To hear his supporters now, following his murder last week at a Utah university, Charlie Kirk was a brave broker of competing ideas, an honest peddler of open debate who encouraged young people to examine all sides of any claim.

In truth, Kirk was a clever racist. How else to explain his view that the landmark Civil Rights Act was “a huge mistake” or his denigration of Martin Luther King Jr.?

Why did he single out Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, both Black women, in saying they lacked the “brain-processing power to be taken really seriously”?

In truth, Kirk was a charismatic antisemite who repeatedly blamed Jews for a range of problems. On his podcast in October 2023, he said that “Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.” Two weeks later, on the same podcast, he said: “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years.” Just a week after that, Kirk defended Elon Musk for telling an X poster he’d “spoken the actual truth” in saying that Jews had promoted “dialectical hatred against whites.”

“It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing, anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans,” Kirk said on his podcast.

Kirk’s supporters bristle at comparisons of his views with Nazism, but his linking of Jews to Marxism eerily echoes frequent claims of Adolf Hitler. To cite one, Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf”: “Slowly fear and the Marxist weapon of Jewry descend like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent people.”

In truth, Kirk was an extremist with a nice smile who paid lip service to open debate but mocked those who disagreed with him.

At his campus gatherings, his frequent challenge of “Prove it!” to students who contradicted him was a rhetorical dodge that enabled him to avoid actual debate. And he failed to hold himself to the rhetorical standards he set for others.

Despite overwhelming bipartisan proof that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential polling, Kirk was an election denier. That view allied him with the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who busted into the Capitol, erected a gallows outside it, and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” after the then-vice president, in his role as Senate president, accepted the election results.

Small wonder that Kirk found an admirer in Trump.

Even as he claimed to be a moderator of political debate, Kirk’s Turning Point USA group helped register tens of thousands of young voters, a movement that Trump aides credited with helping him regain the White House last November.

“Charlie was very much a part of this family, and maybe the highest profile MAGA person outside of those that are working here,” White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Scott Jennings on the radio show of the former President George W. Bush aide, now a CNN commentator.

Always quick to turn tragedy to his political advantage, Trump blamed “the radical left” for Kirk’s murder before anything was known about his alleged killer. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller elaborated, saying the left “hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved” — a sorry example of using hate speech to condemn hate.

In an article two days after Kirk’s murder, Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last wrote: “Political violence is a ribbon running through American history since the founding.” He cited examples going back to the colonists’ armed rebellion against their British overlords and including the 1960s assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

As I came of age, far-left members of the militant Weathermen bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department while far-right domestic terrorists bombed abortion clinics.

Trump’s awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Kirk dishonors the previous recipients, who represent the pinnacle of American life in entertainment, sports, the arts, politics, the media and diplomacy.

Charlie Kirk left no lasting mark in any of those fields. His main deeds were paying homage to Trump and helping the president get back into the White House.

____

ABOUT THE WRITER

James Rosen is a former political reporter for McClatchy who has received awards from the National Press Club, Military Reporters and Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists, which in 2021 named him top opinion columnist. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

___

©2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC