posobiec shows, he openly supported the revival of the McCarthyism that that phrase evokes.
It is somewhat absurd to watch right-leaning commentators now crying foul that Kirk would be called mean names like a “fascist,” when Kirk regularly demonized and whipped up rage against his political opponents in the same way. He called Democrats “maggots, vermin, and swine,” charged that the party “hates this country” and that “they wanna see it collapse.” He told rural white voters that the party hated them in particular and has “a plan to try and get rid of you” and that they “won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.” Kamala Harris “wants to see the elimination of the United States of America,” he claimed last year, and her election would mean “a pagan regime basically permanently engulfing the country.”
In fact, he used the exact same comparisons to fascism and Nazism that right-wing pundits are now saying were materially responsible for his murder. Kirk called a 2022 Biden speech “very Hitlerian” and “a declaration of war against half the country,” claimed the Biden administration was in the beginning stages of a genocide against the Trump movement, and said the FBI under Biden was “doing the work that brown shirts would do” and was “how you get Auschwitz.”
As usual, a host of commentators — mostly on the political right but with the baffling aid of some liberal voices who should know better — have created a topsy-turvy, upside-down reality in the wake of this killing. It’s a reality where all of Kirk’s many authoritarian, politically intolerant, and pro-violence views have not just been wiped from his history but have been transplanted onto his political opponents — all to justify a violent state crackdown that Kirk and others like him constantly said they feared being inflicted on them, while simultaneously fantasizing about being the ones who got to inflict it on their enemies.
No one should be punished, let alone killed, for their speech or their political views. We don’t need to pretend Charlie Kirk was someone he wasn’t to affirm that principle, and we don’t have to pretend that he wasn’t an avowed foe of that same principle.