The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons -Barron own blog.

Help me out here.  I’m struggling with conflicting messages about Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and inspirational leader especially to young, college-age conservatives. In our ever-escalating culture of violence, his horrific assassination has become the latest prominent expression of solving political disagreements with the trigger or the blade.

What perplexes me is the extent to which mainstream media, print and broadcast, have leapt to embrace him because he disagreed with people civilly.  My whole career was about civil discussion, encouraging opposing views to WCVB editorials and promoting vigorous clash of ideas on my public affair show Five on Five. I’m all for vigorous debate in the marketplace of ideas, listening thoughtfully to others in ways that have the potential to create understanding and empathy and finding new common ground.

In inviting political dialogue across the aisle and among ideological adversaries, Kirk walked the walk. On that point, the Boston Globe editorialized in effect that we need “more people like Charlie Kirk.”  Or, as Ezra Klein wrote in the NY Times, “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

But don’t we also have to be honest about the content of what he was preaching?

This is a man who criticized civil rights legislation and immigration for fostering the replacement of whites by people of color, vehemently opposed gay marriage, and spoke viciously about non-conforming gender and sexual identity individuals. He echoed Putin’s talking points and dismissed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a simple border dispute. He saw January 6^th insurrectionists as patriots, promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud despite more than 60 court rulings to the contrary, created doxing watch lists of professors and school boards to target for their doctrinaire liberalism. Back in 2023, he was quoted as saying, ” I think it’s worth it. 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.” He blamed Jews for funding Marxist ideas and claimed that “the Democrat Party hates America.”  Perhaps one of my readers can enlighten about any hard right position that Charlie Kirk ever softened as the result of his engaging in his “Prove Me Wrong” debates. No less than President Trump, Kirk inflamed white fear and anger. Again, none of this justifies his assassination.

Let me be clear. Across academia, there is much legitimate criticism for lack of tolerance for conservative viewpoints. It’s also reasonable to deplore the excesses of DEI in some universities, where so much of collegiate life has devolved into identity groups and where cancel culture reigns. But it’s radicalism on both the left and the right that are poisoning this country. I deplore the celebration of Kirk’s death by Tik Tok and other social media outlets. That’s just sick.

President Trump says he lost a dear friend in Charlie Kirk.  “He [Kirk] was an advocate of nonviolence,” Trump said. “That’s the way I’d like to see people respond.”  At the same time, he told reporters that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”  I’ve never heard Trump criticize the radicals in his base. His way on insisting on unqualified reverence for Kirk doesn’t help lower the political temperature. Nor does Vice President Vance in vowing that the administration will go after left-leaning philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation or the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In at least one horrifying poll, it appears that a solid third of college students believe that violence is sometimes justified to settle political disputes. Clearly, language on both fringes does little but stoke rage and fuel the fires of extremism. Equally concerning: a majority of students across ideological lines oppose even having controversial speakers on campus. How are they to learn how to defeat bad ideas with good ideas if they aren’t exposed to a vigorous exchange of ideas? At least Charlie Kirk started out trying to follow that approach.

Still, there remains the matter of content within the appropriate packaging. There’s a line from My Fair Lady, mocking the culture of France. Says Professor Higgins, “The French don’t care what they say exactly, as long as they pronounce it correctly.”  Or as writer Kevin Kruse has noted, the White Citizens Council in the 1960’s held themselves superior to the Ku Klux Klan because of their manners and civility, but their intention was the same: segregation forever. Style matters, and so does substance.

Folks, we do need to talk to each other. We also have to use language that will not inflame. We have to do that as individuals, and we should expect that of everyone in the public sphere as well. We should heed the advice of British writer G. K. Chesterton who warned against letting substantive disagreements (which can be good) morph into enduring personal animosities (which feed political violence). It’s not always easy. But one by one we simply must make it happen.

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