Mass Firings Reflect Kirk’s True Legacy
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” – Mark Twain, allegedly.
“MLK was awful. He’s not a good person.” – Charlie Kirk, actually.
America, we are being gaslit. Charlie Kirk was not a great man. He was a pretend “free speech warrior” who campaigned to get people fired whose speech he didn’t like. He was far closer to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels than he was to Martin Luther King Jr., whom Kirk himself said was “awful.” And his murder has made him closer still to Horst Wessel, celebrated Nazi martyr.
“We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately,” Kirk said in April 2024, working in the Rush Limbaugh tradition of baselessly identifying his enemies with Nazis. But the history is exactly opposite.
Nazi Germany’s first mass book burning began with looting on May 6, 1933, when Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex Research in Berlin was attacked by Nazi students. Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 books were destroyed. “Through science to justice” was Hirschfeld’s personal motto and the Nazis violently hated both. He was the father of gender-affirming medicine. So Kirk’s call for Nuremberg-style trials was actually a call to continue what the Nazis started.
And as for why Kirk was killed, “I had enough of his [Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” his assassin explained. It was Kirk himself who radicalized his own killer. It wasn’t other people calling him a Nazi — as Trump and other MAGA figures claimed — it was his own words.
His murder was reprehensible. All murders are. But a murdered hatemonger is a hatemonger nonetheless. And that’s who Kirk was: a hatemonger, conspiracist, and false accuser in the mold of Joseph McCarthy, to whom he was sometimes compared, particularly for his organization’s “Professor Watchlist,” which has been used to terrorize and intimidate hundreds of professors since Kirk launched it in 2016, and has helped fuel MAGA resentment against higher education. He regularly made false accusations against Black people, immigrants, Jewish people, the LGBTQ community, and more, encouraging his followers to engage in harassment and intimidation campaigns that could sometimes fairly be described as terroristic.
So yes, he was a very important hatemonger in the MAGA universe. He might well have been the difference in getting Trump elected. But with Trump in office, he’s much more important as a dead martyr. We know that in part because of the forced worship and whitewashing of his record, and the wave of firings of people who’ve been insufficiently discreet about who he was. But also because of how Donald Trump reacted when a reporter offered condolences and asked him how he was holding up a day and a half after Kirk’s assassination.
“I think very good,” Trump said. “And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They’ve just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it’s going to be a beauty.”
Jimmy Kimmel played that clip, after which he said, “Yes. He’s at the fourth stage of grief, construction. Demolition. Construction.
“This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
In short, Charlie Kirk, the man, was completely disposable. But Charlie Kirk, the symbol, was damn near invaluable. Charlie Kirk, the man, could never have gotten Jimmy Kimmel fired (even if it was only temporary), though he did have quite a record with less high-profile people, particularly professors. But Charlie Kirk, the symbol, worked like a charm. And getting rid of Kimmel was just part of a broader pattern of bringing the media to heel.
A combination of street protests, mass Disney+ subscription cancellations, and dropping stock prices reinforcing a chorus of celebrity condemnations of the action, helped to produce a quick reversal.
But Kimmel was just the most high-profile example of people fired for saying things that offended Kirk’s hypersensitive fans but were simply factual observations. And because of public outcry, Kimmel was reinstated a few days later. Others were not as fortunate to have such strong public backing.
First was MSNBC analyst Matt Dowd, a never-Trump Republican. Dowd simply remarked that Mr. Kirk had been pushing hate speech, adding that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” The network agreed that his remarks were being misconstrued as “insensitive,” but they fired him anyway.
When Karen Attiah, the last Black opinion writer at the Washington Post was fired for social media posts — mostly about gun violence, but also accurately describing his malign influence — it wasn’t clear what she said that triggered her firing. Just writing while Black, apparently. No doubt Kirk was smiling, if not laughing, from beyond the grave.
And there were hundreds more. At Payday Reports, Mike Elk reported, “In Texas alone, more than 180 educators and school support staff have been suspended for comments they made about Kirk’s assassination on social media.” This is the true legacy of MAGA’s “free speech warrior”: free speech for me, but not for thee.
All that Kimmel said was:
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing there was uh grieving on Friday.”
Again, this was a fairly accurate description of reactions on social media. Kimmel didn’t say the shooter was a MAGA Republican. He didn’t say anything about the shooter. All he said was about how MAGA world was reacting, pointing their fingers wildly in all directions.
From Trump on down, MAGA world insisted the left was to blame from the very beginning. “We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump said, while the killer was still at large and unknown. He led a chorus of voices blaming the violent radical left, in direct contradiction of the government’s own statistics — as summarized in a report, “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism,” which stated:
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
That’s more than five times as many far-right attacks with more than six times as many victims. That report on the Department of Justice website was taken down shortly after Trump spoke. But the truth remains: the right is far more violent than the left in America. The Jan. 6 insurrection was clear evidence of that. Trump’s mass pardon showed his approval of violence on his behalf.
It’s also clearly false that left is responsible for more violent and polarizing rhetoric. Trump’s social media feed is all the evidence you need for that. Even his Christmas messages are venomous. In 2022 he wrote:
Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our country…
In contrast, Joe Biden wrote:
There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas story: a silent night when all the world goes quiet and all the clamor, everything that divides us, fades away the stillness of winter’s evening.
I wish you that peace this Christmas Eve.
And what did Charlie Kirk say about Biden? This:
Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia filled Alzheimer’s corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.
No hateful violent rhetoric there, right? That is the real Charlie Kirk.
Who Kirk Really Was
In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, media outlets rushed to portray him as a free speech advocate who “did politics the right way,” in the words of the New York Times’ Ezra Klein. But this was gaslighting. Another Times feature on “How Charlie Kirk Connected With Young Men” ran 1,300 words without actually quoting his views, an evasion noted by Boing Boing.
Kirk built his career posing as a “free speech warrior” while actively silencing speech he disliked. His beliefs, far from being obscure, were openly white supremacist. He routinely mocked Black achievement and called Martin Luther King Jr. “a bad person,” devoting his 2024 MLK Day broadcast to attacking King’s legacy. His guest called King “despicable” and “immoral.” This hostility was tied to his opposition to the Civil Rights Act: “Once a week we talk about why passing the Civil Rights Act was a mistake,” Kirk bragged.
He also targeted Black women, including Ivy League graduates, sneering:
“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot.”
His misogyny extended to white women as well. When Taylor Swift’s engagement was announced, he said: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
On LGBTQ rights, Kirk went beyond opposition to equal rights, calling stoning gay people “God’s perfect law.” He made this remark in response to children’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel, who cited scripture to explain her support for Pride. She quoted Matthew 22—Jesus’ command to love God and neighbor. Kirk mocked her: “Satan’s quoted scripture,” before pivoting to Leviticus: “Thou shalt lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying. God’s perfect law.”
Kirk ignored other passages in the same book, including Leviticus’ command to love the foreigner as yourself. Instead, he promoted xenophobia and the Great Replacement Theory, framing immigration as an “invasion.”
His conspiratorial worldview extended to antisemitism. He pushed the “cultural Marxism” myth, blaming Jews for social change:
- “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas … over the last 30 or 40 years.”
- “Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies.”
- “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
This was the real Kirk: a demagogue who cloaked bigotry in the language of “free speech.” Far from a defender of open debate, he was committed to silencing dissent, undermining civil rights, and spreading conspiracy theories that targeted the most vulnerable.
What Kirk Did
Kirk’s legacy isn’t only about his hateful and conspiratorial ideas. It’s also about what he did. The praise that followed his death celebrated his image as a “free speech warrior,” showcased in campus debate tours. But those tours were not what they seemed. They were extensions of the online “Debate Me Bro” culture Kirk helped pioneer. As historian Katherine Kelaidis wrote in Salon: “‘Debate Me’ Bro culture is to civil discourse what porn is to sex. … Anyone with real experience in civil discourse can see that what the format’s practitioners are doing is a very unrealistic imitation.”
Kirk’s debates were even less authentic. He usually faced opponents with little experience, sometimes barely out of high school, and he cherry-picked which events to promote online. His reliance on rhetorical tricks became obvious when he debated at Cambridge and fared badly. The spectacle was never about dialogue; it was about control.
That need for control defined his politics. The wave of harassment and firings following his death is a clearer reflection of his project than any staged debate. His work was always about silencing speech he disliked.
The pattern was clear long before. In 2018, Joseph Guinto profiled Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, in Politico. He found the group’s Professor Watchlist “ill-maintained and often inaccurate,” with professors listed for petty reasons or misrepresented entirely. Other TPUSA initiatives were just as hollow. The Campus Victory Project boasted of backing winning student body presidents at 50 schools, but Guinto’s reporting showed otherwise: candidates denied any connection, and some criticized the group outright. Even TPUSA chapter pages showed little activity. The organization wasn’t delivering real results—it was selling a fantasy.
The buyers of that fantasy were mostly older Republican men, often wealthy, who lived inside a conservative media bubble obsessed with “liberal kids.” Kirk explicitly marketed himself to them:
“You can’t watch Fox News without seeing five or six segments a day about the nuttiness on college campuses,” he told Guinto. “You pair that nuttiness up with people in their 60s and 70s who are beginning to map out where they want a significant portion of their wealth to go … Then we come along.”
In the short term, this meant Kirk built his own donor-funded empire. In the long run, it meant fueling hostility toward America’s universities—an institution that has long been one of the country’s greatest sources of wealth, drawing students and innovators from around the globe.
That hostility has since escalated into open political warfare. When Trump declared war on universities from Harvard to UCLA this year, many were surprised. But he was following a trail Kirk had already blazed. Just as Hitler destroyed Germany’s status as the world’s research center, Trump is undermining America’s future—and Charlie Kirk helped lay the groundwork.