Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t Either.
Credit: Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press
by Jamelle Bouie
September 13, 2025
New York Times
Virtually every person of note in American politics has, rightfully, condemned the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk and expressed their deep concerns about the growing incidence of political violence in the United States. Wherever we stand politically, we all agree that he should still be alive.
There has been less agreement about Kirk’s life and work. Death tends to soften our tendency to judge. And sudden, violent death — especially one as gruesome and shocking as this one — can push us toward hagiography, especially in the immediate wake of the killing.
So it goes for Kirk.
“Charlie inspired millions,” President Trump said in an Oval Office speech on Wednesday. “He championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor and grace.”
“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California declared, “is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”
Kirk’s approach, wrote the editors of Politico’s Playbook, “was to persuade, to use charm and charisma and provocation and the power of argument to convince people of the righteousness of his cause.”
There is no doubt that Kirk was influential, no doubt that he had millions of devoted fans. But it is difficult to square this idealized portrait of Kirk as model citizen with the man as he was.
Kirk’s eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
The list, which still exists, is a catalog of speech acts in and outside the classroom. The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right. And the obvious intent of the list is made clear at the end of each entry, where Kirk and his allies urge readers to contact the schools and institutions in question. Targets of the watchlist attest to harassment and threats of violence.
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.
To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents.
“‘Investigate first, define the crimes later’ should be the order of the day,” Kirk declared in an editorial demanding the legal intimidation of anyone associated with the political left. “And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy.”
Speaking last year in support of Trump’s plan for mass deportation, Kirk warned that the incoming president would not tolerate dissent or resistance. “Playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you,” he said.
It is also important to mention that Kirk was a powerful voice in support of Trump’s effort to “stop the steal” after the 2020 presidential election. His organization, Turning Point USA, went as far as to bus participants to Washington for the rally that devolved into the Jan. 6 riot attack on the Capitol.
And then there is Kirk’s vision for America, which wasn’t one of peace and pluralism but white nationalism and the denigration of Americans deemed unworthy of and unfit for equal citizenship.
On his podcast, Kirk called on authorities to create a “citizen force” on the border to protect “white demographics” from “the invasion of the country.” He embraced the rhetoric of white pride and warned of “a great replacement” of rural white Americans.
“The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” he said last year. “You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.”
Kirk also targeted Black Americans for contempt. “Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people — that’s a fact,” he said in 2023. Kirk was preoccupied with the idea of “Black crime,” and on the last episode of his show before he was killed, he devoted a segment to “the ever-increasing amount of Black crime,” telling his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.”
Kirk told his listeners that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Supreme Court “is what your country looks like on critical race theory,” that former Vice President Kamala Harris was “the jive speaking spokesperson of equity,” and that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “was awful.”
“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said at a 2023 event. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
This is just a snippet of Kirk’s rhetoric and his advocacy. He also believed that there was no place for transgender people in American society — “We must ban trans-affirming care — the entire country,” he said in 2024 — and has denounced L.G.B.T. identities as a “social contagion.”
It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.
But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.
We can mourn Kirk. We can send prayers to his friends and family. We can take stock of the gravity of this event. We can — and should — do all of this and more without pretending he was something, as a public figure, that he was not.
What I Wrote:
I wrote a response, of sorts, to Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, whose recent speech at a conference for “national conservatives” was a direct rebuke of the creedal nationalism of the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg.
Schmitt, like Vance before him, presents this vision of the United States as a novel rebuke to liberal ideology. But truth be told, theirs is the stale orthodoxy of those blinkered devotees of human aristocracy, who reject the faith of the founders — and the work of those who made it real — to worship at the altar of hierarchy and repression.
I also joined my colleagues Michelle Cottle and David French on an episode of The Opinions, where we discussed Kirk, his influence and the potential impact of his death.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion/trump-visual-symbols-authoritarian.html
Opinion
The Unreal Spectacle of Trump’s Authoritarianism
Credit: Ioulex for The New York Times
by Jamelle Bouie
August 30, 2025
New York Times
[You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Historical context for present-day events. Get it in your inbox.]
I saw a picture this week. It’s of a scene in Washington, D.C., taken a few days ago.
In the background, you see the Department of Labor building. Hanging on its right side is a large American flag; hanging to its left is a huge banner of President Trump with the phrase “American Workers FIRST.” It is the president’s official portrait, supposedly inspired by his mug shot. He’s glowering, less a servant of the public than a stern, unforgiving father. He seems to demand respect and obedience without promising anything in return.
In the foreground of the photo are soldiers, their backs turned away from the camera, walking toward the Labor Department building. Because of how it was taken, most likely with a telephoto lens, the main elements of the photo are compressed together; there is at least a city block’s worth of space between the soldiers and the building, but they appear next to each other, Trump staring down at the men just below him.
The photo is clearly meant to evoke the imagery we associate with authoritarianism, or to be a little more precise, show the ways the administration has chosen to associate itself with that visual language. The White House wants you to see its kitschy displays of the president and its militarization of the nation’s capital and conclude that the game is over and that they have already won.
Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
But as much as the situation might feel that way, it isn’t true. The president and his allies have made real strides toward authoritarian power in some areas — using broad executive discretion over immigration enforcement to turn ICE into a personal goon squad, for example — and suffered real setbacks in others. The president must also contend with his steady unpopularity and the real possibility that no amount of cultivated chaos from the White House will prevent a wipeout at the ballot box next year.
The administration-produced imagery in Washington is, then, a projection of sorts — a representation of what the president wants reality to be, drawn from its idea of what authoritarianism looks like. The banners and the troops — not to mention the strangely sycophantic cabinet meetings and news conferences — are a secondhand reproduction of the strongman aesthetic of other strongman states. It is as if the administration is building a simulacrum of authoritarianism, albeit one meant to bring the real thing into being. No, the United States is not a totalitarian state led by a sovereign Donald Trump — a continental Trump Organization backed by the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — but his favored imagery reflects his desire to live in this fantasy.
“The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality, while lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it,” the French social theorist Guy Debord wrote in his 1967 treatise “The Society of the Spectacle,” a work that feels especially relevant in an age in which mass politics is as much a contest to construct meaning as it is to decide the distribution of material goods.
If you follow the president on Truth Social or spend any amount of time on Elon Musk’s X, you’ll see endless amounts of far-right A.I. slop — computer-generated creations pulled together from the nearly infinite detritus of the internet and meant to give form to the bugbears, obsessions, wishes and desires of the reactionary imagination.
I think the military occupation of Washington, along with much of the Trump administration’s imagery about itself, serves the same semiotic purpose as that slop. It represents the world as Trump wants it to be. You could say it is a reality, but it is not yet our reality. We still have the capacity — and more important, we still have the time — to turn ourselves away from this particular vision of the real.
What I Wrote:
For the last month, I have been struck by the way Trump claims ownership over the nation’s public spaces. I wrote about it this week, with some closing thoughts on what it looks like to push back against the president’s autocratic aspirations:
This is wrongheaded. Trump’s pretense to ownership of public goods and public spaces isn’t some quirk to be ignored or waited out — “There goes our Donald!” — but a direct expression of his autocratic ambitions and despotic cast of mind. We can almost see him as he sees himself, not as president of a republic — and subject to external constraints — but as an American Bonaparte (albeit more Louis Napoleon than the original) sitting astride the nation itself. Less a caretaker bound to the rhythms of constitutional time than a sovereign ruler of limitless authority.
Now Reading:
Ed Pilkington on Chief Justice John Roberts, for The Guardian.
Steve Randy Waldman on polling and democracy, for his blog Interfluidity. I liked this passage in particular:
If the true public will existed as a thing that could just be measured and correctly known, we’d have no need for democracy, at least not for anything like electoral democracy. “Consultative democracy,” in which experts simply measure the true will of the public and acted correctly on its behalf, would be the obviously superior system. But the true public will does not exist. We have to construct, to constitute, one of many possible versions of it ourselves. How we constitute it will determine who we collectively are, how we will collectively understand ourselves going forward, how we act, whether we will live well or poorly or outright destroy ourselves.
Jennifer Zacharia on Israel’s war on journalists, for Boston Review.
Melinda Cooper on Trump’s “antisocial state,” for Dissent magazine.
I also found myself reading Cicero’s “On Friendship” this week. I was struck by this observation about the kind of person who cannot build meaningful relationships with others:
For who, in heaven’s name, would choose a life of the greatest wealth and abundance on condition of neither loving or being beloved by any creature? That is the sort of life tyrants endure. They, of course, can count on no fidelity, no affection, no security for the good will of any one. For them all is suspicion and anxiety; for them there is no possibility of friendship.
