With Time’s Passage Can We Now Speak Openly About Charlie Kirk?

The months since Charlie Kirk's assassinations have seen opposite effects, a surge in growth as more school groups apply to form chapters and more young people join, while critics finally feel free to expose Kirk's bigotry and homophobia without fear of losing their jobs in the great anti-free speech pogrom that followed his death.

Andrew Kolvet, who has taken Kirk's place as the host of "The Charlie Kirk Show," a national radio program and podcast followed by some two million listeners every week, says
Turning Point has received some 140,000 inquiries from high schools and colleges about stating affiliates, and among the individuals joining the existing 2,100 chapters, some 200,000 have signed up to work in the coming elections. Kirk, who dropped out of college to start Turning Point USA and died at 31, has in those 13 years founded a formidable organization to promulgate right-wing views.

No matter one's politics or ideology, his killing was a horrific shock — that it had come to this in America. Objections to his mission and his personal ideology were set aside for a time. Kirk had targeted college campuses to counter the pronounced leftward ideology prevalent in the academic ranks, but had set about his own indoctrination of America's youth.

But opprobrium for his caustic intolerance could not be contained forever.

Kirk has made derogatory comments about Blacks. For starters, he was irked that Biden let 10% of Haiti's population, so he says, into the U.S. Particularly racist was his saying,

“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists…They’re coming out and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ We know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

It's muddled, but let's allow that he is attributing someone else saying that but he continued with "Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us."

Blacks, they are dangerous: “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

He said, "The Civil Rights Act, though, let's be clear, created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon".

He was intolerant of anything to do with race or gender. He was homophobic, for example remarking on the radio show in paraphrase of the Bible, "Thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying." His transphobia is reportedly behind the motive of Tyler Robinson's murdering him. Kirk was a misogynist, relegating women to the role of raising children and tending house (but not his own wife, Erika). When Taylor Swift announced her engagement, he advised, “Reject feminism. You’re not in charge.” Elizabeth Spiers, writing for The Nation bluntly summed it up:

"He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses"…

to give it the appearance of morality. He notoriously remarked — and the irony is haunting — when asked about mass shootings that…

“I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

And that would include children as expendable.

Kirk then and Turning Point now unabashedly espouse a Christianity message. Kirk ad as ally purported close friend J.D. Vance, who even sat in as host on the radio program in the days immediately after Kirk's death. Vance acted as Kirk's substitute at a Turning Point rally at the end of October at the University of Mississippi. There was even an “inappropriate”
non-perfunctory hug of Erika Kirk that got viral attention.

In the debate phase that Kirk typically held with his audience, Vance adopted the same technique as Kirk of advancing a Christian nationalist view while affecting seeming forbearance of other views, as when a student asked:

" Requiring Christianity in public schools goes against the founding fathers' wish of freedom of religion. What do you think about that?"

Vance answered:

"I make no apologies for believing that Christianity is the pathway to God. I make no apologies for thinking that Christian values are an important foundation of this country, but I'm not going to force you to believe in anything, because that's not what God wants and that's not what I want either."

Spiers had no part of that pretense. She says,

"Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome."

You could see that in what Ole Miss student Mary Cate Doughty had to say:

”Before Charlie Kirk's assassination, I wasn't in Turning Point USA. Now, like, I have joined as a member. And, I mean, I think it really puts things into perspective about how divisive things have become in our country.”

It is not apparent that joining an ideological organization is more divisive.

Kirk was praised for being open to debate. Shortly after his death California's Democratic Gernor Gavin Newsom would call such discussion a healthy democratic exercise, saying:

“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate.”

But they were not debates, they were arguments. Debates are orderly, with each speaker presenting his or her case in turn, uninterrupted. Not so with Kirk, who interrupted constantly and had perfected techniques that a near two-page analysis in the printed edition of The New York Times analyzed, showing that he would change the subject to throw his opponent off kilter, ask a question that his questioner would likely not know the answer to, generally try to confuse his adversary. He confronted one and all with the challenge "Make me wrong", which itself bespeaks a belligerence of thinking that he was always right.

Kirk comes to his "debates" with fully formed stock arguments he has embedded like brain implants that he delivered at speed to "win". It’s not the quality of his arguments that won so much as the intimidation that flustered his opponents. Student Calvin Wood, vice president of Ole Miss College Democrats, got it perfectly in a PBS NewsHour interview:

"Arguing over our issues, especially when it's this big figure, Charlie Kirk, and some random 18-year-old student who's shaking with their mic and all that, like, it never struck me as a fair landscape or environment for people to actually find common ground on issues."

Here's a small example, an excerpt from a “debate” at Cambridge Union in the U.K. where Kirk is engaging with a professor or "don" arguing that Ukraine is "bad".

Don: So why is Ukraine bad?

Kirk: Well, there's a lot wrong with Ukraine. They're not a democracy. Zelenskyy refuses to hold an election.

Don: Well, no, he can't hold an election.

Kirk: Oh, wait, did Churchill hold an election during the war?

Don: His constitution...

Kirk: Hold on. Lincoln held an election during the war. He can call an election. He can call a snap election. He's a full dictator of the country.

How many times has Kirk, fully rehearsed, made this argument about Zelenskyy before, whereas the professor is caught without instant answers, unaware in advance that election would become a crux of the Ukraine argument. Otherwise he could have been ready with (1) the Churchill government did not hold an election during the war and (2) Lincoln could hold an election because in 1864 nothing flew. People could queue in outdoor lines to vote because there were no bombers or drones in the sky to kill them.

We'll leave you with this link to that clash where at least we hear top-quality students getting the best of some of Mr. Kirk’s arrogance. You will be left wondering just what he needed to prove by such confrontations.