September 12, 2025 - 1:00pm
I met Charlie Kirk almost four years ago. The occasion was a debate on “Democratic Socialism vs. Conservative Populism” at the Turning Point USA headquarters in Phoenix.
TPUSA was and is one of the largest and best-funded operations on the American Right. Evidence of that was everywhere that day. Most political media organizations occupy, at best, one floor of a nondescript office building. TPUSA has its own building with a huge “Turning Point USA” marquee at the front. When you go through the sliding glass doors, you see “Turning Point USA” carpets. If you used the restroom, there was a TPUSA logo on the door.
When Charlie met me and my wife in the green room before our debate, he was wearing a “Socialism Sucks” t-shirt. He told me, jovially enough, that he’d changed into it when his staff alerted him that I’d shown up in a Bernie shirt.
In the years since our debate, he drifted (along with much of the rest of the American Right) toward a much more ugly brand of conservatism than anything he expressed to me in 2021. Even then, though, our views were worlds apart.
The debate, which lasted for more than two hours, centered on healthcare, labor unions, and what I felt were the deep contradictions between his professed Right-wing “populism” and the real content of his views. In my judgment then (and now), he never had a good explanation of how a “populist” could oppose any real redistribution of wealth.
But at the same time, he was, in many ways, an ideal debate opponent. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t get personal. There was very little in the way of grandstanding or attempts to change the subject. As profoundly as I disagree with pretty much every aspect of his worldview, and as much damage as I think the political program he did so much to advocate for has done to the world, I do find it admirable that Charlie Kirk believed in his ideas deeply enough to hash them out with all comers in conversations like the one had with me.
We live in a landscape where many Right-wing pundits prefer to save their debates for a few trusted interlocutors, or for Q&A interactions with nervous 19-year-olds that can then be harvested for clips. I wish more of them had the confidence in their ideas that Charlie did, and were equally willing to enter into challenging conversations that might not go well for them.
Whatever the politics of the shooter turn out to have been, a commentator being shot for the content of his opinions is a disaster in itself, and it might lead to further erosion of freedom if the Trump administration uses it for political point-scoring against its opponents. We need to stand firm against the idea that violence is ever an appropriate response to speech or someone’s opinions. Whatever side you would have been on in that debate in Phoenix, we should all be able to agree that free speech is precious.
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