Was Charlie Kirk a racist?

The larger question is, does it matter? I'll get to that.

Kevin Cullen at the Boston Globe led with the headline “Once you start making excuses for killing, it’s over.” That was his initial response, published on 9/11, to Charlie Kirk’s murder. Cullen has a relevant perspective, having covered the “troubles” in Northern Ireland for years.

“In any divided community, when you start keeping score of the killing, when you create a hierarchy of victims, civil society collapses,” Cullen wrote. Amen. Comparing Kirk’s death to, say, Martin Luther King’s, isn’t pointless, which I’ll get to. But it is beside the point, which is to say neither deserved to die, and talk of “evening the score” or whose death was in service of which cause—both were Americans and professed Christians—is unhelpful to civil society.

Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Martin Luther King was killed by a white supremacist, shot down in the neck with a rifle, the same method used to kill Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk had said some unflattering things about Martin Luther King, and now some are saying unflattering things about Charlie Kirk and racism.

It’s a fair question to ask if Charlie Kirk was a racist. Before I get into that, I’ll tell you that your answer will depend largely on your worldview and your politics.

Kirk was primarily a political operative. His organization, Turning Point USA, is focused on political action. It was born out of the TEA Party movement that brought us Sen. Ted Cruz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. When Donald Trump came on the scene, it was natural that TPUSA would latch on (or it could have split off and joined the resistance to Trump, but that was never a serious thought). I’m saying all this to set a political backdrop. This is important because the things that Kirk said are political rhetoric, in the context of conservative political thought. He was not speaking as a candidate, or a religious figure, or a civil rights activist.

Mostly, Charlie Kirk believed that Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) policies did more to deepen racial inequities in America, while making certain racial groups, mostly Blacks, dependent on the benefits of affirmative action versus merit-based economic progress. To hold this belief, the hypothesis of institutional racism in current day America must be rejected. If there is no reason Blacks cannot succeed by merit today, then DEI is simply an engine for reverse discrimination against white people, and a continuing wedge creating mutual distrust and suspicion.

Whether Kirk personally believed everything he said is somewhat beside the point. But what he said is problematic if the hearer believes that white racism against Blacks and other minorities still exists and manifests in institutions including education, business and politics.

Since 2018, Kirk has made some fairly controversial public statements about race. He cited single motherhood in Chicago’s Black community as a cause of gun violence, because the fatherless contribute to a “broken culture problem.” He rejected the concept of white privilege as a myth and a “racist idea.”

In 2021, Kirk called George Floyd a “scumbag” while speaking in Minnesota. Kirk also spouted debunked conspiracy theories about Floyd’s criminal history and his death. Of course, such things are red meat for the conservative churn engine, but they are deeply wounding and insulting to those who genuinely advocate change and the elimination of racial targeting and profiling in police work.

In 2024, Kirk called DEI programs “anti-white.” He used a Black pilot as an example, questioning “I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” This one is particularly bothersome, given that the FAA and U.S.-based airlines are as color blind as could possibly be regarding piloting skills and standards. Yes, there’s DEI and hiring targets, and, all other things being equal, the minority might get a job based on this, but that’s not the same as promoting unqualified people to do a job a “white person” could do better. And it’s positively racist to say that, even if Kirk meant it some other way.

In the same year, Kirk posted on Instagrams that the “‘Great Replacement Theory’ is not a theory, it’s a reality.” This is the kind of stuff that ties Kirk to genuine racists like Nick Fuentes. Is there a wing of the Democratic Party that believes “demographics is destiny”? Yes, there is. Over the past several decades, has this been an actual recruiting and Get Out The Vote strategy for Democratic Party candidates? Yes, it has. Has it worked? Mostly, no. In fact, the policies of the Democratic Party, in the last 10 years, has largely driven away many of the minorities the party recruited, and a statistically significant number of them have turned to Republicans, who are viewed as more family friendly, and tolerant of religion. In fact, you could say that demographics helped Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton or even Kamala Harris.

Policy matters more than raw demographics, and flirting with racial “ownership” by a party or movement is a pretty racist idea. It’s racist when Democrats do it, and it’s racist when Charlie Kirk says it. But dealing with the statement itself, the “Great Replacement Theory,” as Kirk posted, is a real thing. It’s just not a political strategy that works, so as a theory it fails.

In the 2024 Trump campaign, Kirk latched on to the illegal immigrant “invasion” talk. He promoted all the same conspiracies that Vice President J.D. Vance and others in Trump’s orbit spouted: Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio among the many inflated stories of crimes by illegals.

Note that these examples were all from Wikipedia and other easily accessible sources. It’s not hard to compile this list.

Troubling to Blacks, Kirk has said “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people” in American cities. This is stereotypical garbage that works against any kind of civil rights debate. Of MLK, Kirk said he was “just a man … a very flawed one at that” and a “mythological anti-racist creation of the 1960s.” Of course MLK was a flawed man. Who isn’t flawed? But a myth? Perhaps Kirk meant that King would not have advocated today’s Critical Race Theory “anti-racist” policies which rely on an assumption that every white person is inherently and undeniably racist, while minorities who exhibit racist acts are simply reacting to white racism. It’s fair to say that MLK would heave rejected such beliefs.

MLK believed that white people could be taught to be anti-racist, and didn’t require some magic formula to excise it by self-denigration or endless taxonomies of victimhood and generational reparations. MLK preached repentance and civil rights. Attacking his legacy because he himself was flawed is basically saying that MLK’s cause wasn’t legitimate. It would have been more appropriate to say that what others have made of MLK’s cause is not what King himself would have done. But it’s speculative to even say that. Without MLK, there wouldn’t necessarily be the same foundation for the civil rights cause in the first place.

If you take the whole of Charlie Kirk’s statements over the years, it’s clear he rejected the excesses, cancel culture, and squelching of free speech that goes along with DEI and CRT, especially in some institutional settings like education. It’s also clear he was a savvy political operative, saying things that got him press, face time, speaking engagements, and the praise of Donald Trump.

Is DEI really good for race relations in America? If you ask me, I say, net no. Does DEI really promote better economic opportunities for Black people? Perhaps, but at the expense of other minorities, like Asians (and Jews). Is it proper for our government to meddle in equity to engineer outcomes? As a conservative, I say no. Would Charlie Kirk have agreed with those things? Absolutely. Do many other conservatives I know agree with them, and the foundational belief that there’s no such things as institutional racism? Yes.

Does that make them all racist? It depends, as I said. I don’t consider myself a racist. I think there are still vestiges of institutional racism in America, but they are small, isolated, and exist in pockets. Eliminating them with a giant hammer that affects the entire nation is ineffective and destructive. The courts have rightly judged these matters over and over. But invective on both sides makes political discussion difficult.

Let me close with one other example. Malcolm X was assassinated by Nation of Islam, not by white supremacists. We don’t fully know the background of the young man who nearly assassinated Donald Trump. The young man who murdered Charlie Kirk was a registered Republican. We don’t know Tyler Robinson’s views on race, and it’s not even 100 percent clear if he was living with a transgender romantic partner, or if his roommate was just a roommate, or if he was truly transgender or just liked to talk about it online.

There’s not much to say about the nature of what drives a murderer to take someone out because they don’t like what that public figure is saying, or in the case of Malcolm X, that that person has left an organization that demands total fealty. But what does matter is that we should not count victims and compare whose death means more to whom. That only leads to more killing.

Personally, I don’t think Charlie Kirk was a racist. He was not Nick Fuentes, or Candace Owens, or Tucker Carlson. But he was a political person, running a political organization, which flirted too many times with racist tropes and stereotypes in service of its politics. He didn’t deserve to die for that, and anyone who even hints he did is playing a dangerous, and infinitely worse, game than the political one Kirk played for a living.

Was Charlie Kirk a racist? It’s truly beside the point.

Even if anyone thinks Kirk’s a racist, it is not justified to celebrate his death. And even if anyone loves Kirk, it is not justified to speak in terms of whose death matters more. Our civil society depends on not doing that, and in fact, those who do deserve to have the consequences fall upon them like an anvil. There is no place for it in our society, if we wish to have a civil society.

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