View / Debating Charlie Kirk’s legacy

After Charlie Kirk was killed, as his friends mourned a loving husband and adoring father, the argument over his legacy began.

Liberals — and some conservatives — remembered a debater who believed in reason, persuasion, and electoral politics. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” wrote Ezra Klein. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.”

That column angered leftists, but it wasn’t for them. It was for liberals, who decried what campus political debate had become; the “safe spaces,” the language tangled by critical theory, the protesters who made right-wing politicians look good.

They’d seen how social media censorship of COVID skeptics and 2020 election deniers backfired, even if they’d supported it at the time. Would Donald Trump have won again without Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., spurned by his own liberal family, walking across a Kirk-built stage to endorse him?

“Every time people try to shout us down, tear down our posters, or knock over our display tables, the undecided are reminded which side is trying to foster civilization and which side keeps veering into barbarism,” Kirk wrote in 2020.

That was one Kirk — the one who could and did out-debate the left. He wanted to pull down its temples. Kirk supported the Trump administration’s claw-back of university funding as a way to “blow up some of the fattened-up far-left institutions.” He was thrilled when the president de-funded national public media: “The rebalancing of the American narrative landscape that this would do is remarkable.”

That legacy is being honored, right away.

Liberals were never going to endorse that project, though Kirk believed that the left could find other funding sources to compete with the right more fairly. Liberals also saw danger in the use of government power and resources to punish left-wing academics and organizations — even if they saw their work as harmful to their ideas, and to the Democratic Party.

That’s well under way. In his taped Oval Office address on Kirk’s killing, the president said that his administration would “would find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

The shooter had not been identified, but Trump was talking about the left. Stephen Miller was more direct in a Thursday X post, promising to defeat “this wicked ideology,” and to finish “the indispensable work to which Charlie bravely devoted his life.” Later in the day, Texas Rep. Chip Roy and more than two dozen colleagues asked House Speaker Mike Johnson for a special committee to probe the left.

“We must take every step to follow the money and uncover the force behind the NGOs, donors, media, public officials, and all entities driving this coordinated attack,” Roy wrote. “We must follow the money to identify the perpetrators of the coordinated anti-American assaults being carried out against us and take all steps under the law necessary to stop them.”

What might that mean? Left-liberal institutions that loudly opposed the first Trump administration were already quieter in this one, and worried about exposure and investigations. Left-wing donor trusts like Arabella Advisors and the Tides Foundation may get scrutiny from federal investigators, with bottomless resources. Academics saying cruel things about Kirk’s death are being fired; non-citizens applying for visas are told not to bother if they’re “rationalizing or making light” of it. Violent left-wing organizations were already at war with the government; the president has made that a larger priority.

Kirk’s openness to debate, and fearlessness about saying things that shocked liberals, will be part of his legacy. A crackdown on the left and far-left may be part of it, too.

Plenty of this was happening before Wednesday, and the movement that Kirk was part of was unafraid of doing it. In Unhumans, his 2024 guide to preventing left-wing victory in America, Jack Posobiec wrote that “democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” and it was “time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

That didn’t mean violence. It meant organizing communities of right-thinking people, and using the tools of government to dismantle left-wing power. Kirk’s successors won’t just honor his commitment to debate. They’ll shrink the reach and power of the ideas he debated against.