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There's a rapidly congealing hagiography surrounding Charlie Kirk in the wake of his shooting. Before his assassination, I was only vaguely aware of him as just another political commentator like Destiny, Bannon, Yiannopoulos, Fuentes, etc. I don't recall anyone trying to lionize him as one of the greats or anything like that. Of course, the political calculus changed the instant the bullet entered his body. Cynically, if Kirk looks better and more virtuous, then the more effectively he can be treated as a martyr, and, if need be, used as a cudgel against the left. And of course, it's best to strike while the iron is hot and the outpouring of support is at its greatest. Right-wing rhetoric once again bears a striking resemblance to the woke left of old, with the main retort being some version of "how DARE you!?!" I've seen plenty of conservatives assert that any criticism of Kirk at this moment is tantamount to saying "He deserved to get shot. Also, I 100% support political violence against people who disagree with me". This is flatly nonsense, as it's obviously valid to decry political violence while simultaneously believing Kirk was just a mundane political operative like any other.
In case you're wondering how far the hagiography is going, I'll provide some examples. Yesterday, Trump called him a "martyr for truth" and promised to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that can be bestowed. Congresswoman Luna compared Kirk to previous political martyrs, tweeting a photo that placed him between MLK and Jesus while circulating a letter calling for a statue of Kirk to be erected in the US Capitol. Congresswoman Mace introduced a resolution for Kirk to lie in honor in the Capital Rotunda, and there's a decent chance he'll get a state funeral or a close equivalent. Others have angrily noted how Kirk's Wikipedia page doesn't have identical wording to MLK's assassination -- "assassination by gunshot" vs "gunshot wound" -- as if Kirk's death "was a hunting accident".(?)
I dug into some of the things Kirk has said, and I've found him to be little more than a cynical apparatchik that rapidly changed his views to align with the dominant Republican zeitgeist on several occasions.
@DaseindustriesLtd puts it like this:
And yeah, after doing a bit of research, that's basically what I've found as well.
One of the most steelmanned takes comes from, of all places, Ezra Klein in the NYT. He writes that Kirk was "practicing politics the right way" by being willing to "talk to the other side". This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.
In terms of the flip-flopping, there are several examples. Michael Tracey goes into some of them.
First, the Epstein stuff:
Second, in foreign affairs:
Beyond these two bits, I've found a few more.
Third, on TikTok:
At first he was in favor of banning TikTok, saying "It's way past time to ban TikTok. It is a cancer on America." But then, after talking with some investors Trump changed his tune saying "I will never ban TikTok if re-elected, and Kirk dutifully followed. Shortly before Trump's inauguration Kirk ran a story saying TikTok was encouraging gen Z to become more conservative, and thus that Trump should "save TikTok".
Fourth, on Ron DeSantis:
DeSantis had a good burst of publicity in 2021 and 2022, and so Kirk started singing his praises as "the future of conservatism". That changed when Trump entered the primary in 2024. Soon it became clear that Trump was the frontrunner, and so Kirk changed his tune and started saying that DeSantis should drop out "for the heroes of our nation."
Fifth, on mail-in ballots:
At first, Kirk parroted the Trump line mail-in ballots were fake and easily manipulated and so everyone should vote in-person. By 2024, Turning Point Action rolled out “Chase the Vote” and a “Commit 100” early-vote/ballot-chasing machine mirroring the Trump/RNC pivot to embrace early and absentee voting (“Bank Your Vote,” later “Swamp the Vote USA”).
Finally, on political violence (and this is especially relevant given the context in which he died):
Kirk mostly gave anodyne anti-violence answers when questioned, but that didn't stop him from amplifying conspiracy theories when the shoe was on the other foot. When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, Kirk smiled, laughed, and suggested a "patriot" go bail out the person who perpetrated it so they could "ask questions". This was almost certainly in reference to the notion that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay prostitute, and that the whole episode was little more than a lover's quarrel.
Changing your mind is not a crime, but I start to wonder about political figures who conveniently do so exactly when public opinion shifts. Kirk was almost slavishly loyal to Trump when Trump was the avatar of the conservative movement, but was more than willing to toot DeSantis' horn when it seemed like he might be the next big thing -- despite that DeSantis was always going to have to compete against Trump in a zero-sum race for the nomination.
There's probably more I've missed, but at this point it feels like beating a dead horse.
Yes, this is it. Personally, I might have the talent for it, or been able to develop the talent, and perhaps once was on that path, but I don't have the guts to put myself out in public and go around debating leftists in person at venues across the country. In terms of virtue points, maybe I get 8 for honesty and he gets 5 points, but he gets 10 for courage, and I get like 2, so he beats me.
Russell conjugation: I'm a team player, you are a PR spokesperson for the movement, he is a cynical apparatchik/propagandist.
He was a charismatic and courageous movement spokesperson. He was not a first-class intellectual; nor was he a paragon of truth-telling virtue/disagreeable autist.
If Kirk basically trusts Trump, there isn't anything necessarily cynical about changing his tune on Epstein when Trump did. I'm basically the same way, and I don't have anything to gain for changing my opinion. I assumed there was a deeper conspiracy behind the Epstein thing, like he was running a blackmail ring. But if the Trump people have looked into and not found anything, then that increases the probability that there wasn't actually a blackmail ring. I don't think Trump is hiding is own deep guilt, because if Trump was guilty of anything more than bad taste with regards to Epstein, I think the Biden administration would have revealed it. What Kirk and Trump are most guilty of is in promoting the idea that there were releasable "files" in the first place, and not just a lot of sealed grand jury testimony and raw interview transcripts full of known-to-be-false statements.
"Going out in public" and debating people is hardly something that takes immense courage. I did policy debate in college -- where's my statue?
Before this, public figures generally didn't worry that much about their personal safety. Random crazies have always been a threat, but they're relatively rare compared to all the public figures going out into public. Maybe that's slowly changing as the US becomes more sectarian?
It can take a lot of courage when there are real stakes. Have you ever made an unpopular argument in front of a committee of your 'peers' with all of them glaring at you, knowing that there's a small but serious chance you're going to get into actual real trouble but nevertheless feeling that something has to be said? It remains perhaps the most frightening thing I've done. It's been ten years but I still remember hiding my hands under the table so nobody could see they were shaking.
Now, perhaps I'm more sensitive about such things than you are, but perhaps also the venue was a bit heavier than yours. It was only university politics but equally to some extent the welfare of two hundred people were involved. Likewise, Kirk was involved in real politics and knew that he was at serious risk of being cancelled and blacklisted, even if he didn't expect to die for it.
Sure, I don't disagree with this. And the policy debate I did was fake. But the debates Kirk did were also fake. And almost all political debates of this sort are fake. It's a performative skill you can build like any other. There were no stakes. If Kirk has a bad performance, he could just cut that from the TikTok highlight real. At worst, he might run some risk of someone else filming him mess up and counter-dunking on him, but social media algorithms would be unlikely to serve that to Kirk's audience in any case.
I don't think you understand. Maybe our ages are different? Or just our environments. I assume you were doing your debate-club stuff in a small room filled with only debate people who accepted that one person was going to have to take the opposing side of the argument.
In contrast the debates Kirk was doing were real debates - public, exposing himself, with serious consequences. Even eight/ten years ago we kept reading stories about people being fired and teenagers getting refused from university for saying the most anodyne things. It was very, very clear then that putting your face out there as a conservative meant exposing yourself to pain - giving up any hope of a good career in the usual areas, being SWATed. Remember all those people who rang Scott's work trying to get him fired? We've just found out how not-fake Kirk's debates were but even before that he knew he was taking the hard road compared to going-along-to-get-along.
Mostly correct. Sometimes I could be in rooms with dozens or even low-hundreds if I made it to finals, but there was always the understanding that my arguments would take a certain shape just based on the rules of debate. It wouldn't be much of a debate if both sides agreed with each other!
I do not see his dunk-farming as "real debates" in any meaningful sense. The danger he faced was similar to what any other public figure faces when they go out into the open, that there might be a low probability, high magnitude event where a crazy person tries to attack them, like what happened to John Lennon, Tupac, Dave Chappelle, or Steve Buscemi. Cancel culture was a threat too, but being on the conservative side makes you less likely to have serious ramifications, not more likely.
On a side note, congratulations, that sounds really impressive. You must have been good.
This I think is where our intuitions aren’t matching up.
I think we can agree on this: There has grown up in the last few years a certain creature called the “Right-wing grifter” who make lots of money serving the right-wing need for influencers and talking heads, and are somewhat well-protected by having a right-wing funding stream that is loyal to them.
My dissents are as follows:
Hopefully that lays out my thoughts clearly.
Yep, we can agree on this.
Disagree here, somewhat. I'll readily concede that the grifter-industrial complex has grown in size over time, but it was always kicking around, just in somewhat different forms. Milo Yiannopoulus was before 2020. People like Bannon had been kicking around way before 2020. Young Earth Creationists predate Bannon and largely followed the same gist, scratching out a living with their seminars, roadside museums, and homeschooling education material.
The internet supercharged the grifters through 1) realigning the cranks from being on both sides to mostly being a Republican-only phenomenon, thereby creating returns-to-scale through whole ecosystems. And 2) the internet facilitated easier dissemination of material through stuff like Substack, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
I agree that being right-wing gets you more likely to get kicked out of Blue-controlled institutions, but with 2 big caveats:
The fear was much less pronounced pre-Woke, and really was only an omnipresent concern during peak Woke, roughly 2017-2019. Kirk started TPUSA in 2012.
The fear is less of a concern for mainstream conservative views than it is for someone like a Groyper. Kirk has always been aggressively mainstream from what I've seen.
And of course I'd say that being right-wing has little bearing on getting you kicked out of Red-controlled institutions, which was what Kirk quickly wrapped himself in.
You could say this about any of the grifters. Maybe it's true in a vague sense, but I'm not sure how much "good with words" translates from pandering to right-wing kooks to pandering to lefties. Some might say "it's just words", but the audiences expect something very different, and I'm not sure one could easily cross apply such skills. Maybe you can, maybe you can't.
They were always safe and rote because of what I've said above: Once Kirk had made a name for himself on the Right, threats of a Left wing cancellation dropped considerably.
The biggest disagreement I have with your points overall is that you could plausibly apply it to any of the grifters/influencers. Do you also think Milo, Bannon, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, etc. are also worthy of the silly deification that Kirk is receiving right now?
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Also, the phenomena of the right-wing grifter, who is trying to patch together a living from begging for subscriptions and doing ad reads for supplements, is entirely because the right does not have the patronage ecosystem that the establishment left has. IIRC, journalists at Pro-Publica are making salaries well into the six figures thanks to support from foundations. So they don't have to sound like grifters when they speak to the public, because they have that support behind the scenes. And then there is the entire university system, which is what left-wing patronage really looks like.
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Turning point USA was founded in 2012, so 13 years ago. He was 18 then so he pretty much went all in.
From Wikipedia:
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