The hagiography of Charlie Kirk Radical ideas are now mainstream

When political violence erupts, the first responsibility is clarity. Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. His assassination was an affront to basic democratic values, and any attempt to rationalise or excuse it should be rejected outright.

We also need reflection that condemns violence without slipping into mythmaking. Because alongside the horror of what happened, there is also the reality of who Kirk was and what he stood for.

Kirk’s Christian convictions were, I believe, sincerely held, as was his commitment to free speech. He would, no doubt, hate the idea of people being fired from their job for reacting bluntly (or even cruelly) to his death. But history is already being rewritten in the rush to memorialise him. To claim that many of his positions on race, gender, and religion were not on the furthest edge of the conservative spectrum is either pure denial, or evidence of how ideas once thought relics of the past have steadily crept back into the mainstream.

So, what did Kirk actually believe? When we look at his positions across a range of issues, the picture is clear enough — and it’s far from moderate. He insisted the “Great Replacement” — a far-Right conspiracy theory — was real. He dismissed the Civil Rights Movement as “a huge mistake”. He expressed suspicion of black professionals, painted Muslims as a civilisational threat, and repeated antisemitic tropes about Jewish influence. On gun violence, he argued mass shootings were a necessary price for the Second Amendment — scant comfort to families who have lost children in classrooms. On abortion, he said he would force his 10-year-old daughter to carry a pregnancy to term even if she was raped. That these views are widely held in the US makes them no less hard-line.

His supporters might mount spirited defences of Kirk’s views on race or culture or guns, in an attempt to portray him more favourably. For others in the hard-Right ecosystem, his refusal to condemn homosexuals in the most extreme terms may have marked him ‘’moderate’’ by contrast. It’s when we turn to his positions on constitutional questions that ludicrous claims Kirk was simply a centre-right provocateur truly collapse.

Hosting a Trump rally in Georgia in October 2024, Kirk told the 10,000-strong crowd, “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it that way.” Kirk’s embrace of Christian nationalism shows his politics were far from middle-of-the-road. Once willing to affirm the constitutional safeguard of church–state separation, he later dismissed it as a “myth” and argued that America should be governed by Christian values. He endorsed theocratic ideas like the “Seven Mountains Mandate” — a doctrine holding that Christians must seize control of the seven key spheres of society (government, education, media, arts, business, family, religion) to establish dominion. Kirk understood that the rise of Trumpism presented a unique opportunity to challenge secular, pluralist governance, and in 2021 established Turning Point Faith — a branch of his organisation designed to mobilise churches and pastors, explicitly fusing evangelical activism with Right-wing politics.

In a free country, Kirk had the right to think, say and do all of this — but make no mistake: this was not centre-right conservatism but the language and strategy of the Christian hard-Right. Some will insist he was not “far-Right,” reserving that label for Klan robes and open fascists. But narrowing of the term is just as dangerous as overusing it and ignores how far-Right politics have softened their aesthetic and slipped into the mainstream. The reluctance to embrace the label reflects not moderation, but Kirk’s talent for laundering radical views as common sense — most of it on campus, where his charisma and quick wit turned sparring into theatre.

He could pivot from combative to compassionate, sharp-edged to endearing, blurring the line between persuasion and performance. One example came in an exchange with a non-binary student. Kirk advised them to be very careful about medication and urged them to aspire to be comfortable with the body they were born with. Even if some would regard this as transphobic, the tone of the encounter was nonetheless marked by a degree of empathy — complicating the portrait of him as a purely hateful figure. On YouTube, however, what endured were the highlight-reel victories — clips of nervous students being “owned”, often edited for maximum impact — giving him an aura of intellectual dominance. His debating style was less open-ended than it seemed: more like rehearsed routines, polished through repetition, not unlike ‘’crowd work’’ in comedy. A student might think they had mounted a devastating challenge, only to discover Kirk had answered the same question dozens of times before.

Kirk was reminiscent of a bullish Christopher Hitchens during the heyday of the New Atheist movement, when he toured the Bible Belt turning priests and rabbis into cannon fodder for the entertainment of the crowd. Hitchens fans will bristle at the comparison — and rightly, because Hitchens’s intellect and rhetorical ferocity would likely have torn Kirk apart — but the performance element was strikingly similar. And like Hitchens, Kirk thrived on YouTube, cultivating a cult-like following that congratulated itself on intellectual seriousness while rarely subjecting its hero’s arguments to genuine scrutiny. On the rare occasions when Kirk faced seasoned opponents, such as his bruising exchange with a Cambridge Union feminist, the mask slipped: the charm gave way to petulance, and the performance faltered.

Kirk’s campus appearances should be seen for what they often were: set-pieces, not robust, open-ended exchanges of ideas. To present him now as the lone arbiter of free exchange in this context is also misleading and does a disservice to many of his opponents.

A convenient narrative has taken hold: that the very campuses where Kirk made his name as a debater are now hotbeds of censorship and proof of democratic decay. Sadly, this narrative is not entirely baseless. Yet while some students tried and failed to block his appearances, just as many chose to engage him. His fame rested in part on their willingness to argue back, even when the playing field was heavily tilted in his favour.

A central plank of the conservative strategy is to caricature the Left as irredeemably “woke” and incapable of reasoned debate. Kirk understood that nowhere was this easier to stage than on campus, where students brimmed with confidence but often lacked experience or composure. By turning their faltering challenges into “lib-owning” theatre, he not only polished his own reputation but reinforced a broader narrative of progressive fragility — a tactic that displayed his undeniable political intelligence.

For many disaffected young people, conservatives like Kirk and Jordan Peterson before him provided catharsis: the thrill of watching “snowflakes” get their comeuppance. What began as entertainment soon became an entry point into conservatism, which, compared to the rigid, doctrinaire tone of online activism, felt warmer and more welcoming. While the Right isn’t quite the easy-going broad-church of ideas it likes to claim, a solidarity can develop between hardline conservatives and disaffected liberals, who find common cause in their contempt for the “Left’’. In this context, genuine concern about free speech becomes the hard-Right’s primary youth recruitment tool.

Kirk’s talent was to veil extreme Right-wing views many Americans would find abhorrent, behind that moderate aesthetic: the suit, the charm, the affable style. Conservatives in his mould rose not through the force of their arguments alone, but by capitalising on a Left that had grown intellectually complacent and morally self-satisfied — a strategic opening Kirk was quick to seize.

But the project was clear — to normalise ideas that, only a decade earlier, would have been recognised as hard-Right, reactionary, and deeply consequential for women and minorities if written into law.

Where Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of killing Kirk, fits into this story remains murky. But whatever his political beliefs, America’s ideological obsession with firearms — an obsession Kirk shared — clearly played a decisive role in this tragedy. Photographs have already surfaced of Robinson as a child, posing with an array of high-powered weapons. Culturally, he had been exposed to mass shootings countless times before he ever became politically engaged. He knew the grim fame that comes with such spectacles — a uniquely American notoriety.

Armed only with extreme beliefs, Robinson would likely have been just another troubled young man mouthing off into the void of the internet. It’s dishonest and cowardly of many on the Right to cast Kirk as a martyr to intellectual fearlessness while, at the same time, minimising or dismissing this point.

Progressives should welcome honest conversation about the role Leftist ideologies may have played in this horrifying event. It remains to be seen whether this latest outburst of political violence in the US will prompt conservatives to reexamine their love affair with firearms. I somehow doubt it will. But we will find out whether the commitment to so-called free speech amounts to anything more than free speech for those they agree with — given how many US conservatives, Trump included, are now waging a very Christian brand of cancel culture in the wake of this tragedy.

Kirk once remarked that “you can tell a lot about a person by how they react when someone dies”. Now, in the wake of his own assassination, we face the same test: whether to respond with denial, mythmaking, or glee — or to condemn the violence plainly while refusing to launder the politics he championed.

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