Ron Unz: The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
Audio Player
I don’t spend any time on social media nor do I have any interest in the mainstream conservative movement, so I’d only been very slightly aware of Charlie Kirk prior to his sudden assassination on Wednesday, shot dead at the age of 31 by a sniper while speaking at the University of Utah Utah Valley University.
I’d vaguely known that Kirk was a young conservative activist who had dropped out of community college as a teenager about a dozen years earlier to found Turning Point USA, an activist organization intended to draw youthful Americans into his ideological camp, and heavily funded by mega-donors, it had grown large and successful over time. Those bare facts exhausted my total knowledge.
Given that I’d paid so little attention to him, I was initially shocked by the enormous outpouring of media coverage his killing generated, seemingly greater than might have been accorded many important American elected officials or even major world leaders under similar circumstances. All our top newspapers gave his story large, front-page headlines, and the discussion of Kirk’s assassination and its implications entirely blanketed much of the Internet.
I’d always regarded Kirk as a rather bland mainstream Trump conservative, hardly the sort of figure most likely to inspire lethal hatred. I wondered whether my impression had been mistaken so I sought to assess his views and positions, and get a better sense of why he had been targeted in that deadly attack.
Given his brutal slaying at such a young age, I was hardly surprised that a large fraction of the commentary amounted to hagiography, with even most of his erstwhile ideological foes mourning his death as a tragedy and casting aside any past criticism. Indeed, when Matthew Dowd, a prominent former Bush-Cheney Republican political consultant made some disparaging remarks about Kirk, he was immediately fired from his longstanding position at MSNBC, demonstrating the risks of straying from that widespread position.
Fortunately, I found some important exceptions to this pattern of unremitting praise.
I’d occasionally read pieces by Michael Tracey, a prominent moderate or liberal-leaning Internet writer and the day after Kirk’s death he published a harsh 1,400 word column providing a very different perspective on Kirk.
Many of Kirk’s supporters had described him as a political truth-teller, with President Donald Trump declaring that he had been “a martyr for truth.” But Tracey was scathing in his criticism, portraying him as essentially a political propagandist, someone who regularly shifted his positions to conform to those of Trump, his leading patron:
He was a government functionary. A mouthpiece. He trafficked in ludicrous propaganda on behalf of the Administration he loyally served. And was doing this basically 24/7, in the extremely recent past.
Perhaps most notoriously, after taking a personal phone call from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk hopped on his podcast the next day and proclaimed, “Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” He then bizarrely tried to deny that he said this, or insist it had somehow been taken out of context — which it hadn’t. The context was that Trump got annoyed that a bunch of people had criticized him over Epstein at Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” conference, and then Trump called up Kirk, and then shortly thereafter, Kirk announced he was going to do the government’s bidding. That’s just what Kirk was, and the role he played in US political affairs — notwithstanding how people might now want to exalt him as a paragon of truth-telling virtue because of his untimely death.
His conduct was even more egregious in the run-up to Trump bombing Iran in June. During that episode, he pretty much served as a blatant government disinformation agent. Harsh as that might sound after he was brutally gunned down yesterday, it’s simply true. His mission was to demand uncritical faith in the US government, during a time of war — which is totally inexcusable for anyone who would consider themselves anything even remotely approximating a “journalist.” But that’s clearly not what Charlie Kirk considered himself. He instead considered himself a government media mouthpiece. On April 3, he said “A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.” Then by June 17, as drumbeats for the joint US-Israeli war against Iran were intensifying to full volume, Charlie changed his tune to mollify Trump, whom his whole identity was built around sycophantically serving. “It is possible to be an extreme isolationist,” Charlie Kirk warned his massive audience. “President Donald Trump is a man made for this moment, and we should trust him.” This was just pathetic. Turn off your critical thinking skills and place unquestioning “trust” in the US government to wage a war on false pretenses! What awesome, noble “truth-telling”!
Kirk then called for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for the peace-bringing act of launching a new war in the Middle East. As I wrote at the time, “The shamelessness of these people has no bottom — it’s gotten to the point where you just have to marvel at the spectacle.” That was Charlie Kirk. He openly deceived his viewers and listeners, falsely insisting that Trump had been courageously pursuing “peace,” when in reality Trump was mobilizing for war in conjunction with Israel. At the time, I labeled Kirk a “depraved minion” for doing what he did, and I’m not about to retract that accusation just because he got killed yesterday. That would be absurd.
“We must trust Trump,” declared Charlie Kirk, the martyred truth-teller:
I stand by this completely, and there is zero reason to revise my assessment in light of Kirk’s death:
Charlie Kirk had been a cog in the propaganda machine of the Republican Party, declaring totally baselessly that a vote for Trump in the 2024 election was a vote to “bring peace to the Middle East.” And when the exact opposite happened, Charlie was imploring his followers to simply “pray” and uncritically trust the President. He was detestable.
And he wasn’t just some random commentator or podcaster. He was a full-time, extremely influential Republican Party apparatchik. His mega-donor funded outfit “Turning Point USA” ran “Get Out The Vote” operations for the Trump Campaign in the 2024 election. I’m not saying Charlie Kirk wasn’t entitled to engage in these political activities in a free society with lots of billionaire largesse available for ambitious operatives willing to serve as Republican Party Youth Galvanizer. I’m just saying I’m not obliged to fawningly express reverence for him now, simply by virtue of his sudden and hideous death.
Furthermore, I am very much entitled to challenge the hagiography and mythology that is so quickly congealing around him, such that he’s now being expeditiously put into the pantheon of martyred American saints — which is completely ridiculous. However, I’m fully aware that my limited efforts in this regard will have virtually zero effect. The absurd reverence-fest will continue unimpeded.
- Yes, the killing of Charlie Kirk was heinous. No, he was not a martyred truth-teller
Michael Tracey • Substack • September 11, 2025 • 1,400 Words
Even more hostile was the reaction of right-wing Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin, who maintained his angry, contrarian reputation by quickly publishing a series of posts ferociously denouncing the slain conservative activist. The lengthiest of these drew more than 500 comments on our website, with Anglin’s deeply emotional reaction probably explaining the obviously missing word in his title.
Sharply attacking Kirk from the right, Anglin eagerly dredged up quotes that demonstrated the victim’s notably liberal views on various hot-button issues. This hardly surprised me since it merely reflected the leftward shift of our conservative movement, whose right-wing MAGA partisans these days espouse many positions on social issues that would have marked them as extreme progressives as recently as the 1990s.
For example, Anglin noted that one of Kirk’s Tweets praised Trump’s strong support for global gay rights and condemned the media for failing to give the president sufficient credit on that score:
Anglin also highlighted another Kirk clip in which the conservative activist ridiculed the academic dogma that there are 47 different genders while strongly affirming his own support for ordinary transgenderism, saying that men had the right to declare themselves women and vice-versa.
This last example seems to perfectly exemplify the nature of our modern conservative movement. The promotion of totally insane ideas by the mainstream media and the academic community has provided self-proclaimed conservatives with considerable necessary cover, allowing them to win popular support by proudly advocating ideas that are only somewhat less insane in comparison.
As an example of Kirk’s personal support for transgenderism, Anglin noted that his organization heavily promoted an activist of that ilk called “Lady MAGA,” going much farther in that regard than most other pro-Trump conservatives. This certainly seemed to contradict early media reports suggesting that Kirk had been killed for his hostility to transgenderism.
According to Anglin, Kirk had also been a leading proponent of the notion that “America is an idea,” with our ideology and our constitutional principles defining what it means to be an American. Anglin located a 2019 clip in which Kirk took exactly this position, while simultaneously proclaiming that Israel should rightly remain “a blood and soil nation,” falling into a different category because of the holy connection to its land:
As with many conservatives, Kirk apparently had some strong libertarian roots, and during Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign he had emphasized that wide open America could easily accommodate almost unlimited numbers of hard-working, productive legal immigrants. Anglin actually claimed that Kirk had invented the meme of “stapling green cards to diplomas” and indeed in this clip the latter proposed that any foreigner who graduated from an American university should be issued a green card allowing permanent legal residency. Kirk even suggested that our country could reasonably absorb an astonishing fifty million new legal immigrants over the next ten years.
Anglin was obviously mining Kirk’s record to find those public statements most likely to infuriate the many right-wingers now mourning Kirk’s martyrdom, and I’m sure that clips could also be found in which Kirk sometimes took the opposite side of these same issues. For example, by 2023 he had apparently proposed halting all immigration.
But that’s the crucial point. Like so many other conservative activists, Kirk’s views on most ideological issues were hardly set in stone, and instead might easily change over time as Trump and other national leaders of his movement chose to move in different directions. This hardly indicated that Kirk was the sort of fanatic ideologue most likely to attract a deadly assassin.
All of this suggested that Tracey’s more cynical criticism of Kirk was probably much closer to the mark.
