THOMAS LARSON

(Written October 2, 2025)

The tornadic hullabaloo over Charlie Kirk’s “assassination” and the fight over his legacy has earned a spot in the annals of selective listening. Kirk was a free-speech firebrand who promulgated rightwing anti-diversity values, Christian Nationalism, and women’s traditional roles; he was also a popular lecturer and podcaster, that is, until he was murdered while speaking before thousands on a college campus. We know that free speech and hate speech, the biased and the vile, are protected by law, which citizens largely agree on.

The rush to burnish Kirk’s legacy came, expectantly, from those who were devoted to him. Most beloved was his provocation, “Prove me wrong”—a carnivalesque come-on to incite engagement with ideas and ideologies he opposed; he believed his arguments were so well informed and deftly numerable, no one could match him. He had the true believer’s quality—heroic, overbearing, dangerously convinced, a Biblical view of how men and their families should comport themselves today.

The controversy about his legacy was to honor his free-speech advocacy and herald his views. For his supporters, the two couldn’t be separated. But for others, despite his cunning rhetoric, his ideas were assailable. If you acknowledged his sermonic power but you abhorred his bigotry, well, you were likely shunned, canceled, or fired, especially if you held that his argumentative skill and his chauvinism chafed with dissonance.

Listening and not listening fit squarely into John Keats’s instruction to hold contradictions in our minds as a sign of maturity. That’s how I heard the Kirk controversy between his right to say what he wished and those who heard his wishes as contemptuous, not unlike other bigots like George Wallace, William F. Buckley, and Tucker Carlson. (Perhaps waiting to opine on the Kirk’s odious nature, well after he was lain to rest, is the wiser course.) The approved validators castigated critics ruthlessly and effectively: One study found that 600 people lost their jobs because they posted a remark ranging from “good riddance” to "the moral authority of the Israeli army in Gaza." Why the vitriol? Perhaps this statement from Kirk explains it. 

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. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

Unfortunately—next to the word some—speaks to what’s not said, what’s implied, that gun violence is a necessary obscenity of American life, thus, another reason for defensive carrying. Oh yes, there is context. Kirk’s comment came one week after three children and three adults were slain at Chistian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.