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Charlie Kirk Did Not Practice Politics The Right Way
We don't have to lose our humanity to bear faithful witness, but we do have to keep our nerve.
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Matthew Gertz is right about this—though of course Charlie Kirk did not survive.
He’s right, he’s right, he’s right. And yet in the year 2025 it’s an incomplete thought. We say the cliches because they are true. We also say them to insure against collective punishment. Be merciful, sir, we are not the bad ones.
We can’t be fully honest unless we admit that this fear, this instinct to placate, lurks everywhere.
Rather than repeat the cliches myself, I’ll second what Jonathan V. Last wrote about Kirk’s death here. He hit all the notes I would’ve wanted to if I’d written about the shooting per se, without cowering or grasping for profundity.
But I won’t flagellate myself or anyone else. I won’t eulogize Kirk, or piss on his grave. I will instead move on to offer an observation and a critique: of how fear has already done its job, warping public memory of Kirk unrecognizably, to the point where nearly all liberal elites have chosen to beatify a person with awful values.
Multiple Democratic governors raced into line with the Trump regime to lower their state flags to half staff. Mainstream news organizations eulogized Kirk as though an intellectual giant and an exemplar of politics had passed. Liberal opinion leaders swooned over his powers of “persuasion.”
“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true,” asserted Ezra Klein. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.”
The statement is not true.
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I don’t mean Kirk practiced politics the wrong way in the sense that he held bigoted views, or said vile things, though that of course is part of the story. I don’t mean it in the generalized sense that nobody with good standing in MAGA practices politics the right way. I mean it in the sense that you have to play dumb about the distinctions between persuasion and deception, reason and manipulation, to convince yourself that Kirk’s project was admirable.
That is not to say I disagree with the obvious truth that Kirk’s death is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for Kirk and for his family. But men with power did not lower flags to half staff because a young man who was raising a family died violently. They’re at half staff either because Kirk earned martyr status, or because his eulogizers conferred martyr status on him out of fear and confusion. I think it’s the latter.
Under somewhat different circumstances, it would be fitting for good people to treat a man with rotten values as a martyr.
Kirk’s killing is a civic wound, because Kirk died engaging in free speech—we’re likely though not certain to find that he died because he engaged in free speech. That is a perfectly good reason to mourn and worry for the future of the country. But it’d only be fitting to set aside his political views and make a martyr of him if he was a warrior for free speech.
FIRE is a warrior for free speech. But Kirk? It’s not so clear.
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His name is Connor Estelle, and he’s one of the right-wing extremists who recently participated in a round-robin style debate with Mehdi Hasan. Like Kirk, Estelle also gained a measure of notoriety through speech and debate. But nobody mourning Kirk would pretend to believe speech and debate represent Estelle’s highest values.
When Hasan asked Estelle, ‘If you hate democracy so much, why are you engaged in public debate, a cornerstone of the democratic process?’ Estelle responded, “It is the means to support an end. The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn't mean free speech after we win.”
Estelle’s honesty is surely part of the reason he’s not a household name the way Kirk was.
Would anyone glorifying Kirk say Estelle practices politics “the right way,” if perhaps less effectively than Kirk? Would they martyr him if an assassin killed him?
There’s plenty of room on the American political spectrum, but Kirk and Estelle butt tightly up against each other. You have to move several ticks left to find people with regressive values who nevertheless believe in democracy and free speech more than in right-wing power. If William F. Buckley had been assassinated in an act of free speech, it might have been appropriate to martyr him. But Kirk isn’t like that. At least, not obviously so.
I can’t know what beliefs Kirk harbored privately, and I can’t know with total certainty where he would have come down if, say, Donald Trump had declared the first amendment a dead letter. It might not have been totally clear in Kirk’s own mind.
But, in the final analysis, I suspect he would at least have gone along with it. He went along with an attempted coup and insurrection. He went along with a coverup of a child-sex trafficking scandal. It’s not much of a leap, and it’s not incongruous with his character, to conclude he would’ve been right there with Estelle, cheering our subjugation.