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CHARLIE KIRK’S KILLING WAS A TRAGEDY. BUT WE MUST NOT REWRITE HIS
LIFE  
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Moira Donegan
September 14, 2025
The Guardian
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_ In the wake of horror, honest accountings of his life have not only
become rare – they have also become dangerous _

In the wake of horror, honest accountings of his life have not only
become rare – they have also become dangerous, Antranik Tavitian /
Reuters

 

Maybe it is the gruesome suddenness of his death that has made so many
people forget the realities of Charlie Kirk’s life. After the
31-year-old rightwing influencer was shot dead at a college campus
appearance in Utah on Wednesday, many commentators rushed to condemn
political violence, on the one hand, and to issue warm tributes to
Kirk’s life, on the other. The former of these is legitimate: that
political policy should not be determined by force, or political
disagreements settled through homicidal violence, is a baseline
precondition of not just a democratic form of government, but of any
functional society. The latter, perhaps, can be explained by the
admirable human impulse towards gentleness and reconciliation. The
horror and shock of Kirk’s assassination prompted some to offer
their generosity, and their sympathy, to the dead man.

Perhaps it was these noble gestures toward generosity and sympathy
that led some commentators to be more laudatory to Kirk’s memory
than an honest recounting of his life would allow. In the days
following Kirk’s death, several bewilderingly inaccurate postmortem
hagiographies have appeared, including from prominent voices on the
left and center, that seem to wish that the tragedy of Kirk’s death
could retroactively have given him a more honorable life.

The most egregious of these came from Ezra Klein
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a center-left columnist at the New York Times known for his ability to
channel and influence elite opinion. In a piece published the morning
after Kirk’s death, titled Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the
Right Way, Klein made a series of strained, bizarre and outright
untrue assertions about Kirk’s career and character. Kirk, Klein
argued, was, if anything, an example of civic virtue. “Kirk was
practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein said. “He was
showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.
He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of
persuasion.” Klein’s point was that political persuasion – the
rational debate of ideas between equals in which violence is
unthinkable and good faith is presumed – is a cornerstone of liberal
democracy, the kind of thing we should all be striving for, the kind
of thing we need more of. “American politics has sides,” Klein
continued. “There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides
are meant to be on the same side of a larger project – we are all,
or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the
American experiment.”

Fair enough, I suppose, on its merits, but such a description of
reasoned, honest, good-faith debate is so inaccurate a description of
what Charlie Kirk engaged in on college campuses – in his series of
large, staged events where he “debated” untrained liberal
undergraduates with cameras rolling – that it reads as willfully
naive, if not outright dishonest. Charlie Kirk’s “debates” were
aggressive, unequal, trolling affairs, in which he sought to provoke
his interlocutors to distress, shouted them down and belittled them,
spewed hateful rhetoric about queer and trans people, women, Black
people, immigrants and Muslims, and selectively edited the ensuing
footage to create maximally viral content in which his fans could
witness him humiliating the liberals and leftists they perceived to be
their enemies. This was not “debate”; it was not reasoned,
good-faith discourse; it was not the kind of fair deliberation that
democracy relies on. It was a mockery of those things.

If reasoned debate is a precondition of a liberal democracy, there are
other preconditions as well. A state cannot be called democratic if it
does not offer equal protection of the law – if not all of its
citizens are awarded the same dignity by their government and the same
vote, same rights of expression and same prerogatives before courts
and elected officials in their attempts to influence its policies and
navigate its laws. Civic equality – not just civil engagement – is
central to the American experiment, too. It is not to excuse his
murder to be honest that Kirk opposed that equality. Some historians
and political scientists have argued that the United States did not
become a democracy until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and
the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the laws that intended to end de jure
segregation and racist voter suppression. But Kirk opposed
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Civil Rights Act, calling it a “huge mistake”. He endorsed
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racist so-called “great replacement theory”, in which nefarious
actors (usually cast as Jewish people) are seeking to “replace”
America’s white population with immigrants, saying it was “well
under way every day at our southern border”. On his podcast, he
hosted a “slavery apologist
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and a man who said that after women
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you know, the right to vote – after that, it all went downhill”.
Kirk himself once said that Black women – he named Joy Reid,
Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson – “do
not have the brain power
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be taken seriously”. He condemned Democrats for supposedly wanting
to make the US “less white”
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and claimed: “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a
fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution.” (It
is.) And yet Ezra Klein praised Kirk’s “moxie”. One wonders what
such a euphemism is meant to obscure.

In the rush to canonize Kirk and revise his history, honest
accountings of his life have not only become rare – they have also
become dangerous. In the days since his death, journalists, media
personalities and others who have not been sufficiently laudatory to
Kirk in public have lost their jobs for telling the truth about his
life. Matthew Dowd, a Republican political consultant, was fired from
MSNBC after saying that Kirk had spoken “hateful words
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In Phoenix, a sports writer
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fired for criticizing euphemistic accounts of Kirk’s beliefs.
“‘Political differences’ are not the same thing as spewing
hateful rhetoric on a daily basis,” he wrote in a social media post.
Many of those eulogizing Kirk want to paint him as a champion of free
speech, as a man who peddled in honest inquiry, uninhibited expression
and the open exchange of ideas. This is a laughably inaccurate picture
of the man’s work; it is in these punishments of those who oppose
him that we can see a truer reflection of Kirk’s values.

I do not find it hard to condemn political violence. To me, to say
that Kirk should not have been murdered is the easiest thing in the
world. No one should be shot, be they rightwing influencers, or
schoolchildren, or grocery shoppers, or churchgoers. It is easy for
me, even, to show sympathy for the humanity of Charlie Kirk, who, for
everything else he was, was a human being who has now been robbed of
the opportunity to learn, grow, and repent. But such commitments –
to human life, to nonviolence, to a faith in the possibility of
redemption and reconciliation – need not lead us to lie to ourselves
about Charlie Kirk. The same values that make us horrified at his
violent death are the ones that should embolden our commitment to
defeating the politics he worked for in life.

_xxxxxx MODERATOR: SEE ALSO JAMELLE BOUIE OPINION
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SEPTEMBER 13, 2025 (FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY NEWSLETTER)_

MOIRA DONEGAN is a Guardian US columnist 

Covering American and international news for an online, global
audience. GUARDIAN US is renowned for the Paradise Papers
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and other award-winning work including, the NSA revelations
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Counted
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* Charlie Kirk
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* political disagreements
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* Violence
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* democracy
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* honesty
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