It’s OK To Hold Two Ideas About Charlie Kirk in Your Mind at the Same Time

You don't have to choose between sympathizing with Kirk and his family and criticizing his ideas.

Over the past week, the left-of-center social media space has been lit up with arguments about how progressives should respond to the slaying of conservative activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk. What’s unanimous among institutional progressives and elected Democrats is, thankfully, that the killing was wrong and that political violence is unacceptable.

But the agreement seemed to stop there. A debate erupted after a series of pieces from left-of-center writers — Ezra Klein at The New York Times, my friend Rachel Cohen at Vox, Ben Burgis and Meagan Day at Jacobin — where they offered their condolences to Kirk and at times praised aspects of his life’s project.

For Klein, Kirk was practicing “politics the right way,” engaging his opponents in civil debate; his murder at the hands of an assassin represented the horrifying alternative to a culture that values discussion rather than coercion as a way to settle political manners.

Cohen wrote a contemplative piece about the “sitting shiva” after Kirk’s death, referring to the Jewish practice of mourning. Her piece served as a sort of rumination on how we can mourn someone whose life we had mixed feelings about — which is going to especially be the case with a controversial political figure.

The Jacobin article was the most critical of the three, acknowledging that one of the authors had debated Kirk in the past and appreciating his civility while still listing off some of the more controversial things he was known to have said.

This trio of articles provoked quite a bit of debate left-of-center, where most of the audience was hostile to Kirk’s worldview. If you read the reader comments on Klein’s article in particular, you’ll find that it seems like virtually everybody hated it.

In the past week, I had a heated argument with a leftist podcaster I know about the pieces above. The podcaster was furious that these, at one point referring to them as “white liberals” who maybe wouldn’t be so laudatory had Kirk taken aim at Jews as much as he had offended other minorities.

One eloquent critic of Klein’s approach was the writer Ta Nahesi Coates, who likened the pundits like Klein who commended Kirk as constructing their own version of the Lost Cause, the post-Civil War mythology that turned Jefferson Davis and the Confederates into heroes in the eyes of many Americans.

Coates’s most effective blow came when he noted that in Klein’s lengthy column he never once quoted “a single word…from Kirk himself.”

But what Klein was praising was largely Kirk’s way of doing politics, not what he was doing politics for — his actual political objectives. As I explained to my podcaster friend, finding something good in someone who you generally disagree with is a principle drawn from ancient philosophical traditions, including the Abrahamic faiths. It’s also a core tenet of Christianity.

Recall that after segregationist politician George Wallace was shot during his 1972 presidential campaign, none other than Shirley Chisolm — the first black woman ever elected to Congress — appeared at his bedside and commiserated with him.

The History Channel explains what happened during that visit:

Chisholm’s unexpected visit to Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring lasted roughly fifteen minutes. The congresswoman recounted that she told Wallace “I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” and that the governor “cried and cried” in response. She added that, despite their profound disagreements on fundamental issues like racial equality, she agreed with Wallace’s criticisms of “the domination of corporate institutions…and unresponsiveness of the Government to the people.” Wallace won two primary races after the shooting, but it effectively ended his campaign.

I view Klein, Cohen, and Burgis/Day’s articles as sitting firmly in this tradition. Their message was simple: as much as we abhorred this man’s words, he was still human. And everybody likes someone who they agree with. The challenge for us is still trying to find the good in someone who we disagreed with on just about everything under the sun. And that’s a challenge well worth taking on after the poor man was gunned down in front of his children.

That’s an idea that progressives should be able to hold in their head, right alongside all of their criticisms of Kirk. They should also consider that Kirk was a social conservative giving voice to zoomer social conservatives in some of the most culturally liberal places in America. For many young Republicans, he was a lifeguard in places they felt were fundamentally hostile to them.

Liberals laughed at the memes with Malcolm X/Charlie Kirk comparisons, but in some ways he kind of was the conservative version of the NOI. Despite holding lots of retrograde views, he also gave hope to people who were ensconced in communities they felt like outliers in.

But if Republicans — who’ve been engaged in a sort of secular canonization of Kirk in the past week — want to understand the country they live in, they have to understand why Kirk’s words rubbed so many Americans the wrong way.

Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash

Kirk was a controversial political figure for good reason. Unless your social or political cause is just marching around and saying that we should save puppies, you’re going to be doing something that somebody doesn’t like. Politics in a polarized country is inherently fractious, and Kirk was one of the more contentious political figures out there.

He was contentious because his words were often spoken with little concern for the offense they caused or the dehumanization they represented. In the era of Trump, who is quick to judge others but slow to ever reflect on any of his conduct whatsoever, Kirk represented a style of caustic dialogue that has swiftly taken over the Republican Party.

Take, for instance, the election season hysteria about Haitian immigrants who had settled in Ohio and other parts of the country, like Huntsville, Alabama. In a conversation with co-host Blake Neff (who, by the way, was a long time Internet friend of mine from back when we were all teens) at the time, Kirk posited that the whole thing was part of a nefarious conspiracy to overwhelm American communities with foreigners:

The Harris-Biden regime, they are stuffing foreigners in the reddest communities across the country, in small town red America, I think partially as revenge. Blake might not agree with this, but I think that they get, like, off on this sinister, like, we're gonna go send the Haitians into red America.

Those foreigners aren’t just there to work, despite what the liberal media would have you believe. Instead, Kirk, posited, “the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night — it's only gonna get worse if — unless Donald Trump wins.”

That was one of Kirk’s more nuanced takes on immigration. The week of his assassination he warned that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” part of a larger turn to the hard right he had made in the last years of his life. When he referred to the likely future mayor of New York City, he sounded like some kind of 18th century unreconstructed bigot, referring to him scornfully as a “Mohammedan,” rather than a Muslim.

(His argument here was that Mamdani’s religion meant he has been given “a free pass,” which has to be news to the Super PAC consultants who made millions of all the attack ads and mailers.)

He wanted a ban on all “third world immigration, legal or illegal”; what he thought America needed was a “net-zero immigration moratorium with a ban on all third worlders.”

This comment shocked even some of his fans, with one top commenter on a Facebook post featuring these comments writing, “I Love Charlie Kirk. But you should definitely re write that statement. Legal immigration is accepted and should always be accepted. Anything beyond that sounds radical.”

But Kirk was undeterred. As President Trump has been involved in deep negotiations with India over trade matters, Kirk was adamant: “America does not need more visas for people from India.”

(For what it’s worth, about 1 in 7 doctors in America are of Indian origin and we still have a massive physician shortage in this country — I assume Kirk was not pursuing his M.D. on the side so I’m not sure what his solution here would have been.)

If you’re deep in the lore of the hard right Internet, you’ll know that Kirk spent much of his time covering his right flank. A group of openly racist social media users called the groypers and their de facto leader Nick Fuentes frequently criticized Kirk, seeking to take control of the young online right.

It’s possible that Kirk’s increasing embrace of outright immigration bans for most of the world and his disparaging comments towards faith and ethnic groups were a kind of jockeying of his own. Much as politicians move left or right to box out their opponents, Kirk would also have to pivot to fend off the groypers.

That might also explain his comments on the wars in the Middle East. Although Kirk was known to staunchly defend Israeli foreign policy, friends of his had reported that in the final months of his life he had grown more and more uneasy with the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. Here, too, politics was going on in the background. Turning Point, Kirk’s student activist behemoth, relied on conservative donors who pretty much universally were sympathetic to Netanyahu. Meanwhile, America’s youth, including many on the right, are increasingly horrified by the war in Gaza and annoyed at Netanyahu’s arrogance towards Trump. Would Kirk have ultimately broken with these donors outright and sided with the students he interacted with on a nonstop basis? It’s possible, but the assassin’s bullet meant we would never see where this journey might have led Kirk.

Photo by Dimmis Vart on Unsplash

What once could have been a moment of unity following Kirk’s death quickly gave way to polarization, like seemingly everything in our politics does. Bitter comments from people offended by Kirk’s life’s work collided with anti-free speech attitudes and actions by the Trump administration and its constituents, dashing any hopes of national reconciliation following the death of the late activist.

But there is no reason why we as Americans have to be caught up in the same polarization following Kirk’s passing — or the passing of any deeply controversial political figure.

In a follow up piece, Klein told his readers that he ended up grieving for Kirk “because I recognize some commonality with him. He was murdered for participating in our politics. Somewhere beyond how much divided us, there was something that bonded us, too. Some effort to change this country in ways that we think are good.”

I think in my many years of reading Klein, this is probably the most challenging idea he has ever presented to his readers.

There are people out there who think completely different from you.

They advocate for things you find disturbing and unacceptable.

Yet they still think they are doing the right thing, just as much as you think you’re doing the right thing.

That doesn’t mean that they’re right. But in their minds, they may be no more evil than you think you are.

Maturity may mean being able to hold both of those truths in your head at the same time.