DrWebCharlie Kirk, Redeemed by Ezra Klein, Gavin Newsom, and the Political Class | Vanity Fair
Protestors clash during an anti and pro-immigration rally in Toronto, Canada, September 13, 2025. Arindam Shivaani /NurPhoto / Getty Images.COMMENTARY
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause
By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates, September 16, 2025
Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk left a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being memorialized in mainstream discourse.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dubbed Kirk “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” and a man who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California governor Gavin Newsom hailed Kirk’s “passion and commitment to debate,” advising us to continue Kirk’s work by engaging “with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” Atlantic writer Sally Jenkins saluted Kirk, claiming he “argued with civility” and asserting that his death was “a significant loss for those who believe engagement can help bridge disagreements.”
The mentions of “debate” and “engagement” are references to Kirk’s campus tours, during which he visited various colleges to take on whoever come may. That this aspect of Kirk’s work would be so attractive to writers and politicians is understandable. There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians.
But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry.
Indeed, claims of Kirk’s “civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks” and referring to trans people with the slur “tranny.” Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.”
Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.”
The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that. Large “dedicated” Islamic areas were “a threat to America,” Kirk asserted, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was a “Mohammedan,” with Kirk supposing that anyone trying to see “Mohammedism take over the West” would love to have New York—a “prior Anglo center”—“under Mohammedan rule.”
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Charlie Kirk, Redeemed by Ezra Klein, Gavin Newsom, and the Political Class | Vanity Fair
#2025 #America #CharlieKirk #DonaldTrump #Education #EzraKlein #GavinNewsom #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #PoliticalClass #Politics #Resistance #Sanitize #Science #Television #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates
Malvan
𝕚𝕒𝕞𝕕𝕥𝕞𝕤
TSM at Work
Tim Board
عدالة 🇵🇸
Graham
Fox
Poetry News
Dave Askins