BY HANK REICHMAN

Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die.  As so many have pointed out, political violence—whatever the source—must be condemned for both its immorality and its destructiveness.  Much as I have abhorred Kirk and the movement he represented, we are all worse off today than we were before he stepped to a podium in Utah for his final appearance.  Like my fellow blog coeditor Matthew Boedy, who has a book on Kirk coming out this month, “I certainly did not consider him my enemy or any type of negative thing.”  But too many pundits notwithstanding, Kirk is no martyr.  Nor can he be taken as a model of “genuine discourse” and “good faith debate,” to quote Gov. Gavin Newsom, one who “argued with civility” and practiced politics “in exactly the right way.”

I wasn’t planning to add to the cacophony of commentary on Kirk, both laudatory and critical.  For plaudits, one can hardly get more concise (and ridiculous) than this, from Ron DeSantis’s New College horror show (yeah, go click on it).  From the critical (and more intelligent) side, the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates did such an exquisite job scrutinizing the man’s rhetoric that it might seem like nothing more need be said.  “Kirk’s politics,” Coates demonstrates, “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.”

Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.”  He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.”  Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti.  Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.”  These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.”  The only hope was Donald Trump, who had to prevail, lest Haitians “become your masters.” . . .

In 2022, when Kirk was frustrated, for instance, by the presence of Lia Thomas on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team, Kirk did not call for “spirited discourse.”  Instead, while discussing a recent championship tournament, he said he would have liked to have seen a group of fathers descend from the stands, forming “a line in front of [Lia] Thomas and saying, ‘Hey, tough guy, you want to get in the pool? ’Cause you’re gonna have to come through us.”  Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump’s deployment of federal troops to DC.  “Shock and awe.  Force,” he wrote.  “We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.”  And in 2023, Kirk told his audience that then president Joe Biden was a “corrupt tyrant” who should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” . . .

Words are not violence, nor are they powerless.. . .  the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

What we in academia cannot look away from and what surely needs more attention, however, are Kirk’s actions, rarely dwelt upon by commentators who seem to buy the line that his main activity involved debating opponents on campus.  But if Kirk made a name for himself at all it was, first and foremost, not through his campus visits and staged confrontations with opponents—mostly setups—it was through his founding in 2016, via his organization, Turning Point USA, of the infamous Professor Watchlist, a website that lists faculty members and some graduate students that according to TPUSA “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” a site that still exists and continues to make “a living hell” of the lives of scholars it so capriciously lists and labels.

In short, Kirk got famous (and rich) by founding a blacklist.  For those unfamiliar with Professor Watchlist, its listing of alleged lefitst professors was based largely on rumor and innuendo.  For some, the listing could be just little more than an annoyance–indeed, at one point the AAUP spearheaded a campaign to get faculty members to demand their inclusion.  But for others–especially women, LGBTQ, and faculty of color–listing could lead to sustained campaigns of doxing and harassment.  As one victim put it after Kirk’s death,

See, Charlie Kirk was a good guy who should be honored because he valued free speech,” Cohen wrote on Facebook last week.  “So much so, in fact, that he put me and many of my friends and colleagues on his Professor Watchlist.  No, not because he wanted us targeted — why would you think that you cynical fool?!  Rather, because he was being so kind and thoughtful to highlight our work for his rabid, highly-armed rightwing extremist audience.  I’m so grateful for all he did to promote us to this new group of people!”  In an interview, Cohen said he won’t celebrate anyone’s murder, but that people shouldn’t forget what Kirk did when he was alive.

“There’s been so much hypocrisy with how his death’s being covered,” he said.  “He’s being touted as this paragon of free speech who just wanted to engage with people who disagree with him.  In fact, he was behind a website that targeted those who he disagreed with and broadcast information about us to his extremist readers with the clear intention that they should take some kind of action against us.”

In March 2020, as college instruction moved online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kirk called on students to submit videos and screenshots from online presentations, declaring that “now is the time to document and expose the radicalism that has been infecting our schools.”  This was too much for some conservatives.  None other than the Charles Koch Foundation, for example, declared that “inciting harassment against scholars isn’t just wrong at a time when many are seeking out new ways to engage their students during a crisis, it’s always wrong.”

Again, Kirk’s Professor Watchlist was and still is a blacklist, plain and simple.  That it has only infrequently succeeded in costing those it lists their jobs—the hyper-Zionist Canary Mission has probably out-performed Kirk’s creation at that—by no means vitiates its vile and vicious impact.

Remarkably, in the New York Times‘ extensive obituary for Kirk, Clay Risen failed even to mention the Professor Watchlist.  Nor did Ezra Klein, in his notorious Times apologia for Kirk.  “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true,” he wrote.  “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.  He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.  He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”  Perhaps Klein thinks publishing blacklists is not a form of “practicing politics,” but if it is—and, well, it most surely is—it’s clearly a means of practicing politics in precisely the wrong way.  If the Professor Watchlist is an example of practicing politics “the right way,” then someone, perhaps Klein, owes Sen. Joseph McCarthy and HUAC apologies.

And then there is Laura Rosenbury, president of Barnard College, also in the Times, who, oozing sanctimony, implores us to use the Kirk assassination as an opportunity to “have the courage to explore ideas that diverge greatly from our own” and “engage with the widest possible spectrum of views respectfully, without disruption or violence.”  Pretty rich, coming from an academic “leader” who, as Paul Campos reminds us, banned students from putting signs on their dorm room doors, and who “brought disciplinary proceedings against students who held a non-violent protest against Israel’s war on Gaza, although some of the students being sanctioned apparently weren’t even part of the protest, but were merely walking by at the time, and made the mistake of stopping for a minute or two to listen to the speakers.”  This is the Barnard president who imposed an expression policy that the New York Civil Liberties Union charged “stifles the give and take of political and academic scholarship and is a flagrant example of ‘prior restraint,’ the most restrictive kind of censorship because it curtails speech before it is uttered.”  As I pointed out on this blog, Rosenbury came to Barnard from a stint as dean of the University of Florida’s law school where she negatively distinguished herself for her collaboration with efforts by the university administration to prevent law school professors from testifying before the state legislature in opposition to measures supported by Governor Ron DeSantis and the board of governors.

Yet another Times writer, John Della Volpe of the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, urges Democrats to “take a page” from Kirk’s “playbook.”  Kirk, he assures us, “built a network of belonging, where community came before ideology, and culture became a driving force in politics.  It established chapters on high school and college campuses that gave young conservatives a ready-made social life tied to politics.  Its conferences featured appearances by many of the right’s boldface names and influencers, helping turn activism into a lifestyle.”

At least Della Volpe acknowledges the existence of the Professor Watchlist, but he offers no evidence about how Kirk allegedly constructed his marvelous network.  It surely wasn’t from the ground up.  While membership in TPUSA may have been growing, perhaps making it one of the largest student political groups today, its growth was by no means the result of the sort of patient attention to student concerns and day-to-day organizing that Della Volpe implies.  It came from money, right-wing money, lots of it, which, in turn, came in response to the “success” of the Professor Watchlist.

From the start Kirk’s activities were generously funded by well-heeled reactionary donors, with initial support coming from the late Foster Friess.  But things really took off with the 2016 launch of the Professor Watchlist.  Between July 2016 and June 2017, Wikipedia reports, the organization raised in excess of $8.2 million.  The same year, leaked records found that the group had secretly funnelled “thousands of dollars” into student governments to elect conservatives, often in blatant violation of campus policies.  (Another example of “practicing politics the right way?”)  Donors included Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner, Richard Uihlein, and the Donors Trust on behalf of private donors.  By 2019 donations were approaching $30 million annually.  And the money flow has continued, much of it going to Kirk himself, who upon his death at age 31 was reported to be worth in the neighborhood of $12 million.

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s characterization of the right-wing student movement of the late 1960s in her timely and well-researched monograph, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America, as “an astroturf backlash” may be a similarly apt description of Kirk’s movement.  “The Right’s campus mobilization was less an organic youth endeavor than a top-down directive from funding giants in the larger movement,” Shepherd writes.  Her book documents the “impressive financial support students received from plutocratic donors.”  Rather than independent actors, “students in this astroturf arrangement instead functioned as useful on-campus assets for a network of overlapping leaders associated with the broader conservative movement.”  Plus ca change?

Charlie Kirk was undoubtedly a force and a malign sort of talent to be reckoned with.  But it would be the height of delusion to see him as some sort of model, for either political discourse or political organizing.  Like many in the MAGA movement he was an opportunistic bigot who served the interests of plutocratic sponsors.  He still didn’t deserve to die.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.