Hate-checking Charlie Kirk

It’s an article of faith on the left that Kirk was a hateful extremist. Was he?

Sorry in advance for the length of this one. I could have broken it up into parts, and maybe I should have. But I wanted readers to be able to refer back to a single source. And I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible in the event anyone was going to find it useful for internet fighting.

It’s largely impossible to have productive conversations about the legacy of a public figure when we can’t even get on the same page over the most basic facts about him.

“Did he really say that?”

“Is that really what he meant?”

“Is there context missing here?”

I’m not sure I have ever seen such a tattered, dysfunctional information landscape as the one that’s emerged since Charlie Kirk was gunned down. Who was this guy? What was he about? Who killed him and why? We aren’t just in disagreement about these things, we’re in different worlds.

I’d like to help fix that.

Can’t remember where I first saw the meme up top, but it’s been making the rounds. It’s getting shared a lot with the sentiment, “glad somebody made this,” and the posters are mostly excited to use it as a hate roundup that will help people continue not feeling bad that a man just got murdered for his thoughts.

Because my God, you guys, these thoughts. Like, what kind of monster could believe such awful things? What kind of demon would ever speak such curses aloud?

Although are these curses? Did the demon speak them? Do the people posting this stuff have internet service that only awakens long enough for them to spread horseshit?

I spend a lot of time these days wondering what first interested people in politics. For me, it was arguing with my friends. We did it constantly, often contentiously. Some of us were liberals, some of us were conservatives, we fought like cats and dogs, and not only did we all stay friends through the years, we learned a helluva lot from each other.

How did you find your way to this business if not through that? Where - really asking - does this idea come from that people with different views to your own are enemies to be killed instead of just…people with different views?

I’d like to blame Online Life for this, or social media, but I’m not sure those things fully explain it. Too many of the people I’ve seen gloating over Kirk’s death, or needing to project how much they don’t care about it, or suggesting that if he didn’t want his kids to watch it, he should’ve held his tongue…are old. Older than me. Old enough that having been screen-reared in this rage swamp we call the internet doesn’t explain their behavior. They grew up in a time when kids actually played outside! And some of them aren’t even that active online.

You guys actually know what grass feels like. How can you be behaving this way?

But this question, depressing as I find it, is putting the cart before the horse. Okay, so by your insane moral code, we sometimes kill people for thinking the wrong thoughts. Or at least, we don’t care so much when they’re gunned down by madmen at campus events.

But shouldn’t there at least be some standard by which we assess what views are in bounds and which are assassination-worthy? This is what I’m struggling with. If Charlie Kirk was so extreme that his violent death is a reap-what-you-sow situation, then I’m no longer clear on how open our Overton Window really is.

Most of his views were just: What Republicans Think. Some leaned pretty hard in the Christian Right direction, and I get that the Christian Right isn’t the presence it used to be. But did people think those folks just went away?

Again: age. If you are my age or older, you have surely encountered the Christian Right before. How is it a surprise to you that they aren’t all wild about gay marriage?

The sense I’m getting - and much more importantly, the sense most of the right is getting - is that really, you just think that anyone with conservative views can be killed, and that’s okay. The right thinks you’re all eliminationists because, and I can’t stress this enough, you are directly telling them that you are eliminationists.

Fair enough, if somebody’s political project were, “I WILL HUNT DOWN AND MASSACRE EVERY SINGLE [member of whatever group] AND THERE WILL BE NO STOPPING ME,” then yeah, I could kinda see feeling safer with that person out of the picture.

But that just wasn’t Charlie Kirk. And way too many of you are way too certain that it was.

My theory for your behavior is that your social media habits have allowed you to cocoon yourself in a simulacrum of 2020 Twitter, where the thing to do when you encountered a bluntly stated conservative viewpoint was, you shut it down. But then when rubber met road, and you were confronted with the cold reality of a world moved on, you carried those same impulses into it, just without the Terms of Service in your favor.

Those bad, mean views can’t be shut down digitally anymore, so when somebody uses a bolt action rifle to achieve the same end, the same part of your lizard brain gets a tickle.

Yes, Charlie Kirk said a bunch of shit that would have gotten him booted from Twitter had he expressed it there (he got some temporary slaps on the wrist, but was never ditched entirely). But guys, 2020 Twitter is not a good barometer for commonplace American thought. In fact, it’s a godawful fucking terrible one.

2020 Twitter was run by crazy people. People who were hellbent on just whack-a-moling ideas they didn’t like so that none of them could ever disseminate. Didn’t mean those ideas weren’t around though, and doesn’t mean they aren’t still now. Which, fine. Like them or don’t. Pay attention to them or don’t. Nobody’s making you follow politics.

But some of you talk like you’re in an existential struggle for the future of humanity. Then I see your posts, and I think, yikes. Humanity is fucked if you’re its army. Some of you don’t know the first thing about your “enemy.” You don’t know what they think, you don’t know how they think. A lot of you don’t even know that they think.

You regard them all as an extrapolation of that one, half-wit Reply Guy you went to middle school with, who lurks in your Facebook comments and posts shit like WHAT ABOUT VINCE FOSTER DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT SUSAN.

Since that’s not really a representative sample of today’s right, maybe it’s time for some broadening of your media horizons? Given how easy it is to fact check this stuff, and how few of you seem to have done it, I’m getting the sense that mostly, you’d just rather not know what Charlie Kirk actually believed. You’d rather not have the He Was An Evil Racist bubble popped for you. Maybe you feel like you went out on a limb, grave dancing over his murder and you don’t want to end up with egg on your face.

Thing is though, the egg is already on your face. You may not know much about what Charlie Kirk did or didn’t say, but his followers do. They know you’re full of shit, and they’re judging you pretty harshly right now. Not just for being ghoulish - though that’s obviously happening also - but for being a bunch of head-up-the-ass clowns who are either too dumb, too lazy, or too cowardly to just put “Charlie Kirk + full quote” into your Google search bar.

So, we’re going to go one-by-one down this list. Both in the interest of evaluating Kirk for extremist tendencies (spoiler: we’re only going to find a few) and to get you up to speed with what the American right really is.

Because that could be important information for you, especially if your victory plan is to kill everyone who holds Kirkian sensibilities. Geez Louize, people. If Charlie Kirk is on the *maybe murdering him is okay* side of the line, you are going to be at your work for a very long time. You’ll want to stock up on PowerBars or something, at the very least.

Disclaimer:

I don’t know why I bother with these anymore and maybe I’ll stop. But this is not a post about how much I, Dave, shared Charlie Kirk’s politics. I mostly didn’t. But my disagreements are irrelevant. Our standard today - which is really your standard - is: should this have gotten Charlie Kirk shot in the neck while his daughter watched? Is it that extreme?

Because that’s what happened. He got murdered. So that really has to be the question we ask for each of these.

Not, “do you agree with it?” (don’t care), not “does Dave agree with it?” (mostly no, but also don’t care), and not “is this on the spicy side?” (irrelevant; Kirk wasn’t ‘called out’ for being spicy, he was shot in the fucking throat).

That’s what you’re all shrugging at. That’s what you’re “just not that sad” about. That’s what you’re but he said this-ing about. Forgetting apparently that the mere mention of say, George Floyd’s criminal record was something most of you regarded as worthy of permanent, professional banishment.

Today’s mission is not shame though. It’s education. Because of a lot of you really, really need it. We’ll deal with your morality and humanity another week, but today is for degumming your brainworks.

And so in we dive.

Table of Contents

Gay people should be stoned to death

Most people are scared when they see a black pilot flying a plane

Taylor Swift should reject feminism and submit to her husband

No one should be allowed to retire

Leftists should not be allowed to move to red states

British Colonialism was what “made the world decent”

The guy who assaulted the Pelosis should be bailed out

Religious freedom should be terminated

Multiple black politicians “stole white people’s spots”

MLK Jr was “an awful person”

The Great Replacement Theory is reality

Hydroxychloroquine cures COVID

Vaccine requirements are “medical apartheid

Gun deaths are acceptable in order to have a 2nd amendment

Women’s natural place is under their husband’s control

Parents should prevent their daughters from taking birth control

George Floyd had it coming, the Jan 6th protestors didn’t

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”

Encouraged parents to protest mask mandates

Mamdani winning in NY is a travesty because Muslims did 9/11

Muslims only come to America to destabilize Western Civilization

Palestine “doesn’t exist” and those who support it are like the KKK

Gay people should be stoned to death

A nice, easy one for us to warm up on. Easy, because Kirk simply never said this. If he had, it would have been pretty bad and mean. But he just didn’t.

What happened was, Kirk was criticizing children’s Youtuber Ms. Rachel, who had dropped a verse from Leviticus - Leviticus - to defend Pride Month. Ms. Rachel had used “Love thy neighbor” to explain gay acceptance to children, and Kirk pointed out that the same book of the Bible sends a bit of a mixed message there with regard to the LBGTQ+ community.

"By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might wanna crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser referenced part of the same chapter of scripture, in Leviticus 18 [sic; actually Leviticus 20:13], it says that 'thou shalt not lay with another man as with a woman; it is an abomination.' And the penalty for that? Thou shalt be stoned to death. Just sayin'. The chapter in Leviticus affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."

To be fair, Kirk isn’t word-perfect on these quotes. Leviticus does indeed suggest deleting gay men, and it talks about stoning as a punishment, but those two things aren’t in the same verse or chapter. Whatever though, the Old Testament is not at issue here.

The charge against Kirk is that he said gay people should be stoned to death, when what he actually said was that people should either justify their actions using the whole Bible or not use the Bible to justify their actions at all.

[UPDATE: Some readers took issue with my having ignored Kirk’s “God’s perfect law” tag in the first draft of this that was published. I ignored it because it struck me as obviously tongue-in-cheek; These are God’s words, Rachel, not mine. Don’t cherry pick them from them if you don’t know them. “God’s perfect law” is not how Leviticus describes itself. In fact, that precise word order doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible (though the Psalms do refer to God’s law as perfect on at least two occasions). So I didn’t read this as a defense of scriptural absolutism or textual fundamentalism. I thought the critique warranted an update though, because if I’m wrong about that, it obviously changes the impact of Kirk’s statement, and flips this from a “he didn’t say it” to a “he said it.” Though I continue to think this one belongs on the “he didn’t say it” side of the line. Kirk spoke to and about gay people often. This murderous sentiment was simply never present when he did. We might have asked him to clarify his position, but that possibility has been robbed from us.]

Those with my same taste in television will recall that there was once a time when a very popular, liberal president made a very similar point, though kind of in the other direction.

Most people are scared when the see a black pilot flying a plane

[UPDATE: This passage was unclearly written initially. Its first published draft left the impression that commercial pilot standards had been compromised by DEI. There’s little evidence of that. The industry does have hard questions to answer about overall safety, especially in terms of air traffic control, but there’s no reason to think the the guy flying your plane isn’t competent to do it.]

Nope. Again, Kirk simply did not say this. I wrote a whole piece about it once. Two actually.

What he did say was that DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiatives, particularly in the airline industry, were producing a second order effect, causing travelers to doubt the competence of black pilots.

If black workers in the airline industry face less rigorous qualification standards - which in some cases, they do - and if you, the traveler, doesn’t know who among those responsible for your flight met the high standards, and who got to stand on a stepstool, it might be reasonable to prefer flying with folks who don’t make you wonder. That was Kirk’s point. Take it or leave it.

The second link above raises some worrying questions about air traffic control. Actual pilots though, appear beholden to the same standards as before this era. Beyond the existence of DEI initiatives advertised at pilot training academies, it remains the case that actual, objective flightworthy standards appear technically uncompromised. Kirk (fuck, I hope) was worried about a non-problem here.

From my first link:

This would be a good time to note something important. Nowhere in the NYT piece is it claimed or ever suggested that any airline is actually lowering safety standards in order to meet racial quotas. Even in this long piece from a few weeks ago by right-wing firebrand, Matt Walsh, there’s a lot of suggestion, a lot of innuendo and implication, and a lot of *raising questions*, but no actual proof that DEI initiatives have negatively affected airline safety.

This doesn’t solve all of our issues though. Here’s how I explained the optical problems:

“Imagine that United Airlines announced that they really wanted to hire more guys named Pete. Not enough Petes in United cockpits. And further imagine that United intended to meet their Pete quota by making it easier for guys named Pete to become pilots. Petes would now require fewer simulator hours, less time in the air, and a wider berth for mistakes than guys named Dan, Bob, or Steve. So then imagine that you knew all this, and you were boarding a United flight, and the pilot was standing there with the flight attendants, ready to greet you, and you caught a glimpse of his name tag, and it read, “Pete.” Now, are you really telling me, given what you know, and in spite of your righteous commitment to Pete advancement, that a small part of you isn’t going to go, “boy, I hope he’s qualified?”

Taylor Swift should reject feminism and submit to her husband

Okay, this one is at least real. And yeah, it was kind of a dick thing to say. But the overall rant Kirk was on isn’t remotely out of step with what the mainstream Christian Right thinks.

His point was that Swift - a feminist and Biden supporter - would probably conservatize if she had kids, as many adults do. He was saying that he hoped this would happen, and that if it did, he would look forward to welcoming her into the non-woke fold.

Then he made the comment about submitting to her husband, and her being “not in charge,” and he made a crack about her taking Travis Kelce’s name upon their wedding.

You certainly don’t have to like this. You’re actually entitled to doubly not like it on the grounds that Swift was on track to be one of the most powerful and successful singletons ever, making it extra douchey to be barking at her to bend the knee. On the other hand, Swifties, particularly single ones, have a weird, parasocial bond with the pop star, such that a lot of them were openly bummed to hear about her wedding. They regarded it as a kind of betrayal to the manless sisterhood. In that sense, I kind of get why Kirk wanted to rub their noses in it.

But the main point is, WE DO NOT KILL PEOPLE FOR SAYING THINGS LIKE THIS, YOU COMPLETE MANIACS.

No one should be allowed to retire

Ben Shapiro just got dragged for this, even though he didn’t say it either. What Kirk, Shapiro, and much of the right believes, is that social security is an expensive and overgenerous program. They think the retirement age should be raised, and they also think that retired people should still stay active and contribute to society, even if that doesn’t take the form of paid employment. He didn’t want to put the elderly to the lash, he just didn’t want their skills and wisdom being taken out of circulation.

Look, I’d rather raise the income cap on payroll taxes than raise the retirement age, but this is about as standard an argument as right and left have with each other. Is the new plan to just kill everyone who takes the wrong side of it? Because if so, I’ll need a new pitchfork.

Leftists should not be allowed to move to red states

Kirk was annoyed at leftists moving from “failed” states like California to better performing states like Texas, bringing what he judged to be their shitty voting preferences with them. He also used provocative language - “colonizers” - to describe this phenomenon. But no, he did not suggest that interstate relocation should be banned for people on the left.

British colonialism is what made the world decent

This one is mostly true. Colonialism as a force for unalloyed evil is a post WWII conceit. Prior to that, nothing about what Kirk said of it would have caused so much as a media blip. And the resurgence of pro-colonial sentiment - which is real - is a direct retort to the decidedly unnuanced view of colonial history presented at western academies.

It’s actually an enormously interesting topic, if you don’t mind a little contrarianism. You’d be fair in calling it “extreme,” I suppose, at least today. But Kirk was actually saying that the British empire was “benign,” and made the world “decent” relative to other, more brutal imperial powers. The remarks were not made in a vacuum.

I don’t know. You can make up your own mind on this one (though not about whether he should have been shot for saying it). There’s a lot of presentism wrapped up in today’s anti-colonial moral panic, but hey, times change.

The guy who assaulted the Pelosis should be bailed out

Yes, but there’s some context missing. The clipped quote makes it sound like Kirk was celebrating Paul Pelosi’s attack with a hammer, and suggesting that somebody bail out the hero who perpetrated it. While Kirk wasn’t exactly not celebrating it, that isn’t quite what was happening, or what he said.

You know how a lot of people on the left right now are clinging to the notion that Kirk’s killer was some right winger who shot Kirk for not being even more right wing than he was? There was a version of that going on after the Pelosi attack. Partisans of all stripes find attacks carried out by their comrades embarrassing. Sometimes, the urge to deflect is strong.

David DePape, who attacked Paul Pelosi, was a super weird dude (they often are). He was a homeless, Canadian hippie, who went from being part of the Green Party to posting QAnon slop and antisemitic nonsense on the internet. Many on the right went into conspiracy mode after the attack, suggesting, for example, that he and Mr. Pelosi might have been lovers, and that the attack could’ve been the result of a tryst gone wrong.

Kirk was having some fun with it (maybe a little too much fun) and said something to the tune of, “somebody should bail this guy out so they can ask him some questions.” It was a joke, which was pretty clear in context. Kirk also condemned the attack unequivocally, and applauded DePape’s harsh prison sentence - though not without taking some swipes at Democrats for being soft on crime.

Religious freedom should be terminated

No. This is a mangling of Kirk’s actual beliefs, which were not that religious freedom should be terminated - he was very much in favor of religious liberty - but that the separation of church and state was based on a misunderstanding of the Establishment Clause. He was a Christian Nationalist, and he didn’t think the state needed to bend over backwards to separate itself from the church, particularly as the nation was founded on obviously Judeo-Christian principles.

Take it or leave it (I’ll leave it, I think) those were his views. And while they aren’t views that you hear commonly in mainstream discourse, they are very popular on the Christian Right. Nobody who follows politics should be unaware of this belief, and nobody should be killing people over it one way or the other.

Multiple black politicians “stole white people’s spots”

I actually appreciate that the wording of the meme here isn’t super misleading. Kirk did indeed say this, and the rant in which he did was widely characterized as his having said that all black women had low processing power. In fact, he was taking aim at four, specific women - Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Joy Reid.

It was a very rude segment. Harsh stuff. But despite the popular interpretation (again, this particular meme excepted) Kirk was not talking about black women in general, but rather these particular women.

I wish he hadn’t done this. One of the biggest problems with affirmative action is that it’s considered both completely necessary for equity and fairness, but also something that we must never, ever talk about with regard to any individual. Rep. Jackson Lee had broken that taboo by discussing the positive impact affirmative action had had on her own life and career. That’s admirable. It would cool temperatures substantially if more were willing to do that. And she ended up in Congress, so clearly, Lee made the most out of the opportunities that were given to her. It was pretty nasty of Kirk to smack her down so hard after opening up about it.

But the thrust of his pitch is a very common one on the right: affirmative action is unfair because it disadvantages men and white people. Which it does, of course. The left has never really had an answer to that charge beyond, “yeah, we know, but we still think it’s for the best.”

MLK Jr was “an awful person”

True. He did say this. Kirk considered King a fraud who didn’t actually live up to the values he espoused in the I Have A Dream speech. He also judged him to be an adulterer based on (disputed) FBI files and blamed him for the excesses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. More on that one later.

I don’t expect many on the left to get behind this view. It certainly isn’t one I share. But failing to worship our heroes is not a capital offense in America.

Great Replacement Theory is reality

I really don’t understand how the left decided that the “great replacement theory” was this racist lie. Particularly since it was the left that spent decades openly salivating at the prospect of using demographic change to “turn Texas blue!”

You can have one, or you can have the other. You can taunt Republicans for years and years about how your openly-stated plan is to import non-white people into their most electoral vote-rich state until they can never win it again, or you can call them racist when they…complain about your openly-stated plan to import non-white people into their most electoral vote-rich state until they can never win it again.

Doing both seems kinda unfair though.

Friends, I used to taunt Republicans about this! That’s how I know it was a thing! Turning Texas blue, particularly through immigration, was not some secret plot. It wasn’t a thing we didn’t talk about out loud. We very much talked about it.

Here’s Nancy Pelosi doing so, to none other than the Texas Tribune:

“Texas is our hope for the future. And I’m not just talking about Democrats. I am talking about the country and the world. When Texas goes blue, that’s going to be very wholesome for our nation. It is a beautifully diverse state in every way.”

And here’s Manny Garcia, who was, at the time, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, following up:

“Texas is the biggest battleground state in the country. We are dramatically changing, we’re changing quite rapidly.”

Fill in the blank:

*If your plan is to use intentional, deliberately-engineered demographic shift to reduce the population share of a group that typically votes for your opponents, it could be said that that population is being _________.

a) massaged

b) fed cocktail shrimp

c) taught to play the trombone

d) REPLACED

*the answer was (d) by the way

It’s pretty simple math. And it doesn’t only apply in Texas.

“Non-Hispanic whites” made up 48% of the population of Los Angeles in 1980. Today, they make up just 29%, despite their total number increasing. That happened because other groups grew their populations at rates that outpaced this group.

We don’t have to be mad about this at all, but we shouldn’t gaslight people by pretending it isn’t happening, or that it isn’t the result of policy choices favored by Democrats, or that it somehow isn’t “replacement.”

How many Democrats have you heard cheer on the idea of white people becoming a minority in the United States? And before you give me the “who me???” act, here are just a few of them:

So talking about this is a racist conspiracy theory but actually doing it isn’t? How does that work?

Granted, Charlie Kirk was against this. He sometimes even spoke harshly about it. He also crossed, more than once, the line that I think actually does veer all of this into “racist conspiracy theory” territory - which is the idea that The Jews are the ones responsible for it.

"Jewish donors have a lot of explaining to do. A lot of decoupling to do, because Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical open-border neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews and now they're coming for Jews, and they're like, 'What on Earth happened?' And it's not just the colleges. It's the nonprofits, it's the movies, it's Hollywood, it's all of it."

I want to be careful here. This is - there’s no other word for it, really - antisemitism. In its most common form. What Kirk is doing here is observing several, clear dots, then connecting them such that they form the picture of a nefarious, Jewish-driven conspiracy to destroy white America.

Dot 1: Jewish people skew wealthy.

Dot 2: Jewish people are politically active.

Dot 3: Jewish people are often successful and influential.

Dot 4: Jewish people are overrepresented in the creative arts.

Dot 5: Jewish people are mostly Democrats.

Dot 6: Democrats favor diversity and are dovish on immigration.

All of these things are true, but all of them are pretty banal. Looked at from the wrong angle though, they add up to what could almost seem like a plot. A scheme.

It’s illusory though. And we will now see why.

This 2019 study found that lesbians (slightly) outearn their straight counterparts. The study has nothing to do with anything. I’m just using it to make the case that we could technically swap out “Jewish people” for “lesbians” in that list, and it would all still be true.

THE LESBIANS, THEY RUN EVERYTHING THESE DAYS! THEY’RE LIKE OUR PUPPETMASTERS!

All kidding aside, Charlie Kirk does not get a pass for this one. He took something true but boring and turned it into something paranoid and inflammatory.

Does it make him a Nazi? Well, no. It doesn’t. And the clues are right there in the quote. Would a Nazi have taken pains to single out only secular Jews? Would a Nazi have cared that the actions he was calling out were harming Jews most of all? The answers are, of course, no.

But while slamming Kirk for promoting the “Great Replacement Theory” is dumb and hypocritical, calling him out for the manner in which he prosecuted his case is totally fair game. For those looking for evidence that Kirk was an extremist, this is the richest vein to mine.

Hydroxychloroquine cures COVID

Yes, he said this. No, it wasn’t true.

I’ve sort of taken a vow never to write about Covid again - my experience with it, and with that whole period, was so cushy, I cannot in good conscience judge others for their reactions then or now. So I’m not going to elaborate.

Except to remind people, again and again and again, that we are not here to decide whether Charlie Kirk exclusively said things that were true or good. We’re here to decide whether the things he said rendered him politically “extreme,” or whether he should have been killed for any of it. HCQ discourse upset a lot of people, but it was extremely common during the pandemic. If we’re making a hit list over it, it’s going to be a pretty fucking long one.

Vaccine requirements are “medical apartheid”

Yes, he said this. His point was that restricting the behavior of the unvaccinated created what was effectively a second class of citizens. I.e. you can attend this concert, but you can’t since you didn’t get the jab. And yeah, it was a pretty incendiary way of putting it. Which is why it’s such a good thing that nobody ever makes comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

Gun deaths are acceptable in order to have a 2nd amendment

Wrote a whole piece on this subject, which you can check out here. The short version: yes, Kirk did say this. It is also the position on guns held by virtually the entire American right. Guys, I’m begging you, go talk to a conservative once in a while.

Women’s natural place is under their husband’s control

I doubt he’d have used the word “control,” and he didn’t ever say these precise words, but this isn’t an unfair characterization of Kirk’s thoughts on gender roles.

Ephesians 5:22–24

"Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."

This is garden variety Christian Right stuff.

Parents should prevent their daughters from taking birth control

He offered this as advice specifically for Christian parents, but I think this is close enough for us to call it accurate. And it wasn’t the spiciest thing he said about birth control. Not by a long shot. He also said that it screws up female brains and makes women angry and bitter.

I reject all of this, and wouldn’t expect anyone saying it to wait for many Christmas cards from feminists. Still, a bullet to the neck feels like an extreme reaction.

George Floyd had it coming, the January 6th protesters didn’t

No, he did not say that George Floyd “had it coming.” He pushed the narrative that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose and thus, that Derek Chauvin should not have been prosecuted for Floyd’s death. He was also unsparing about Floyd’s violent criminal record, but guys, come the fuck on.

I might respect this complaint under normal circumstances, just on the grounds of it not being very nice to speak ill of the dead. But Kirk - who never committed a violent crime in his life - was killed less than a week ago at the time I’m making this first draft, and folks have been all up and down the internet speaking ill of him. So at best, this is a selectively applied standard, and we shouldn’t have to waste time parsing Kirk’s morals over having violated it.

Re January 6th, Kirk was a total clown. He helped organize the Stop The Steal rally - a cynical, bullshit gambit from the jump, and when it turned bad, he retreated to the “they were just tourists who got lost” talking point. Pitiful.

Kirk was not present for the rally, and I don’t believe there’s any indication that he knew what would happen or that he helped facilitate what happened. But nobody is going to tell me that I didn’t see what I saw with my own eyes, or that January 6th was anything but a complete, lawless disgrace. If that had been a bunch of BLMers trying to storm the White House, Charlie Kirk would not have been telling his audience that it was all an overblown misunderstanding.

Still, the embarrassment this caused the right has turned the impulse to downplay into a very mainstream one. Kirk is far from alone in latching onto this narrative, and its existence really shouldn’t still scandalize lefties at this point.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”

This one probably deserves its own post, and may get it. It’s something Kirk spoke about a lot, and I’m glad I did at least a bit of digging into his views, because I was very close to issuing a guess cum paraphrase, and I would have been dead wrong about what he actually thought.

So, Kirk did, several times, say that he thought the Civil Rights Act was partially a mistake (he was also careful, always, to point out that he thought it was directionally good and mostly not a mistake).

But the standard, conservative beef with the CRA is actually not one espoused by Charlie Kirk. Usually, the gripe is that it prevented businesses from barring access to customers based on their race. This component of the CRA is why we don’t have “whites only” lunch counters anymore. Kirk is actually in favor of this provision, which came as a surprise to me, because most doctrinaire conservatives aren’t. Here he is talking about it with a college student.

The charge is that this provision of the act violates the right to free association: on privately owned property, I should get to invite or disinvite anyone, for any reason, and the government shouldn’t have the power to sanction me for exercising that freedom. That’s the argument.

This was not Kirk’s view. His beef was much more narrow and moderate; he thought it created a cumbersome bureaucracy, and he objects to Title VII, which prohibits employment practices that lead to a “disparate impact.” Meaning, even a neutral hiring policy that sees, for example, no women, or no Asians making the cut could be said to be in violation of the law, even if it was race-blind on the surface.

This is the underpinning for a lot of DEI initiatives, so it should surprise nobody that Kirk opposed this. Shit…I think I might actually oppose this too. Need to think about it some more…

Encouraged parents to protest mask mandates

“He lawfully encouraged democratic behavior, but because he did this on something I disagree with, it was right that he was shot.”

Another win for the “Protecting Democracy” crowd.

Elaborating on this one would also violate my oath never to write about COVID, so I won’t. Except to say that if you think murdering people who questioned mask mandates is the way to go, you need to check yourself. For I’m afraid you may already have wrecked yourself 🙁

Mamdani winning in NY is a travesty because Muslims did 9/11

Yeah, this one’s real, and Kirk was an asshole for saying it. The quote, and this topic carries over into the next supposed Kirkism, was:

It got worse actually after Kirk was rightly called out for his Islamophobia:

Look, the left is way too cavalier about tossing out accusations of bigotry and of this, that, or the other “phobia.” Here though, it’s apt. This is textbook. It’s also literal; Kirk is expressing a fear of Islam. We don’t actually have a better word for that than “Islamophobic.” You’re free to think he’s right, and to also fear Islam in the way he does (more on this in the next section) but it’s totally fair game to take him to task for this one.

Although although although…did he deserve to face death for it? Big, BIG nope.

Cenk Uygur, co-founder of The Young Turks, who has been on-point in the wake of Kirk’s death, had this to say. I agree with every word, would offer no tweaks, and so will just post it as my reply also.

Muslims only come to America to destabilize western civilization

Part II of a II-parter: this isn’t something Kirk actually said, but he did say a lot of things like it, and was overall pretty harsh about Muslim immigration to the West. To the extent that he would have disagreed with this statement, it would maybe just be because the word “only” is doing such heavy lifting in the purported quote.

What Kirk said frequently was that Islamic values are incompatible with the West - a sentiment that isn’t just common, it’s increasingly common. Xenophobia is a fair charge here. And while I’m friends with way too many moderate, normie, even liberal Muslims to take the idea particularly seriously, the left snoozes on this at their grave, electoral peril.

Immigration is one of those issues that changes its parameters as time goes on, and as the demographic makeup of the host country is altered by it. This is true especially when the host country is a democracy in which incoming groups will be allowed to vote their preferences. I’ve lived in some Muslim-majority countries, some with incredibly repressive variants of Islam that dominate public life.

Yemeni women, when I was there, did not show their faces on the street, just as an example. I wonder how many American women would truly feel comfortable in such a society. Not visiting one, living in one. How many would be on board with a law that said they had to cover up? Or that didn’t recognize marital rape as a crime? Or that made it arduous to divorce even a physically abusive husband? How many would want to live in a country in which gay people actually can be stoned to death?

Liberal Westerners might be comfortable sharing a country that’s home to a Muslim minority. But without a mechanism for immigration restriction, there’s nothing to stop a minority from becoming a voting majority. Muslim-Americans were, until recently, reliably on the left. But the median Muslim in a country like Yemen, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, is a very far cry from being dispositionally on the American left.

Meanwhile, the American left has pulled an odd bait-and-switch: judging American Muslims to be “marginalized” then extending that designation to Muslims who live in Muslim countries, thus giving them all a pass, even for very retrograde beliefs.

Guys, Muslims are not “marginalized” in Saudi Arabia. They are not a downtrodden minority there. They are not your teddy bears, and they do not need your rescue. Also, you probably wouldn’t like living in a country where having a beer is a criminal offense, or where women have only been allowed to drive legally since 2018.

This isn’t to say that Muslims would necessarily do all, or even any of these things the moment they hit 51% in a given polity. But the left likes to round up all immigration restrictionism to “racism,” and that is both reductive and outdated. Leftist sensibilities make conversations about restricting immigration next-to impossible. It’s hard to reason with somebody who regards anything short of fully open borders a form of bigotry. But even leftists who hold this view must at least recognize that the counterarguments have underpinnings different from “we hate those types.”

Charlie Kirk was vastly more extreme on this issue that I am. But observers should expect his position to become more and more popular as western nations, especially those in Europe, continue to look more and more different as a result of mass immigration. A right-wing rally in London, led by activist Tommy Robinosn, just drew a crowd that the BBC estimates at 150,000-strong. Vibes are changing on this, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if today’s moderate position becomes tomorrow’s far left position.

But anyway, we don’t kill each other over these disagreements, we shouldn’t start, and that includes Charlie Kirk.

Palestine “doesn’t exist” and those who support it are like the KKK

UPDATE: I was very wrong about this. Charlie Kirk absolutely did say that Palestine wasn’t a place that really existed. You can watch him do it here.

I’m going to leave up my false commentary as an illustration of how easy and regular it is to fuck this up, even when you think you’ve put in the work.

I put this one through Google and four, separate Ai’s and nowhere could I find evidence of Kirk saying anything like this. That doesn’t mean we can’t still parse it in a manner consistent with the rest of this project, but unless somebody can present evidence of this claim’s truth, I think we must regard it as a lie.

Look, I am very sympathetic to the Palestinians. I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I am not remotely on the fence about this issue. What Hamas did to Israel on October 7th certainly warranted a forceful response. It did not warrant the response it received, and is still receiving, and that is a standard to which I would hold any civilized nation, my own very much included.

Still, I’m not shocked by the sentiments being expressed here - even if, again, Charlie Kirk never expressed them. Palestine “not existing” is, by the reckoning of many Americans, a simply true statement. The United States doesn’t recognize a Palestinian state or any territory called Palestine. I do, but my country doesn’t. There’s actually a pretty big debate over this right now! So it’s a little odd if people aren’t aware of that, or of the existence of people who do not regard “Palestine” as an autonomous territory worth naming in its own right.

The only famous person I know of who compared the pro-Palestine movement to the KKK was comedian Jerry Seinfeld, a chronically unfunny douchebag and known fucker of teenagers. Obviously, I don’t think Charlie Kirk should have been killed because Jerry Seinfeld is a moron, but I also don’t think that Jerry Seinfeld should be killed because Jerry Seinfeld is a moron. Here again, a final time, this does not pass the Should He Have Been Killed For Saying It? test. Seinfeld’s point was about how the pro-Palestine movement hates Jews or something, which is just garden variety idiocy, and not something for which we kill people. Any people.

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap!

I mean actually, no. It’s far from a wrap. Kirk was a professional communicator - one who got famous for saying things that others didn’t or wouldn’t. Of course he said controversial things. Of course a lot of people hated those things.

I didn’t much care for it, for example, that Kirk referred to gay relationships as “lifestyle choices.” I especially fucking didn’t like it when he said, “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

But there’s one anti-Kirk talking point I want to dissect before we close: the idea that Kirk’s habit of turning up on campuses to debate students was somehow not a real honoring of the principle of free exchange. This is absolute hogwash. Just pure balderdash. Patent poppycock.

Kirk’s detractors are framing this as, “he went around beating up on students.” Which is sort of true. But this is an extremely useful, educational service, particularly in climates as ideologically stifling as American university campuses.

College students deserve to have their ideas tested against somebody who tests them professionally. It’s not just important, it’s vital. And however much you disagreed with Kirk, you should think it’s vital too.

I don’t think it’s fair to call Kirk a hateful, divisive extremist. I think that view is based on what has become one of the most profound cases of collective, leftist Memebrain I have ever observed. But it’s fair for us to disagree about that. Vanilla for me might be dark chocolate for you, and vice versa.

Still, we just have to get together on: we do not kill people for expressing their ideas. That’s it, guys. That’s the whole ballgame. Without that, we are nothing, and we are nobody.