Yesterday afternoon, conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot during a stop on his “American Comeback” tour at Utah Valley University. He died shortly after. In the 24 hours that followed, liberal news networks, publications, and politicians have tripped over themselves to eulogize Kirk, with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein claiming that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way,” while California podcaster-in-chief Gavin Newsom said "the best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”
After MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd noted, quite reasonably, that "hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” the network fired him. The New York Yankees, neither a publication nor a politician, held a moment of silence for Kirk.
These are just a handful of examples. Conspicuously, many such teary-eyed odes neglect to quote or substantially discuss the views of the man himself. So – to help other pundits craft their eulogies for a man who died on the same day as a school shooting in a country with hundreds of mass shootings per year, the latest of which is receiving vastly less attention than Kirk’s – here’s Charlie Kirk, in his own words:
Charlie Kirk on gun violence:
Charlie Kirk on empathy:
Charlie Kirk on George Floyd:
Charlie Kirk on trans people:
Charlie Kirk on gay people:
Charlie Kirk on women:
Charlie Kirk on Black pilots:
Charlie Kirk on Martin Luther King Jr:
Charlie Kirk on immigration:
Charlie Kirk on the great replacement conspiracy theory:
Charlie Kirk on abortion:
Charlie Kirk on Gaza:
Charlie Kirk on a whole bunch of other stuff, over the course of just the past few days:
This is to say nothing of Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and its watchlist of professors, which resulted in nearly a decade of harassment disproportionately directed at women, queer people, and people of color.
In a sane nation, our most visible figures and venerable institutions wouldn’t be attempting to canonize a man who made his name spewing hate and laundering fascist talking points. But Kirk knew how to cozy up to power and work the algorithm – the only two skills you need to gain influence in a landscape where viewership, as opposed to expertise or a legitimate desire to better your community, is king. This is a system that makes monsters, encourages them to run rampant, and then scratches its head at the carnage they’ve caused. It is ill-equipped to grapple with the age-old adage “what goes around comes around,” because that would require accepting a measure of culpability.
Yesterday, many saw images of gruesome violence in their algorithmically generated feeds. Some expressed outrage, acting as though this was an anomaly, and perhaps it was. Perhaps they have not spent the past almost-two years opening Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram or whatever else and being greeted by images of charred Palestinian children. Maybe the endless stream of unspeakable darkness has made them numb. Or maybe, like many pundits and elected officials, they are aware of the horrors visited upon Gaza, but to them, those are acceptable losses – bodies, but not real people. State violence is the background hum of this country, after all. It does not count as the “political violence” so many politicians and pundits rushed to decry yesterday.
Kirk’s death, like much of his life, took place on a stage. Despite the artificiality of such a setting, that makes him more real to some Americans – and clearly to those eulogizing him. More real than the Democratic lawmaker and her husband who were killed just a few months ago. More real than the 11 people killed last week by the US government in what was almost certainly an illegal strike on a boat in the Caribbean. More real than tens of thousands – or, more likely, hundreds of thousands – of Palestinian civilians.
Kirk’s violent rhetoric helped shape this world, and yet, it has been deemed “civil” by those on both sides of the political divide. This is the mark of a sick society, one that is perfectly fine with an unconscionable body count as long as none of the disfigured, barely recognizable faces are ones we know from a screen. Some of the pundits fake-crying for Kirk probably found his views privately appalling. Again, networks made the deliberate choice to shy away from engaging with the substance of his debates. They were almost certainly aware, at least on some level, of the kinds of things he regularly said. But that didn’t matter. They had to put on a show. The show, after all, is what keeps the meat grinder that is America moving, and it must – at all costs – go on.
