Essay
What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed
For those who felt denigrated by his rhetoric, the bipartisan tributes to him as a champion of free speech augured something dangerous: the mainstreaming of formerly extremist views.
By
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Sept. 28, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
The day Charlie Kirk was killed, Dominic Durant’s 11-year-old daughter came home from her middle school in Tulsa, Okla., and told her father that her friends had been very upset about his death, and that they felt she should be upset, too. “I’m sad,” she said, tears in her eyes.
Durant struggled with how to respond. He, too, had been appalled by the act of violence. But his young daughter did not know much about Kirk, and he worried she would look him up on YouTube and come across the many ugly assertions the right-wing activist had made about Black Americans like them. For instance, Kirk had claimed that four prominent and successful Black women, who all went to Ivy League universities — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the former first lady Michelle Obama, the TV host Joy-Ann Reid and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas — did not “have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously” and had to “go steal a white person’s slot.”
He’d argued that “Black America is poorer, more murderous, more dangerous” than when Black people were living under Jim Crow.
Durant did not want his daughter thinking that because her friends were grieving him that the things Kirk had claimed were acceptable or right.
It was a difficult and heart-rending conversation, grappling with how his daughter’s classmates could admire a man who’d said such hurtful things. “I said it’s natural to be sad and I don’t want to change your opinion about being sad,” Durant recounted to me. “But I am explaining to you that the gentleman who just got shot was under the impression that you, as a young Black woman, don’t have the brain processing power. So I am explaining it to you to let you know what he said was wrong and not true.”
As a Christian, Durant also felt he had to address Kirk’s version of Christianity, which condemned and disparaged people who are gay and transgender.
Kirk once posted, “The pride and trans movements have always been about grooming kids.” And, in another instance,
he had pointed to a passage in the Bible that said men who lay with other men “shall be stoned to death,” saying it “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
This intolerance was not reflective of Durant’s own understanding of Jesus or the Gospel, nor the faith his family practiced. “I reminded her not to be a hypocritical Christian,” he said. ”I told her, You know, the Good Book, the Bible, says you judge a man as he
lived, not as he died.”
Durant left the conversation about Kirk’s death grateful that it had prompted a father-daughter talk about his child’s worth as a Black girl and about having empathy for those marginalized by society. He hoped that this moment of beatifying Kirk had passed.
But a few days later, Oklahoma’s superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, directed all the state’s schools to observe a moment of silence in honor of Kirk. Durant felt a shock that quickly flamed into outrage.
People were free to mourn Kirk or not, he said, but the state had no right to order his child and other children to honor a man whose words had often denigrated them. “My initial thought was, Hell no — there’s no way.”
He’d already decided that his daughter would not participate when, to his relief, the Tulsa Public Schools, a district that is majority Black and Latino, and several other Oklahoma school districts announced that they would not comply with the dictate. For that, they now face a state investigation for failing to commemorate the activist who Walters said was a champion of free speech, civil debate and conservative and Christian values.
Oklahoma, of course, is a deeply red state. But in the wake of Kirk’s death, individuals and institutions across the nation moved not just to condemn his killing and political violence, but to venerate him. It was unsettling to many to see politicians from across the political spectrum speak with reverence about a man who espoused the racist Great Replacement Theory, which argues that white Americans are being systematically replaced by multiculturalism and by brown and Black immigrants; who continuously claimed that
“there’s a war on white people in this country; who said it was “a fact” that
“prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people”; who gave a platform to people who believe in
eugenics and race science; who contended that Black people commit more crime than white people and that the blame lies in a Black culture that accepts that
Black men “impregnate women and they don’t stay around”; who
referred to a transgender athlete as an “abomination” and called “the transgender thing” a “throbbing middle finger to God”; and who declared that Islam, the world’s second-largest religion, “
is not compatible with Western civilization” and that it is a sword being used
“to slit the throat of America.”
Still,
N.F.L. and
M.L.B. teams held moments of silence. C-SPAN covered Kirk’s memorial service live.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan recounted how, after Kirk’s death, he spent time researching and determined that Kirk was a “modern day St. Paul” and a “hero” albeit “pretty blunt” and “pretty direct.” Mainstream news outlets such as
CNN and
CBS invited Jack Posobiec to come speak about his friend’s
“life’s work,” and about how to “fill this void” Kirk had left behind. These outlets did not mention that Posobiec is a conspiracy theorist who has
been labeled an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of his ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Even Democratic politicians felt compelled to pay tribute. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania ordered flags to be flown at half-staff
“as a mark of respect for the memory of Charlie Kirk,” though he later criticized Kirk’s rhetoric. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who has crafted an image of himself as the face of the MAGA resistance, implored that “t
he best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work.” And last week, the House passed a bipartisan measure to honor Kirk, with 95 Democrats joining Republicans to vote for a resolution in support of the man who said that
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “should be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”
Image
A scene from Kirk’s memorial service on Sept. 21 in Arizona.Credit...Eric Thayer/Getty Images
Last year, The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, published a column calling the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, “one of the most destructive forces in
Republican politics.” It said that “a healthy conservative movement cannot tolerate conspiracy theorists being presented as serious political figures” and called the organization’s leadership “toxic.” But the period since Kirk’s death has revealed a deeply unsettling cultural shift. Eight months into President Trump’s second term, it is clear that Kirk’s ideas are no longer considered on the extremist periphery but are embraced by Republican leadership.
The mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse.
When Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, bemoaned that only two of the 58 Democrats who refused to sign the resolution honoring Kirk were white, Laura Loomer responded on X by railing against “ghetto Black bitches who hate America serving in Congress.” Loomer is not merely some right-wing provocateur. She has the ear of the president of the United States and understood that such an explicitly racist comment in 2025 America would bring no political consequence.
More on the Charlie Kirk Killing
What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed
The Firing of Educators Over Kirk Comments Follows a Familiar Playbook
A Broad Wave of Firings Followed Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
U.S. Threatens to Bar Foreigners Over Remarks About Charlie Kirk
‘We Are All Charlie’: Thousands Stood in Line for Hours in Hopes of Paying Tribute
A Patriotic Dress Code for a Political Memorial
A Who’s Who of the American Right Attends Charlie Kirk’s Memorial
Trump Remembers Kirk as a Martyr While Attacking Political Opponents
Erika Kirk Takes a Leadership Role in Turning Point USA
For Erika Kirk, a Husband’s Life Cut Short by Violence He Seemed to Foresee
And while Trump has surrounded himself with people who have said racist things and maintained ties to white and Christian nationalists, the number of Democrats and esteemed American institutions that have engaged in the mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse, a phenomenon we have not witnessed since the civil rights era.
In some parts of polite society, it now holds that if many of Kirk’s views were repugnant, his willingness to calmly argue about them and his insistence that people hash out their disagreements through discourse at a time of such division made him a free-speech advocate, and an exemplar of how we should engage politically across difference. But for those who were directly targeted by Kirk’s rhetoric, this thinking seems to place the civility of Kirk’s style of argument over the incivility of what he argued. Through gossamer tributes, Kirk’s cruel condemnation of transgender people and his racist throwback views about Black Americans were no longer anathema but instead are being treated as just another political view to be respectfully debated — like a position on tax rates or health care policy.
Using Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous.
As the Trump administration wages the broadest attack on civil rights in a century, and the shared societal values of multiculturalism and tolerance recede, using Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous. Kirk certainly produced viral moments by showing up on college campuses and inviting students a decade his junior to “prove” him wrong about a range of controversial topics such as Black crime rates and the pitfalls of feminism. But his rise to fame was predicated on the organization for which he served as executive director, Turning Point USA, and its Professor Watchlist. The website invited college students not to engage in robust discussions with others with different ideologies, but to report professors who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
The site includes photos of professors, along with often highly misleading summaries of the thought crimes that landed them on the list. It provides the telephone numbers of the universities that employ them for students and parents to register their complaints. While the site claims the organization supports free speech
, many professors have recounted enduring campaigns of harassment after being put on the list. (I was placed on it in 2021 because of my work on the 1619 Project, after it was announced that I would be a professor at Howard University.)
A couple of years ago, Angel Jones, now a professor at a university in Maryland whose work focuses on educational inequality, joined the hundreds of professors across the country who found themselves on the list.
Jones landed on it under the tag “racial ideology” when she published an article citing research about how distressing it is for Black people to go to work after witnessing news coverage of police killings. She told me someone had sent her a picture of a house thought to be hers, but it turned out to belong to another Angel Jones. Someone else had threatened to hang her from a tree and burn her alive. The scholar changed her classroom and removed her name plate from her office door. The university where she was working at the time installed a safety alarm button under her desk.
“I would cry. I was very fearful. I was anxious,” Jones told me. “I was afraid to go to class sometimes. I was just scared all of the time.
“I love teaching — it makes my heart go pitter patter — so to be in a space where I am afraid of my students, like that rocks me in a way I can’t even articulate,” she added.
When Jones learned of Kirk’s killing, she remembers that there was a sense of disbelief shared by many Americans who were shocked by the gruesome video. But soon, that disbelief was replaced by another feeling. In the immediate hours after his death, she watched as pundits and politicians eulogized Kirk as that rare example of someone who practiced a willingness to hear opposing ideas because he saw it as the salve for political violence. After all she’d gone through, and the stories she’d heard of other professors similarly harassed, the tributes pouring in for Kirk both infuriated and saddened her.
The next day, Jones went to the class she taught on misinformation and disinformation and showed her students a short Instagram video she had made in response. In the video, she says that while she does not celebrate Kirk’s death, she also refuses to mourn him. “I cannot have empathy for him losing his life when he put mine at risk and the lives of so many other educators just because we dared to advocate for social justice,” she says in the video, “because we dared to do our jobs.”
After she showed the video, a white male student in her class asked Jones if she thought her lack of empathy for Kirk might radicalize students. After a short, tense exchange, the student took his backpack and left. Jones said it had made her nervous. There’s a Turning Point USA chapter on her campus, and Kirk’s followers and even some politicians had been posting about revenge on social media. Jones switched her classes to virtual for the week.
Image
After Kirk’s murder, many conservatives paid tribute to him.Credit...Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
The past few weeks have filled Ash Lazarus Orr with a similar sense of foreboding. Orr has been at the forefront of resisting efforts to target transgender Americans, including as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. against a Trump administration’s policy that would prevent transgender people from having their chosen gender on their passports.
While Orr was never named by Kirk, they say Kirk’s rhetoric helped fuel an environment that makes transgender Americans vulnerable to violence and that has paved the way for the removal of their civil rights; in February, Iowa became the first state in the country to take away legal civil rights protections for transgender residents.
“I firmly believe that no one should be killed for their beliefs, no matter how harmful those beliefs might be,” Orr told me. “But we are watching our rights being stripped away. We are having our friends’ lives cut short, and then we are told to stay quiet while those responsible are celebrated.”
In just a few short years, Orr has watched as the momentum toward recognizing the full humanity and rights of transgender people has collapsed. Orr recently left their home state of West Virginia, finding it no longer safe after being threatened and assaulted.
Kirk’s rhetoric of “Christian white nationalism, anti-transgender, quote anti-woke culture-war framing, this isn’t on the edge anymore,” Orr told me. “It has moved into what many consider the center of Republican identity.” They said they were deeply concerned about how few people seemed willing to point out the consequences of this shift: “Who is actually fighting for us?”
Robin D.G. Kelley, a historian at U.C.L.A. whose scholarship on racial injustice also landed him on the Professor Watchlist, is struck by how rapidly our society has changed since Trump took office a second time.
Kelley pointed to the fact that Trump was widely condemned during his first term when he called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people.” Now, Democrats and political centrists were lining up to honor a man who promoted the same Great Replacement Theory that served as the rallying cry for that march. At a time when the president of the United States is using his power to go after diversity efforts and engaging in a mass deportation project, some progressives are arguing that people of color, immigrants and members of other marginalized groups who felt dehumanized by Kirk’s commentary, podcasts and debates have to find a way to locate common ground with his followers.
“There has been an extreme shift,” Kelley told me. “This treatment is authorizing the idea that white supremacy and racism is not just a conservative idea, but a legitimate one.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights.
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