The murder of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 is the latest incident in a cycle of mounting political violence. Victims of these attacks span the political spectrum. Prior to Kirk’s killing, the most recent incident had been the shootings of two Minnesota state legislators, both Democrats, and their spouses. Former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed.
Political violence is morally repugnant and poisonous to a democratic society. Those who romanticize or otherwise celebrate such attacks when the victim is on the other “team” forget that an escalating cycle of violence spares no one. It also creates a climate of fear that silences political expression and encourages authoritarianism—as we are seeing with Trump’s response to Kirk’s death. Moreover, there are the other victims of political violence, including bystanders who become collateral damage as well as the victim’s spouse, partner, children or other loved ones—Kirk left behind a wife and two small children. The killing of Kirk is inexcusable. No one should be killed for expressing political beliefs. Period.
However, many people, especially on the right, do not distinguish between the rightful condemnation of Kirk’s murder and the celebration of him as a public figure. The House and Senate each passed Republican-sponsored resolutions—with Democratic votes—not only condemning the killing but going a lot further, eulogizing Kirk and declaring October 14 a national day of remembrance in his honor. One House resolution called Kirk a man of “compassion,” who engaged in “respectful, civil discourse” and “personified the values of the First Amendment.” According to the resolution, Kirk exercised “his God-given right to speak freely, challenge prevailing narratives, and did so with honor, courage, and respect for his fellow Americans.” It says his “commitment to civil discussion and debate stood as a model for young Americans across the political spectrum, and [that] he worked tirelessly to promote unity without compromising on conviction.”
But Kirk was not a true champion of free speech, civility or respectful discourse. He was not a unifier. He was not a model for Americans. Kirk promoted hate, division, untruth and the silencing of those he considered unworthy of full respect as fellow citizens. The accolades bestowed on Kirk – including the feckless praise delivered by the likes of Gavin Newsom and Ezra Klein – are, at the risk of severe understatement, totally undeserved.
Throughout Kirk’s career, his controversial comments and views were widely reported on, receiving the sort of sensationalist attention that provocateurs crave. Though his quotes were at times taken out of context, his discourse was nevertheless extremist, ugly, hateful and incendiary. He said that prominent Black women like Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson were unqualified affirmative action hires. He accused the left and Democrats of hating America. He openly embraced the racist Great Replacement Theory and said the left wanted to “eliminate” White people, especially rural Whites, in part by promoting immigration from non-White countries. He accused Black people of prowling cities to target White people for “fun.” He promoted the viral falsehood that Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating people’s pets. He said that Jews were pushing anti-White hatred. He equated New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, with the 9/11 terrorists, and declared Islam incompatible with Western civilization. He said doctors performing gender-affirming care should be subject to Nuremberg-style trials and ominously said that trans people should be treated like they were back in the 1950s and 60s. He described as “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters,” the Biblical passage saying that men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death. He called on women, most recently Taylor Swift, to submit to the authority of their husbands. Kirk claimed that one’s capacity for independence and to exercise liberty is proportionate to their testosterone level.
There were also outrageous political views, including Kirk’s oft-cited and, in hindsight, doubly disturbing—even tragic—comment that some gun deaths were a rational trade-off for having the Second Amendment. Kirk was a climate change denier who spread blatant falsehoods about climate change and the scientific consensus around it. He actively promoted the lie that Trump had actually won the 2020 election, supported the “Stop the Steal” protests and tried to characterize the January 6 insurrectionists as peaceful. He anticipated and arguably helped inspire Trump’s politics of retribution, calling back in 2023 for mass investigations of Democrats: “Send out subpoenas, demand records, fish constantly for anything remotely questionable.” Kirk spread medical misinformation about COVID-19. He called the 1964 Civil Rights Act a mistake and lied about how affirmative action works. A former libertarian, he came to openly embrace Christian nationalism.
Partly because Kirk and other right-wing provocateurs have defied established norms of “political correctness,” they have been lionized as champions of free speech. Kirk was certainly unafraid to speak his mind. He and his group, Turning Point USA, also made a practice of showing up at college campuses to debate students and professors; he was assassinated at one of these events. Such campus visits showed some admirable chutzpah and could have been an occasion for vibrant, instructive political discourse. However, these debates were often theatrical, rhetorical confrontations—many people, whatever their politics, seemed to find them entertaining—often leaving students shocked. These contests were skewed by Kirk pushing falsehoods about climate change, COVID-19, affirmative action and other topics.
But what is more disturbing is that far from promoting free speech, Kirk tried to silence others. His comments, mentioned above, about people of color, Jews, Muslims, women, queer and trans people, Democrats, leftists and others were not at all in the spirit of open discourse. These comments served to dehumanize members of these groups, portray them as dangerous “others,” and by doing so, delegitimize their voices and place in public life and demonize them, making them targets of hatred, discrimination and violence.
Kirk was also notorious for starting Professor Watchlist, a website dedicated to public shaming of academics engaged in “radical behavior,” which often means the expression of views that go against conservative orthodoxies. Most of those targeted — which included large numbers of women and people of color — have articulated views associated with the left-leaning, but the list also includes former U.S. Representative-turned-Professor Liz Cheney, a conservative Republican who dared to defy Trump. Academics have been put on the list for highlighting fossil fuels as a main cause of climate change or writing about redlining as a key factor in racial economic disparities. Professors put on this list, some of whom I know personally, were variously subjected to doxxing, death threats, rape threats, demands that they be fired and other forms of harassment. This was cancel culture on steroids. The New York Times columnist Jamelle Buoie, who also raises a number of the points I make here, says, “The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.” When COVID-19 hit, and classrooms moved to Zoom, Kirk called on his young followers to record their instructors’ classes so that those who are ideologically suspect might be publicly exposed and attacked.
The standard liberal response to extremists is to counter vile speech with “more speech” by engaging Kirk and other provocateurs in debate. Unfortunately, this approach only helped to move hateful or crackpot ideas from the fringe into the realm of supposedly legitimate discourse. Such engagement also meant that the dignity, humanity and rights of the various groups that Kirk and others targeted, plus their recognition as fellow Americans, were now once again up for debate after centuries of struggle for equality and inclusion.
I approach speech from another political tradition, civic republicanism. Civic republicanism values vibrant, vigorous political debate and deliberation, even if that debate becomes strident and confrontational. However, republicanism also emphasizes that we should pay attention not only to the intensity of public discourse and the diversity of viewpoints, but also the quality of discourse.
Political discourse must reflect certain civic virtues, including a fundamental respect for other partners in the deliberative process, even one’s political antagonists, as equal citizens and fellow members of a shared political enterprise. Political discourse should also not encourage the marginalization of others or promote hierarchies, where one party has the arbitrary power to interfere with others.
Civic republicanism advances what political theorist Philip Pettit calls the “eyeball test,” namely that one should be able to “look others in the eye without reason for the fear or deference that a power of interference might inspire; they can walk tall and assume the public status, objective and subjective, of being equal in this regard with the best.” Speech that questions the civic competency, humanity, culture or character of whole groups of people undermines their ability to fearlessly look others in the eye and rationalizes their domination. As Frederick Douglass observed about racism in nineteenth-century America, one can be nominally or legally free and equal, but the predominance of bigoted, exclusionary attitudes can in practice render one entirely subordinate, even a slave of the community.
These considerations make all the more disturbing the praise of Kirk as a champion of free speech or the blithe dismissal of his comments as mere posturing. Such views suggest that a vibrant political and cultural life can be sustained even at the cost of women, people of color, immigrants from the ‘wrong’ countries, queer and trans people, Jews, and Muslims being disparaged as unfit for equal status or defective in character or culture. This starts to look a lot like what philosopher Charles Mills described as the racial contract under which White people – and specifically White men – enjoyed liberal rights while people of color were systematically excluded from the body politic.
Since Kirk’s death, his supporters have widely circulated a quote to argue for his decency. Kirk said, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.” In reality, though, Kirk’s own words dehumanized people and, I would argue, helped push us toward what some now describe as a cold civil war.
Charlie Kirk, like the Hortmans, like the ten Black people murdered by a White supremacist gunman at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, and like other recent victims of political violence, none of whom have their own national day of remembrance, should be alive today. And, as despicable as Kirk’s comments and views were, a civic republican perspective condemns his speech as toxic to a healthy republic but would not call for censoring him.
However, Kirk and others like him should also not be engaged as legitimate interlocutors. Appropriate responses to Kirk are condemnation, protest, ridicule, boycotting and, in certain cases, deplatforming. At the same time, we cannot deny the contemporary appeal of Kirk and other far-right provocateurs, including President Trump. This doesn’t at mean legitimizing their views, but it means understanding why those dangerous views are finding so much traction in our deeply troubled world, not only in the U.S. but overseas as well. But that’s a whole other topic.
