The Weekly Sift

In response to Charlie Kirk’s murder, most coverage has fit into one of two polarized bins:

• Kirk was a saint, a free-speech warrior, someone who believed in talking to opponents and practicing politics “the right way“.
• Collections of quotes that paint Kirk as a hate-monger promoting bigotry of all sorts: racism, sexism, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ, and so on.

Neither struck me as the whole story, so I challenged myself to form an independent opinion about Kirk. I listened to his wife’s eulogy for him, I watched most of his conversation with Gavin Newsom, I read as much of his book The MAGA Doctrine as Amazon would show me for free, and I looked for anybody else who had a view of him deeper than a partisan knee-jerk.

This is where I’ve gotten to. Unsurprisingly, I wind up mostly on the cynical side.

In Erika Kirk’s speech, I mainly heard standard Christian evangelism not all that different from what Billy Graham was saying half a century ago: Americans are in a spiritual crisis that can only be solved by turning their lives over to Jesus and living according to traditional gender roles that I don’t recall Jesus ever advocating. Kirk’s brand of Christianity was mostly Christian Nationalism, which I (and many others) believe is a perversion of Jesus’ message.

(For those of you without a Christian education, Jesus had a lot to say about feeding the poor, healing the sick, and living your life according to compassion rather than rules. The gospels paint his opponents the Pharisees as the strict rule-followers. A few years ago, I wrote a post about where I think Christianity went wrong. Later I turned it into a sermon at a Unitarian Universalist church. The sermon is a little better, in my opinion.)

Kirk and Newsom talked amicably (to the point that I was getting angry with Newsom for not challenging some very questionable assertions). Here, the evangelism played a very small role: This was two political operators comparing notes. Still, I heard Kirk’s voice and heard him speak for himself; we should all do that before we pass judgment on people.

The MAGA Doctrine is Kirk’s 2020 take on Trumpism, though I’ve seen no sign that he ever revised his the worshipful view it presents. His political worldview, to me, feels based in resentment: Both political parties are presented as uncaring, and Trump is the revenge of the neglected voter. There is a whiff of traditional conservative rhetoric: small government, individual freedom, and so on. But it’s hard to take seriously given that Kirk stuck by Trump even as Trump was expanding government power and concentrating it in an autocratic presidency. As with so many conservatives, Kirk’s idea of “freedom” was freedom for people like himself, not freedom for everybody.

One thing Kirk was very good at — and this is where all those objectionable quotes come from — was trolling people like me. He played the game of making people angry, then painting himself as the victim of that anger. (And ultimately, he did become the victim of someone who felt trolled. “I had enough of his hatred,” the accused shooter texted to a friend.)

Another thing Kirk was good at was getting funding from the very rich. Erika made a point of how little he had when he started his crusade to win young Americans for Christ (and later Trump), but Turning Point has never lacked for funding. Charlie got his first $50K at age 20 from the multimillionaire Dunn family. He soon attracted the attention of billionaire Foster Friess, and he was on his way. The Dunns eventually contributed millions. The Bradley Impact Fund gave TPUSA $8 million in 2023, and millions more came from a fund connected to Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus.

The ValueWalk website recently estimated Kirk’s net worth at $12 million, including a $4.5 million mansion in Scottsdale.

People sometimes wonder why there’s no Charlie Kirk of the Left. Well, money is one big reason: It’s hard to picture an 20-year-old liberal or socialist running into somebody at a conference and walking away with the funding to start a national organization, much less get rich in the process.

The Voice of Reason blog had an even more cynical take on Kirk’s entrepreneurial nature, painting him as a front for older, richer men.

Here is what really happened. In 2012, a 72-year-old Tea Party activist named Bill Montgomery heard Kirk give a talk at a small local event. Montgomery took one look at this kid with ambition in his eyes and told him to skip college and start an organization. Within weeks, Turning Point USA was born. Montgomery wasn’t just a mentor. He was the co-founder, treasurer, and strategist. In plain English: Kirk didn’t invent Turning Point USA. He was recruited into it by an older political operative who saw in him a useful mouthpiece.

Then came the money. Kirk didn’t scrape together pennies from bake sales. He stalked the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012 memorizing donor faces. That’s how he buttonholed multimillionaire Foster Friess, pitched him, and walked away with a five-figure check. Add in Bruce Rauner, the future governor of Illinois, and the DeVos family, and suddenly this “teenage entrepreneur” had more capital than most actual start-ups. By 2016, Turning Point’s budget had ballooned from $50,000 to over $5 million. That doesn’t happen because of hustle. That happens because deep-pocketed billionaires decide you are worth buying.

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Amanda Marcotte doubts that Erika can keep TPUSA rolling, because so much of Charlie’s following was based on misogyny.

Charlie Kirk was an aspirational figure for his male audience. They wished they could go on campuses and condescend to cute girls, but they knew — they continue to know — that wouldn’t go well for them. They’d get ignored, mocked or worse, have campus security called on them. Charlie Kirk, though, had the charisma, money and organization to tilt the field so that he “won” every encounter — even though the kids that approached him usually had better arguments. He offered a fantasy of male domination. His audience will never accept a woman in this fake “alpha male” role.

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Numerous people noted the similarities between Stephen Miller’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service and the one Joseph Goebbels gave to honor Nazi martyr Horst Wessel.