We shouldn't pretend Charlie Kirk was a good person just because he's dead now

Conservatives are trying to make Kirk out to be a right-wing Martin Luther King Jr. Don't let them.

Charlie Kirk appears in one of his very last shows before his Sept. 10 shooting death at Utah Valley University.

Within hours of the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, virtually every Democratic elected official and media figure denounced this act of political violence. And they were right to.

Political violence only begets more political violence. It’s the responsibility of every leader in this country to turn down the temperature when tragedies like this occur. This is something that President Donald Trump notably did not himself do when a gunman killed Minnesota State Senate Leader Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home in June.

Instead, the president told reporters he wouldn’t call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in the aftermath of that shooting, referring to the Democrat and former running mate to Kamala Harris as “whacked out.”

"I could call him, say, 'Hi, how are you doing?' The guy doesn’t have a clue, he’s a mess,” Trump said. “So I could be nice and call him but why waste time?”

Democrats, in the wake of the Kirk shooting, universally took the high road.

“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile and reprehensible,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted. “In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.”

Also in a tweet, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “Political violence is NEVER acceptable. My thoughts and prayers are with Charlie Kirk and his family.”

But turning down the temperature doesn’t mean we should lose sight of this basic truth: Charlie Kirk was a repugnant human being who spewed hatred even in his final public words.

In Kirk’s last moment in front of a crowd, a person asked him: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?”

“Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responded immediately before being shot.

The 31-year-old has said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake,” even while admitting his view is “very, very radical.”

He also denounced Martin Luther King Jr. — ironic, as individuals in his circles have begun comparing Kirk to King.

Kirk has said: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

He has argued that “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years.”

He’s said that if his daughter were raped at age 10, he would insist she carry a resulting pregnancy to term. “The baby would be delivered,” he said.

Days before his death, he tweeted that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit throat of America.”

Kirk even said gun violence — the thing that ultimately killed him — is an acceptable trade-off for the Second Amendment.

“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said in 2023. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.”

Kirk paid that price. He, unfortunately, reaped exactly what he sowed.

He was not, as Ezra Klein wrote for The New York Times yesterday, “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” He was not simply “showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.”

He was a purveyor of hate and vitriol. He was a symptom of all of the things that are wrong with American politics in the present moment. No, he should not have been murdered for his beliefs. But I don’t suspect he would have much sympathy for a left-wing influencer of similar prominence meeting a similar fate. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.