Descent into Darkness

Sep 21, 2025

The exercise in hagiography underway on behalf of Charlie Kirk is breathtaking in scope and audacity. Kirk is in this telling a champion of free speech and open debate, committed to nonviolence, a model of civility and paragon of civic and moral virtue. Suggestion to the contrary is hate speech and tantamount to support of terrorism.

Trump ordered that flags be flown at half-mast on September 14 and announced he will award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna wrote a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson requesting that a statue of Kirk be installed in the Capitol. Media personality Glenn Beck issued instructions on X to stop calling Kirk a conservative activist. He was, says Beck, a civil rights leader.

Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza,” with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader,” or pay monthly fines. (Mackey, Oklahoma Republicans)

Testimony from those who knew Kirk portrayed him as a loving husband, devoted father, and good friend to his friends. That is not in dispute, nor is the moral imperative to condemn his asssassination. Kirk’s ideas, influence, and legacy are.

Charlie Kirk was a pseudo-conservative activist and provocateur. I borrow the term “pseudo-conservative” from historian Richard Hofstadter, who borrowed it from The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 by Frankfurt School philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno and his associates. Hofstadter discussed pseudo-conservatism at length in three essays included in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965): “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt—1954,” “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited—1965,” and “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics.” The relevance of these essays to the present situation is striking.

In the 1954 essay Hofstadter wrote that he borrowed the term because

its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word…
Who is the pseudo-conservative, and what does he want? It is impossible to identify him by social class, for the pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically all classes in society, although its power probably rests largely upon appeal to the less-educated members of the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics.

The book’s title essay is no less relevant. Hofstadter refers to the paranoid style “because no other other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” that he has in mind, using the term “paranoid style” not “in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.”

Charlie Kirk was born in 1993 in the suburbs of Chicago. Kirk’s father, an architect, and his mother, a mental health counselor, were active in Republican circles. Political involvement began early. In 2010 he volunteered in a Republican Senate campaign and protested a price increase for cookies sold in the school lunchroom. Two years later he wrote an op-ed published at Breitbart News on the theme that “our classrooms are slowly becoming political lecture halls with teachers being pawns to further the doctrine of liberalism and ‘equality.’” He was aggrieved by a textbook adapted from Paul Krugman and Robin Wells’s Economics (2nd ed.) used in preparation for the Advanced Placement exam in economics. The economics text, he concluded,

is only a microcosm of the indoctrination children are receiving in today’s public schools, as unionized teachers push a liberal-leaning agenda…Students are being pushed toward an education that demonizes free enterprise while advocating top-down government, deficit spending and class warfare. (Liberal Bias Starts)

The op-ed brought him to the attention of Tea Party supporter Bill Montgomery at Fox News, and he took off from there. In 2012 at the age of eighteen he founded Turning Point USA where after the early focus on economics and animus toward government he evolved into a culture warrior.

The bio note at the end of the Breitbart op-ed identifies Kirk as a high school senior who would be attending Baylor University in the fall. He never made it to Baylor and only briefly attended a community college. Kirk presented his lack of higher education as a credential of authenticity, claiming to represent most of the country as he tapped into grievance about educated elites, disdain for universities, rejection of the ideal of liberal education, and the anti-intellectualism that has had a place in American culture since the colonial era.

Actually, still, the majority of the country does not have a college degree and if I may, you know, bluntly critique the Democratic party, you guys have become so college-credentialed and educated that you guys snobbishly look on the muscular class of this country. (quoted by Speri, How Charlie Kirk turned campuses)

The first is true (Census Bureau Releases). The second is of a piece with conspiratorial narratives about left-wing professors indoctrinating students, racism against white men, the 2016 and 2020 elections, the January 6, 2021, attempt to overthrow the government, vaccines, and the covid pandemic.

Since Kirk’s death the tendency among commentators of moderate and liberal persuasion has been to reflexively preface remarks about him with praise for his advocacy of free speech and willingness to meet and debate those who disagreed with him while passing over the content of so-called debates and the mess of rumor, slander, innuendo, and fabrication that was his calling card. Following are a few examples gleaned from a cursory search. There is much more.

Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson are beneficiaries of affirmative action and thus “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” with the implication that this is true of black women generally (Charlie Kirk Show, posted on X, July 13, 2023).

The Catholic Charities subsidize the crisis on the southern border and “train the sex traffickers how to smuggle the women across the border.” The “American Democrat Party” wants Mexico and the cartels to overrun the country because they hate the country, want to see it collapse, and “love it when America becomes less white” (Charlie Kirk Show, March 20, 2024).

Democrats hate rural and small-town America and want to go after people who live there “the same way that Joseph Stalin went after the kulaks…and they won't stop until you and your children and your children's children are eliminated” (Charlie Kirk Show, March 1, 2024).

“The spiritual battle is coming to the West and the enemies are woke-ism or Marxism combining with Islamism to go after what we call the American way of life.” That American way of life is “Christendom, Christians,” as Charlie Kirk understands those concepts (X post, September 8, 2025).

The “annoying liberal” Taylor Swift might “deradicalize herself” by getting married, submitting to her husband, and having a bunch of children. Perform as Taylor Kelce. “You've got to change your name. If not, you don't really mean it” (Charlie Kirk Show, August 26, 2025).

Elevation of Kirk to a place alongside Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights icon drips with irony in light of what he said about King: “MLK was awful. He's not a good person” (fact-checked by Ibrahim, Loe, Charlie Kirk called).

As for free speech, Kirk said Mehdi Hasan was a neurotic lunatic and prostitute for Pfizer who should be deported because of his views on the covid pandemic (Charlie Kirk Show, August 29, 2023).

Debates staged with earnest but not terribly articulate young people ill-equiped to confront a clever bully whose lines were calculated and well-rehearsed barely came to the level of dorm or bar room argument after a few beers. Hasan Piker is a leftwing political commentator who rose to prominence about the same time as Kirk and was scheduled to debate him at Dartmouth on September 25. Piker described Kirk as “someone who I know—not someone I’m fond of but still, someone that I’ve known for years, someone I’ve debated before” (Wren, What Hasan Piker Told). He described their relationship as “cordial” (Speri, How Charlie Kirk).

Of Kirk and debate, Piker says, “I don’t think he was ever debating for the purpose of finding the truth or from a position of intellectual curiosity…For Charlie, I think the format was more so to just humiliate his ideological opponents.” Piker wrote in a guest essay in the New York Times that Kirk was an “expert” at “[taking] advantage of people’s resentments and [redirecting] them toward vulnerable communities” (Demopoulos, The students who debated). This is borne out by videos featured on Prove Me Wrong at Turning Point USA with captions that boast of Kirk destroying or demolishing hapless opponents.

During one debate, Kirk insisted on the truthfulness of a racist hoax about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. In another, he falsely called the term foetus “just a word for a human being”. He goaded college students, who eagerly stepped up to query or challenge him, with leading questions that were intended to elicit strong emotions—“what is a woman?” and “what is racism?” were two of his go-tos. (Demopoulos)

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is exploited in escalation of the campaign to stifle dissent and go after “radical left lunatics” with prosecutions, investigations, and tax policy. Vance calls for Americans to inform on friends, family, and neighbors who should at a minimum lose their jobs if they engage in speech forbidden by the regime. More than a few already have.

The Jimmy Kimmel affair is a high-profile case in point. Kimmel questioned the MAGA characterization of the assassin and said mean things about Trump in a monologue on the Monday after Kirk was killed. He mentioned Kirk by name once, when he spoke of “the Maga gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it” (Yerushalmy, Holmes, Explainer).

There is at most the implication that Kirk was the victim of a right-wing assassin when by this time authorities in Utah were reporting that according to his conservative family Tyler Robinson had started to lean more to the left, especially in regard to gay and trans rights. Initial speculation about the shooter’s political views had been all over the place with partisans from both sides at pains to show that the killer resided in the other camp. The MAGA crowd was indeed doing all they could to characterize Kirk’s killer “as anything other than one of them.” So were many comrades from my wing of the great divide. Figures on the MAGA right remain intent on “doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s response was egregious: “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead” (Jira, FCC Chair Threatens). ABC and Disney went for the easy way in accordance with the capitalist ethic that the bottom line is the corporate bottom line.

NPR reported on September 13 that already more than thiry people had “been fired, put on leave, investigated or faced calls to resign because of social media posts criticizing Charlie Kirk or expressing schadenfreude about the conservative influencer's assassination” (Jingnan, et al. Charlie Kirk critics). Clemson University capitulated to pressure from Congresswoman and gubernatorial candidate Nancy Moore and Republicans in the state legislature after a campus GOP club shared social media posts following Kirk’s death. South Carolina’s attorney general sent a letter to Clemson’s governing board assuring them they would not be prosecuted under a state law that forbids firings based on political opinions. One employee was fired and two faculty members dismissed (Binkley, College pressured).

The social media twit-o-sphere is a sewer. Reprehensible posts span the social and political spectrum and will get no defense here. Other comments about Kirk are in questionable, sometimes quite bad, taste that merits disregard but not necessarily the same condemnation or consequences:

One screenshot circulated by college Republicans showed a professor of audio technology reposted a message on X the day of the killing that said: “According to Kirk, empathy is a made-up new-age term, so keep the jokes coming. It’s what he would have wanted.” (Binkley)

Note this is not about anything said in the classroom. A reprimand or other proportionate disciplinary action by the professor’s department or the univerity might be warranted. Dismissal as a consequence of political pressure is not.

Vance and Miller “vowed to unleash the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security on unspecified liberal networks they claimed were stoking political violence.” Pam Bondi walked back her initial threat to “go after” and “absolutely target…anyone with hate speech,” pledging to “always protect the First Amendment…When you cross the line from First Amendment to a crime—we will prosecute you” (Ewing, ‘That is not the law’). Where that line lies is up for dispute.

In the most detailed formulation so far, Miller told Fox News on Friday that the administration would unleash “the power of law enforcement” against people responsible for “radicalization,” cultivating “extremism,” spreading “hate,” “fomenting violence,” “trying to inspire terrorism,” or calling their adversaries “evil,” “fascists,” “Nazis,” or “enemies of the republic.” (Saletan, Charlie Kirk’s Rules)

Behind much of this lies the delusion that nongovernmental organizations are promoting and funding leftwing protest and violence. An absurd recent example is Trump’s contention that a woman who yelled at him in a DC restaurant was “a paid agitator.” Why would you need to pay someone to yell at him? There is no shortage of Americans who would gladly do it for free.

The refrain from the regime and too many congressional Republicans is that the left is responsible for all or if not all the overwhelming preponderance of extremist violence. Data from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism and the Cato Institute indicate otherwise.

Tthe ADL Center on Extremism’s annual Murder and Extremism report also found that all extremist-related killings of 2024 were connected to right-wing extremism, with eight of the 13 killings involving white supremacists and the remaining five having connections to far-right anti-government extremists. This is the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings. (ADL press release)

The trend was interrupted in 2025 with fifteen extremist-related murders documented so far, fourteen of them “stemming from the deadly vehicular terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, the first mass killing incident by a domestic Islamist extremist since Sayfullo Saipov’s 2017 bike path rampage.”

An earlier ADL report in 2023 found that

From the 1970s through the 2000s, domestic extremist-related mass killings were relatively uncommon. However, over the past 12 years, their number has greatly increased. Most of these mass killings were committed by right-wing extremists, but left-wing and domestic Islamist extremists were also responsible for incidents. (Murder and Extremism)

A report from the Cato Institute provides data from 1975 to the present:

A total of 3,597 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025. Murders committed in terrorist attacks account for about 0.35 percent of all murders since 1975. Only 79 happened since 2020, accounting for 0.07 percent of all murders during that time, or 7 out of 10,000…

The 9/11 terrorist attacks account for 83 percent of terrorist murders, the Oklahoma City Bombing for another 5 percent.

Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on US soil since 1975…Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. The definition here of right-wing terrorists includes those motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies.
Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists include those motivated by black nationalism, anti-police sentiment, communism, socialism, animal rights, environmentalism, anti-white ideologies, and other left-wing ideologies. Those murders that are politically motivated by unknown or other ideologies are a vanishingly small percentage, which is unsurprising because terrorists typically want attention for their causes. (Nowrasteh, Politically Motivated Violence)

Neither the Anti-Defamation League nor the Cato Institute leans left. Nor does The Economist, which offers useful perspective on analysis of political violence in an article published September 12. The report is prefaced with the warning that “assessing political violence in America is inherently subjective: analysts must determine which forms of violence count as political and assign ideological labels to attackers or victims” (Is “radical-left” violence).

A paper by Celinet Duran at the State University of New York at Oswego who studied political violence between 1990 and 2020 “found that there were far more frequent and deadly attacks by the hard-right than the hard-left, although left-wing violence increased throughout the study period…But those who commit violence often leave a messy trail of resentments that defy easy classification, and some are clearly mentally ill. There is no single definition of political violence and no federal database.”

The Economist article cites Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins who notes that “some social movements in the 1960s were brutally violent but not partisan: ‘It wasn’t that Democrats were on one side of it and Republicans were on the other.’” She points out that “the amount of actual political violence that has occurred [in recent years] is nowhere near what it was in the 1960s.”

She also sees a different trend: attacks against political figures to get attention, not to advance a cause. “A lot of these are people who probably would have committed violence in some way,” she says. “It’s just that our politics has kind of aimed them towards political targets.”

The concluding paragraph of Richard Hofstadter’s essay “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics” hits home.

But, above all, the far right has become a permanent force in the political order because the things upon which it feeds are also permanent: the chronic and ineluctable frustrations of our foreign policy, the opposition to the movement for racial equality, the discontents that come with affluence, the fevers of the culturally alientated who practice what Fritz Stern has called in another connection “the politics of cultural despair”…Its opponents, as men who carry the burdens of government, are always vulnerable to the discontents aroused by the manifold failures of our society. But the right-wingers, who are willing to gamble with the future, enjoy the wide-ranging freedom of the agitational mind, with its paranoid suspicions, its impossible demands, and its millenial dreams of total victory.

In the sixty years since Hofstadter wrote these words, pseudo-conservatives have taken over the Republican Party. They have worked relentlessly to shift the parameters that define the moderate center rightward. Liberals and the left offer a competing array of explanations and blame for pseudo-conservative ascendency but have yet to come up with a strategy to counter it. The wave of mass hysteria has not broken.

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Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
—John Keats

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Keep the faith. Hold the line.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt

David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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