The far-right podcaster’s work and words, in context.
Far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk’s death on Sept.10 set off a firestorm of debate about his life and legacy. Republicans have lionized the slain podcaster as a martyr and a civil rights leader. Democrats have normalized this idea of Kirk as a reasonable debater. The debate, however, appears to miss a few key points.
Author’s Note: As a journalist and MSU Denver student from the USA but currently residing in Ireland, I have the ability to look at Kirk’s work from both an outside and inside lens.
Kirk was killed while speaking to a group of students at Utah Valley University. His last recorded words, which took place at the event in the moment before he was shot, were “Counting or not counting gang violence?” in response to a question about gun violence.
He died doing what some have termed his “work.” Utah’s Gov. Cox told Deseret News, “I think honoring the things that [Kirk] stood for — which are passionate debate, free speech, a competition of ideas — that go back to the very founding of our nation.” An official statement issued by California’s Gov. Newsom stated, “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”
However, this bipartisan image of Charlie Kirk as a peaceful activist who engaged with others in serious debate doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Kirk instead promoted hate speech and far-right propaganda to his primarily college-aged audience.
Mary McAuliffe, an Irish gender studies professor at University College Dublin, stated after Kirk died that the activist’s killing was “deploring” but did not excuse the “violence against women, gays, trans people, migrants and people of colour that Kirk’s rhetoric caused.”
“The, what seems to be, targeted killing of right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk is going to destabilize the U.S. even more,” McAuliffe warned. “Although a through-and-through gun rights advocate himself, even if it meant murders and school shootings, his killing is not to be celebrated. Most, I hope, would agree that gun violence has no place, and killing even the most awful of opponents is not the way to uplift a democratic society.”
There are numerous examples of Kirk promoting racist, transphobic, and misogynistic ideas on his podcast, as McAuliffe alludes to. Here are a few.
- “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” – July 2023
- “I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it. We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.” – December 2023
- “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” – May 19, 2023.
- “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.” – August 2022
- “I don’t affirm delusions. You do not affirm what is harmful or what is not true. And you must find the underlying issue as to why this is happening…Young women have always been more prone to social contagions, and transgenderism is a social contagion.” March 10, 2025
- “The Civil Rights Act, though, let’s be clear, created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon.” Dec. 2023
- “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” – Jan 23, 2024.
The list goes on. Not only do these statements betray the characterization of Kirk as someone who debates in good faith, but they also misrepresent some of the most pressing issues in America today.
Of course, it is not a fact that Black Americans are somehow more violent or more criminal. That line of thought is incredibly racist and massively disproven.
FBI crime statistics, which are impacted by the ongoing legacies of structural racism, including in policing, show that most crime is committed by white Americans. This means that, despite the USA’s criminal justice system being more likely to target and unfairly charge people of color with crimes, white people are still the largest block of criminals.
A report from the Prison Policy Initiative, dated Dec. 19, 2024, stated that, “people of color — and Black people in particular — were more likely to experience police-initiated contact, including street stops, traffic stops, and arrests.” PPI continues, “Not only were Black people disproportionately likely to experience traffic stops and arrests, but they were also more likely to experience enforcement actions.”
Experts have criticized this racist structure for years. For example, the Vera Institute of Justice published a brief in 2018 stating, “These racial disparities are no accident, but rather are rooted in a history of oppression and discriminatory decision making that have deliberately targeted black people and helped create an inaccurate picture of crime that deceptively links them with criminality.“
Kirk also hated immigration and largely saw immigrants as lesser, in alignment with his white supremacist alliances. Vernellia R. Randall, an Emerita Professor of Law at the University of Dayton School of Law, discussed those alliances:
“The evidence remains overwhelming: Kirk and TPUSA did not need to wear hoods or wave Confederate flags to advance the logic of white supremacy.” Randall continued, “By denying systemic racism, vilifying movements for justice, and legitimizing extremists, Kirk and his organization reinforced the architecture of racial dominance in America. That was the through line of his political project.”
Defining Kirk’s legacy, Randall also stated, “His legacy is not simply conservatism. It is a record of advancing ideas and practices that aligned with white supremacy, even if he never wore the label himself.”
He had pushed the racist, debunked, conspiracy theory called “Great Replacement Theory,” which falsely alleges that white people are being replaced by some sort of conspiracy to forcibly unwhite the children that are being born.
Kirk spent a large amount of time making monsters of trans people and demons of their healthcare providers.
Do people usually call diabetes medicine, some of which function by replacing specific hormones or simulating the effects of such hormones (like insulin) on the human body, an “evil” that was perpetrated, like Kirk did about trans people and their medicine, including hormones? No.
In response to Trump’s second administration unconstitutionally withholding congressionally authorized funds (this kind of order is called an impoundment) to the Trevor Project as part of suicide prevention efforts, Kirk said, “Trevor Project is a racket and evidence has shown they affirm Trans kids further on a cycle of delusion.”
This is Kirk categorically stating that trans people are delusional, and coming out as against mental health supports and trans people both.
He also used economic anxieties as a mechanism to further demonize trans people.
“There’s a direct connection to inflation and the trans issue,” Kirk said on his podcast in April 2022. “You say, ‘Charlie, come on. They couldn’t be further apart.’ No, they’re exactly the same. They’re the same in this aspect—when you believe that men can become women, why wouldn’t you also believe that you could print wealth? If you believe that someone can change their gender, why wouldn’t you also believe that money is wealth?”
First of all, people can and do change both their gender and their sex. For example, hormone replacement therapy changes gene expression and blood markers, in addition to providing secondary sex characteristics in alignment with the desired sex.
Second, the idea that Kirk is using here about “printing wealth” relies on scientifically unsupported claims about inflation and money volume. Jonathan Kadmon of the economic literacy non-profit Real Progressives has stated, “There is no relationship between the quantity of money and inflation.”
Third, people merely living their lives and having bodily autonomy, while too often dependent on access to money in a privatized, for-profit healthcare system, is not causally relevant to macroeconomic phenomena like inflation. Economist Fadhel Kaboub has stated multiple times that inflation is about real resource constraints, not the amount of currency in existence.
Trans people existing isn’t a constraint on real resources, and Congress, not trans people, constitutionally has the sole power of the purse to control currency creation and destruction in the U.S.
Another economist, Warren Mosler, has argued that government spending isn’t inherently inflationary and that, for example, the passage of Medicare For All would be deflationary and require lower taxes from an economic perspective.
Further, Kirk’s vision of how to handle trans equality was clearly stated by Kirk on his show- “These people are sick.” He said in an interview with Riley Gaines on his show from Aug. 2022, “I blame the decline of American men- this never should’ve been, someone should’ve just taken care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s. But, you know, as testosterone rates go down and men start acting like women and don’t do anything.”
Kirk’s words here were to demonize trans people, blame them for some sort of unspecified “decline” in men, say that women don’t do anything- a patriarchal framing, and advocate for a return to the 1950s.
It isn’t clear from his statement alone which part of the 1950s he meant, whether the segregation, the forced institutionalization of minorities and mentally ill people, and/or the inability of women to legally have their own bank accounts and financial privileges, even as citizens.
However, from the context of his extensively documented public remarks, it could be all of the above.
On Aug. 28, Kirk tried to link all trans people to mass gun violence, and stated, “The evil perpetrated on young people by the trans medical industry is something future generations will look upon with horror.”
This, combined with his other comments on trans people being a “social contagion” is a pattern of Kirk repeating misinformation, anti-LGBTQ+ hate, and junk science using his platform.
In response to the billionaire singer Taylor Swift announcing her engagement, Kirk tweeted, “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
Kirk also stated that “stoning” gay people is “God’s perfect law.” According to the Wisdom Library, “In Christianity, the concept of Perfect law reflects an ideal legal framework.”
This means that Charlie Kirk stated that he believed public violence and murder against gay people is an ideal legal framework by calling it “God’s perfect law.”
He said in an April 2023 event in Utah, “I think it’s worth 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.”
