Charlie Kirk’s memorial service was this past weekend, and it is estimated that about 100,000 people attended. Clearly many people believed in the power of his words. Some have called him a martyr – likely many of the people in that crowd believed that. But that evaluation depends entirely on how you judge those words. Was he speaking truth to power? Or was he speaking to reinforce power that already existed? And was he killed on behalf of those who opposed his ideas? Or was he killed by a rogue actor who operated outside the bounds of regular discourse?

I want to state unequivocally: Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die, regardless of how you judge his words. Speech is not an excuse for murder, no matter how reprehensible. He should still be here, sharing his ideas, whether you think they are sanctified or fiendish. 

So what did he represent? Of course, it is difficult to summarize the complexity of one human being in a series of statements. Any attempt I or anyone else could make would necessarily be incomplete. And yet there is a certain theme to the ideas Kirk expressed in his public life. 

• 2023-05-19 — “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.”
• 1/29/24 – “NY city councilman Yusuf Salaam, who once took part in the gruesome gang rape of a jogger in Central Park…” 
• 3/1/24 – “The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day on our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”
• 6/24/25 – “If you are trying to continually have Muhammadism take over the West, wouldn’t they love to have both London and New York… now under Muhammadan rule?” 

For me, these ideas are reprehensible. They contain blatant bias. They contain intentional misrepresentations of facts. They contain conspiracy theories running throughout. Charlie Kirk expressed horrible ideas. He did it repeatedly, and he did it frequently. 

I don’t make any claims about Kirk being a horrible person, however. I don’t think that is a useful claim to make, even a possible one, a meaningful one, or a justifiable one. I believe all people are complex and good and evil. This is not about what we are. It is about what we choose to do. Unfortunately, Charlie Kirk chose to spend much of his life spreading hateful ideas. And a person who had consumed hateful ideas made the evil decision to take Kirk’s life. 

There is no “eye for an eye”. There is no moral justification for murder. And I also believe that there is no justification for the way that Charlie Kirk demonized many of the groups that make up this nation. His ideas served to explicitly elevate some groups over others – white people over people of color, men over women, straight people of LGBTQ, Christian over Muslim and Jewish, native-born over immigrants. But his ideas also served to implicitly protect the power of those who ultimately control our society and our country: wealthy elites. In the end, he served the interests of those elites by trying to direct the anger of working people with little power away from the elites and toward those with even less. And that anger in turn rebounded onto one of those who sought to generate it. 

The best lesson we could take from his life and death is to direct our anger toward its rightful destination, and to use that anger to fuel a peaceful revolution against those same wealthy elites who have only their own interests at heart.

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