We Must Not Posthumously Sanitize Charlie Kirk's Hateful Life

Influential anti-LGBTQ+ activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Wednesday. While condemning violence is something most can get behind, sanitization of his hate has gone too far.

Charlie Kirk // Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday, while giving a campus speech, far-right activist and anti-LGBTQ+ influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a gunman—another grim marker of how political violence has become a recurring feature of American life. Quickly, political figures and pundits rushed to denounce the killing, as they should. But some went further, valorizing and lionizing a man who built his career on contempt of people he viewed as lesser. Political violence is corrosive and we must not excuse it—killing Charlie Kirk was horrific. But we also must not sanitize the memory of a man who wished harm on those he disagreed with, and who spread a message of hate to anyone willing to listen or pay him to so. We can denounce the violent killing of Charlie Kirk without praising his abhorrent legacy.

Yesterday, Gavin Newsom tweeted that we should “continue the work” of Charlie Kirk and honor his memory. This morning, centrist columnist Ezra Klein published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics The Right Way.” Both paint a portrait of an open-minded Kirk, a man of dialogue and principle. But this is not his legacy. To call for “continuing his work” or to praise how he “practiced politics” is to erase what that work actually was: a relentless campaign of hate directed at LGBTQ+ people, racial and ethnic minorities, and anyone who refused to fall in line.

I first reported on Charlie Kirk years ago, at the beginning of the modern anti-LGBTQ+ panic—back when Riley Gaines was rising to far-right fame and her fifth-place swim finish was weaponized against transgender people. In one interview with Gaines on Real America’s Voice, Kirk railed against “the decline of American men” and blamed it for transgender equality. Then he added that people should have “just took care of” transgender people “the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s.” Let’s be clear about what that meant: the 1950s and 60s were not kind to transgender people. The “standard treatments” were lobotomy, shock therapy, and involuntary institutionalization. Police commissioners openly described queer people as “a cancer in the community” and promoted “vigilant detecting.” Violence was the norm. So when someone calls for “continuing his work” or praises him for “practicing politics the right way,” this is the work they are honoring.

Charlie Kirk’s violent rhetoric toward transgender people in that clip was not an aberration—it was his brand. He preached hate and violence as a matter of routine. In another interview, he mocked Christians who followed scripture about loving their neighbor, scoffing that God also “calls for the stoning of gay people,” which he described as “God’s perfect law.” This was not a slip of the tongue. Hate was and continued to be central to his message. So when people invoke Kirk’s “work” and urge us to carry it forward, when they valorize him as some open-minded political figure, this is what they are valorizing: praising violence, contempt for human dignity, and the politics of fear dressed up as principle.

Later in 2023, Kirk took the stage at a megachurch to unleash a tirade against transgender people. He called them an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God,” before turning his venom on swimmer Lia Thomas, citing scripture to brand her the same. It was the kind of hate-speech pulpitry we remember from the most virulent anti-LGBTQ+ preachers of the 1990s—rhetoric meant not to persuade but to dehumanize. This is Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a campaign to eradicate entire classes of people from public life. It is not dialogue, and it is certainly not something that deserves to be honored or continued.

Charlie Kirk’s hatred was hardly confined to transgender or queer people. In one interview, he said the first thing he thinks when he sees a Black pilot is, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.” In another, he called for the man who assaulted Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be bailed out of jail. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the very legislation that made possible the civic life so many now falsely lionize him for defending. He infamously said a few gun deaths were worth his second amendment rights in the aftermath of a school shooting. He even derided empathy itself as worthless, a sentiment that has since metastasized into a broader far-right project to strip empathy education from schools. This is not a man to be admired. This is his legacy.

Charlie Kirk was not “practicing politics the right way.” His work should never “be continued.” He embodied everything corrosive about American politics today. He turned the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ panic of the 2024 election into the centerpiece of his message, fueling many of the political ads that blanketed the country—ads rooted in narratives he and his network of far-right allies manufactured. He called for Nuremburg trials of gender-affirming care providers. He started a “professor watchlist” which called on his followers to report “leftist propaganda” in the classroom, which reportedly led to the families of those on the list being terrorized with death threats. His model of politics was not dialogue, but trolling: hopping from campus to campus to bait students, churn out sound bites, and spread hate. And his rhetoric was not debate—it was violent, dehumanizing, and designed to put targets on people’s backs.

You can stand against political violence, as anyone with a conscience does. You can call for a politics rooted in kindness—something we desperately lack today, and something I know the absence of intimately as a transgender person who has lived under the weight of rhetoric like Kirk’s. You can and should condemn killing over speech. But to ask that people carry on Kirk’s “work” is a bridge too far. We must not valorize his life. We must not sanitize his hate. Not now. Not ever.