Since Donald Trump rose to political prominence, I have been his constant critic. I’ve never experienced a president, Democrat or Republican, who behaves the way he does. I watch with horror as our civic discourse descends into ugliness, racism, misogyny, and violence. The MAGA movement has elevated dozens of little-known agitators into national prominence. Some are obvious (Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene). Others lurk in the background until a moment of tragedy or notoriety brings them to wider attention.
Until he was shot and killed, Charlie Kirk was not on my radar screen. So, as Republicans began martyring the guy, tripping over themselves to tell us how “great” he was, I decided to investigate. Who was this guy? President Trump called him “loved and admired by all, especially me.” Vice-President Vance thought so much of Kirk that he flew his casket home to Arizona on Air Force Two.
I know. I know. The young man was brutally murdered at a college event. He hasn’t even had a funeral yet. A young suspect has just been apprehended. Why can’t I let this go? Because young men like Charlie Kirk are almost as dangerous to the concept of “America” as the young man who shot and killed him. Let’s examine the record on a variety of important issues:
We begin with a moment of pure cruelty: In 2022, Paul Pelosi—senior citizen, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi—was attacked with a hammer by a MAGA conspiracy theorist. Most decent people responded with sympathy and outrage. Not Charlie Kirk. He called for “some amazing patriot” to “bail out the attacker” so the movement could “go ask him some questions.” Think about that: a prominent conservative activist celebrated violence by encouraging his followers to treat a violent criminal as a folk hero.
Many of Kirk’s ugliest comments were reserved for women of color. He repeatedly claimed that Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former First Lady Michelle Obama only advanced in their careers because of affirmative action. He went further, saying they lacked the “brain processing power” to be taken seriously and that they had “stolen a white person’s slot.” In other words, Kirk dismissed them as unqualified and illegitimate, reducing their achievements to some imagined theft from white men. Is this a message you want delivered to your young college student? A racist message to a young white audience that they alone deserve opportunity and power in America?
Kirk also trashed the very laws and leaders who created a more equal America. He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake,” arguing it created a permanent bureaucracy hostile to white people. He maligned Martin Luther King Jr. as “mythologized” and unworthy of his iconic status.
Kirk was staunchly anti-abortion. I get it. It’s a tough issue. While I consider myself pro-choice, I am certainly not pro-abortion. I believe that it’s none of my business what a woman decides to do with her own body and her own pregnancy. But Kirk used language so extreme that even conservatives recoiled. He called abortion a “holocaust”worse than the Nazi genocide of six million Jews. He opposed exceptions for rape, even when the rape victim was a child. He frequently compared Planned Parenthood to Hitler’s regime. These grotesque analogies demeaned real Holocaust victims and weaponized Jewish suffering to push an absolutist agenda.
When it came to the 2nd Amendment, Kirk was chillingly candid. He called gun deaths the “price” we must pay for liberty. “You’re not going to get gun deaths to zero … this is part of liberty.”
Imagine telling grieving parents in Uvalde or Parkland that their children’s deaths are simply the price of freedom. For Kirk, ideological purity mattered more than human life. Will his Widow see the irony? Was Kirk’s life the price of liberty?
Kirk had no respect for women’s independence. He urged young women to abandon academic or career ambitions in favor of pursuing an “MRS degree,” the old school belief that a woman is at her best in the bedroom and the kitchen. He encouraged women to go to college to find a husband and framed feminism as a societal evil, eroding the Family. In his worldview, women belonged at home and not in positions of leadership.
Kirk was consistently praised by my own Jewish community as a staunch supporter of Israel. He boasted that his record on Israel was “bulletproof.” After his death, Israeli leaders mourned him as a “lion-hearted friend of Israel.” But supporting Israel does not automatically make someone a friend of the Jews.
Kirk also trafficked in classic antisemitic tropes. Here are some examples:
These aren’t stray slips of the tongue. They are age-old antisemitic conspiracies: Jews as puppet-masters, destroyers of white civilization, or all-powerful elites pulling cultural strings. When you lay them alongside his staunch pro-Israel rhetoric, the picture becomes clear: Charlie Kirk’s “Love” for Israel was the Christian Zionist kind—support rooted not in solidarity with Jews, but in religious prophecy and a desire to keep biblical sites under Jewish rather than Muslim control. Is this a man you want your Jewish child to lionize? Kirk proved that a person can be pro-Israel and still be an anti-Semite.
Why can’t I let the young man rest in peace? Republican leaders lionize Kirk as a fallen hero. They martyr a man whose record is filled with division, cruelty, and bigotry. He demeaned women and minorities. He trivialized the Holocaust. And he played both sides with Jews—professing love for Israel while echoing some of the ugliest antisemitic tropes in circulation. And, the ultimate irony, he supported the political violence that may have taken his life.
We should not let his memory be whitewashed. If America is serious about rejecting racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and political violence, then we must look at Charlie Kirk honestly, without whitewashing his memory.
That’s the man President Trump and other Republican leaders want to mourn as a hero. Charlie Kirk was no hero—he was part of the problem. He did not deserve the death penalty for his views, and he had a 1st Amendment right to espouse them. While you may mourn his death, it is also reasonable to mourn the damage he helped cause—to our politics, to our sense of decency, and to the truth.
That’s my view, what’s yours?
Mark M. Bello is an attorney and author of 9 Zachary Blake Legal Thrillers and other legal themed novels and children’s books. For more information, please visit https://www.markmbello.com
