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CHARLIE KIRK, REDEEMED: A POLITICAL CLASS FINDS ITS LOST CAUSE  
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
September 16, 2025
Vanity Fair
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_ "Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and
ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization
of the Black population...and the destruction of democracy."...are
ignoring and sanitizing Charlie Kirk's legacy. _

Conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning
Point Action, speaks during a meeting on the campus of the University
of Arizona in Tucson on October 17, 2024., Photo credit: Olivier
Touron / Agence France-Presse (AFP) // Truthout

 

Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk
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a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who
sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult
to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being
memorialized in mainstream discourse. _New York
Times_ columnist EZRA KLEIN dubbed Kirk
[[link removed]] “one
of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” and a man
who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California
governor GAVIN NEWSOM
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Kirk’s “passion and commitment to debate,” advising us to
continue Kirk’s work by engaging “with each other, across
ideology, through spirited discourse.” _Atlantic_ writer SALLY
JENKINS saluted Kirk
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claiming he “argued with civility” and asserting that his
death was
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significant loss for those who believe engagement can help bridge
disagreements.”

The mentions of “debate” and “engagement” are references to
Kirk’s campus tours, during which he visited various colleges to
take on whoever come may. That this aspect of Kirk’s work would be
so attractive to writers and politicians is understandable. There is,
after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college
students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock
therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger
warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the
political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to
everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted
to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked
his ire.

 
Protestors clash during an anti and pro-immigration rally in Toronto,
Canada, September 13, 2025.  (Photo credit: Arindam Shivaani/NurPhoto
 //  Vanity Fair)
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that
he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions
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or that he rejected the separation of church and state
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It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s
“civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning
members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks”
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to trans people
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the slur
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Faced with the prospect of a KAMALA HARRIS
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Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because
Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda
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Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a
master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as
when he defined “the American way of life
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marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian,
gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not
want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a
day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed,
and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of
America
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antithetical to that. Large “dedicated” Islamic areas were “a
threat to America
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Kirk asserted, and New York mayoral candidate ZOHRAN MAMDANI
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a “Mohammedan [[link removed]],” with
Kirk supposing that anyone trying to see “Mohammedism take over the
West” would love to have New York—a “prior Anglo
center”—“under Mohammedan rule.”

Kirk habitually
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against
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crime
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claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white
people
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He repeated the rape accusations against YUSEF SALAAM, a member of
the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City
councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig
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who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held
for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti
was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo
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whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night
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These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other
countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for
your daughter next.” The only hope was DONALD TRUMP
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had to prevail, lest Haitians “become your masters.”

The point of this so-called mastery was as familiar as it was
conspiratorial—“great replacement.” There was an “anti-white
agenda
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Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the
Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the
planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the
murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the
world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he
said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re
coming in and they’re coming in…”

You can probably imagine where this line of thinking eventually went.

“Jewish donors,” Kirk claimed
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funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist
policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.” Indeed
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“the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely
financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

 
Tommy Robinson, a far-right British activist, held a rally this week
in which supporters chanted support for Kirk. The gathering turned
violent, injuring 26 police officers.  (Photo credit: Lab Ky Mo/SOPA
Images/LightRocket  //  Vanity Fair)
Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he
founded, Turning Point USA. CRYSTAL CLANTON, the group’s former
national field director, once texted
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fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them
all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s
advisers, RIP MCINTOSH, once published a newsletter featuring an
essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks
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“become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black
culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after
three Black football players were killed at another college
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MILLER, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of
Missouri, joked
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in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers
we would have had the whole week off.”

Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs
that this country has ever known. But it is still chilling to think
that those beliefs would be silenced by a gunshot. The tragedy is
personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family
will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that
robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national.
Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is
paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political
violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is
also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as
Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk
endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.

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
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forming “a line in front of 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 [[link removed]].
“We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.” And in
2023, Kirk told his audience that then president JOE BIDEN
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a “corrupt tyrant” who should be “put in prison and/or given
the death penalty
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his crimes against America.”

 
A Tommy Robinson supporter at the "Unite the Kingdom" rally where
organizers honored Kirk.  (Photo credit: Lab Ky Mo/SOPA
Images/LightRocket  //  Vanity Fair)
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
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and, on the other, urges us to commemorate
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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? Can they truly
be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to
memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s
column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in
the piece from Kirk himself.

More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit
words
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men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently
transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve
their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with
Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire
for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th
century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied
intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their
words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.

Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of
the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its
animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population,
the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The
rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but
also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to
serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this
history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard
question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of
Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

_[TA-NEHISI COATES is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were
Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and
Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of
a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently
the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard
University. See more from V.F.’s THE GREAT FIRE project here
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which Coates guest-edited for the September 2020 issue.]_

* Charlie Kirk
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* Turning Point USA
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* Racism
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* white nationalism
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* white nationalists
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* MAGA
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* misogyny
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* Confederacy
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* slavery
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* apartheid
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* homophobia
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* xenophobia
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* political violence
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* political assassinations
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* Lost Cause
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* Donald Trump
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* GOP
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