With Charlie Kirk’s death, the MAGA movement gains its first patron saint

5 hours ago 3

Opinion

September 14, 2025 — 1.35pm

Irrespective of what views you may have held about American conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, he should still be alive today and tweeting out the worst thoughts known to man.

But more than one thing can be true at the same time. On one hand, political violence of any kind is abhorrent and should be condemned. On the other, Kirk was one of the chief architects of the violent political culture that ultimately claimed him.

Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.

Over the course of a decade, Kirk stood as close to the centre of the machine as possible, doing everything he could to destabilise and fragment American politics. His willingness to spew hate and encourage his large following to distrust, if not outright despise, anyone who didn’t look or think like them, left him holding the matches of a burning house. He dedicated much of his relatively short career to making the world a crueller, more stupid, and more violent place.

It’s impossible to discuss the rightward shift in America’s young people without mentioning Kirk and Turning Point USA, the organisation he led. To the Christian nationalist right, Kirk was a darling. His videos – which regularly racked up tens of millions of views – preaching the gospel saw him become something of a folk hero. He was willing to go into what he called the lion’s den of liberal American campuses and debate his political opponents. In that lens, he was a hero – a man with reasonable conservative views willing to exchange ideas in the name of good, clean democracy.

In the days since his death, a sanitised version of Kirk’s debates have been circulated that ignore his vitriolic hate, his willingness to make life worse for anyone whose ideology did not align with his own. These videos, many of which are being shared by people I grew up with in South Carolina, show Kirk simply as a man talking about scripture and his Christian faith. In this light, he becomes a kind of martyred folk hero, and many people are entirely unaware of just how extreme his views were.

But that’s not really who he was. For whatever reason – be it intentional by the people putting out the videos or the algorithm at play – they have been shielded from the videos of Kirk saying that women should submit to their husbands, that white people are being replaced, that “prowling Blacks … target white people”.

Kirk was the flag carrier of freedom of speech, but only when that speech matched his. He regularly attacked every kind of minority in society. He weaponised identity politics and forced every corner of the US political system to respond to threats he levied. He put together a list of academic staff on campuses that he deemed were enemies of liberty and freedom, and encouraged his rabid band of followers to harass them.

He played a key role in overseeing who got a job with the White House, especially its most fundamentalist figures like J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth. One memorial I read this week, shared by someone I went to summer camp with in high school, recounted his interview with the Presidential Personnel Office where he “came highly recommended by Charlie Kirk”.

He was also, as is now well known, staunchly against any kind of restrictions on gun ownership and use. In 2023, he argued that deaths were an unavoidable consequence of the freedom to own guns, saying, “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

While it’s easy to find condemnation for senseless violence, and feel sympathy towards the wife and young children he leaves behind, it’s difficult to find empathy – an emotion Kirk himself once said, “does a lot of damage”.

Republicans close to Kirk scoffed when Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman was gunned down in Minnesota three months ago. Following her death, Trump failed to express any degree of sympathy or condolence, even refusing to mention Hortman’s name. The same goes for Paul Pelosi – former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband – who was the victim of a home break-in and an attempted assassination in 2022. On that occasion, Trump, Kirk and their band of far-right misfits mocked the seriousness of the crime and called for a “patriot” to bail Pelosi’s assailant out of jail. Yet, now, when it is someone important to them who is senselessly killed, they expect and sympathy and demand valorisation for Kirk.

While it’s tempting to believe this is a problem on both sides of politics, that the right and the left are equally polarised and that this kind of violence is merely a symptom of a broken culture, that is not the case. Every Democratic leader and official condemned Kirk’s murder within hours, and without hesitation.

Republicans, though, immediately blamed Democrats, as if criticism of Trump and his movement – the ordinary work of citizenship – were the provocation. This, even as the president spent the week threatening to invade Chicago and posting images of the city engulfed in fire. The kind of fury they have conjured is not a lapse or a misstep; it is the world they have chosen to make.

The first truth is that Charlie Kirk was a victim, and that is a terrible thing. No one deserves to die for their political speech, and no one deserves to be the victim of political violence. The second is that he did a lot to make America the kind of place where this violence happens regularly. That he was a victim of a kind of violence that he was directly a part of inciting cannot be ignored.

The third is that his assassination, which should only be the stuff of third-world autocracies, will only add to the MAGA movement’s mythology, with Charlie Kirk perhaps their first patron saint.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris Administration for three years.

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