The Kirk Effect: Political Violence in America
by Henry Boehm, Contributor
Imagine an act of political violence. What do you picture? A rogue gunman, an ideological extremist; a sniper shot, a bomb; a politician, CEO, celebrity, wounded, dying, dead. Too often, our images and definitions of political violence are limited to brutal acts by disaffected/radicalized outcasts against the rich, powerful, and famous—violence which is newsworthy for obviously transgressing social norms. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is the most recent and memorable example. In the days and weeks after his death, there has been a concerted effort to whitewash Kirk’s legacy by highlighting his supposed commitment to political debate and dialogue. And it’s not just conservatives who have taken part in this effort: In a New York Times opinion piece, bloodless liberal commentator Ezra Klein praised Kirk for “practicing politics in exactly the right way” by debating his ideological opponents (woke college kids like us). Klein pairs his praise for Kirk with a warning against the spread of political violence in the United States, indicating the January 6 Capitol attack, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as pertinent examples. For Klein, Charlie Kirk’s life and death produced contradictory effects on American democracy—a symbol of healthy civic debate in life, a symptom of contagious political violence in death. But Klein, and others like him, miss the bigger picture. Klein’s narrow definition of political violence prevents him from seeing the violence that Kirk enabled against the poor, powerless, and invisible.
I think it’s necessary to set the record straight just one more time. In his life, Charlie Kirk excoriated the civil rights movement, calling for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He espoused the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, a foundational text for modern white nationalism, which holds that globalist (read: Jewish) elites promote the mass migration of non-white and Muslim people into Western countries in order to replace their native white majorities—Kirk explicitly accused the Democratic Party of “an anti-white agenda” and called for the protection of “white demographics in America.” At various points, Kirk was unable to hide the antisemitic subtext of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, claiming on his podcast that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.” Of course, Kirk’s antisemitism did not interfere with his support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Fundamentally, Kirk’s politics were characterized by virulent bigotry against the most powerless in American society: non-white immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, Black people, and women, among others. The violence he enabled through his influence on the MAGA movement and Trump administration targeted these most vulnerable groups. A prime example is the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, a central plank of the Trump administration and a policy which Kirk advocated tirelessly. Deportation as a process is undoubtedly violent:
People are abducted from their homes and communities by men with guns to be imprisoned in facilities where they are abused, neglected, and separated from their loved ones—including parents from children—before being shipped hundreds of miles away to a country they may never have stepped foot in. Deportation is rarely granted the appellation “political violence” not because it is peaceful. In fact, it is for the opposite reason. Deportation is a kind of violence so regular and routine that its nature is invisible to us. The process is legal and its targets are perceived as legitimate, so Americans will generally look the other way.
With an expanded consideration of what constitutes political violence, the whitewashing of Charlie Kirk’s legacy as a paragon of American politics can be handily dismissed. In life, Kirk was responsible for unleashing a wave of violence against not only undocumented immigrants, but also against LGBTQ people, Muslims, and people of color, and even non-Americans—consider the Palestinian population of Gaza whose annihilation by Israel Kirk so passionately defended. Kirk died as he lived: making the world more ugly, dangerous, and unjust, an enabler of political violence against the poor, powerless, and invisible.
