The Opinions - The ‘Fork in the Road’ After Charlie Kirk’s Death

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

Following the killing of the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk, the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle talks to the Opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French about how to remember Kirk honestly and rising political violence in the country.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Kristina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And I'm back this week with my fantastic colleagues, columnists Jamel Bowie and David French. Guys, hello. Hey, Michelle. Hello there. So I want to jump right in to the big story of this week, which is kind of

heartbreaking. So the influential young conservative Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. So Kirk is well known for his conservative political organization, Turning Point USA, and his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. President Trump has said of Kirk, quote, no one understood or had the heart of the youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. So I want us to talk today about not just Kirk, but also the rising political violence. the country. And the usual time stamp, we are taping on Thursday, so events will almost certainly have changed by the time everybody hears us. So first off, I guess, Jamel, what did you wake up thinking this morning? What did I wake up thinking this morning? I've had two thoughts,

two main ones. One regarding Kirk and one regarding political violence. The one regarding Kirk is that you know it's quite easy to condemn the circumstances of his death I don't think anyone thinks anyone should be shot and killed and we don't really have a motive or

anything so I hesitate to say shot and killed for his speech like we don't really know but a political figure being killed is a terrible tragedy but I also think that some of the remembrance of Kirk is

edging in the hagiography. And it seems that people are forgetting, if they ever knew, the kind of work that Kirk did, which was the maintenance of watchless for professors who violated conservative orthodoxy, which was demands for the state suppression of his political opponents, which was spreading really awful stuff about racial and gender minorities. And so I've also been somewhat troubled. by the sort of eulogizing of Kirk as a champion for discourse and dialogue, because I don't think that stuff constitutes the kind of discourse and dialogue we want to see in our country. I guess I want people to both hold two ideas in mind, which is that this

was a tragedy, but that doesn't somehow mean we should airbrush Kirk's legacy. I took the occasion this morning to read the Times obituary for Father Colin. So I just pulled it up on Times machine, which New York Times subscribers have access to. So Father Colin, of course, Charles Colin was a famed radio demagogue of the 1930s. It's viciously anti-Semitic and bigoted in many ways and had a huge following through the 1930s. And it was interesting to read the obituary, which both recognized his influence and important. but didn't shy away from the reality of the man. And this is how I feel about Kirk.

We can recognize his influence. We shouldn't shy away from the reality of the man. As for political violence, I find myself wanting to remind people that the United States has a long history of endemic political violence. And although we do seem to be approaching the return of higher levels of political violence,

it's kind of important for us not to indulge the fantasy that this is somehow foreign to our experience. It's very much part of the American experience. Well, hearkening back to 1968,

which was the year of political violence, right? I mean... But even before that, right, you can read, you know, Lincoln's Lyceum speech where he's decrying mob violence against

people who disagree with prevailing views, right? Elijah Lovejoy, you know, slaughtered for publishing abolitionist tracks. Like,

tarring and feathering during the revolution. I mean, it's sort of a recurring part of our experience. Okay, David, what about you? I mean, you've written just this week, turned around a magnificent kind of look at Kirk and what he meant to the conservative youth movement. What have you made of all of this early kind of remembrance? Yeah, there's a few things.

One, going back to Jamel's point, when I wrote, I have a piece that was published this morning, the Thursday morning about Kirk and about the assassination. And Charlie and I had a lot of disagreements. You know, we represent very different parts of the broader American right, and there were a lot of disagreements there. And I chose not to highlight those in that discussion. I mentioned that we had disagreements, but I chose not to highlight them for a pretty specific reason, which is that when you're looking at the shock and horror and trauma of what just unfolded on that college campus, that the gravity of that is so much greater than the disagreements that I had politically,

that I didn't want to foreground those in this moment because I wanted to rest on the most important thing and the most important things, plural, which is the gravity of the loss of a husband and a father, and also how and where it happened. And so the thing that really is sticking with me when I got up this morning is this happened on a college campus. It happened during a debate or a debate-type event on a college campus. And it was people, rather than hashing these things out, one person chose to end the conversation with a bullet.

And the fact that this occurred on campus, the fact that it occurred in front of thousands of students. And the fact that it occurred to a person who, as I wrote in my piece, has an all, he's almost omnipresent in politically interested Gen Z or social media feeds. It's very difficult to find a Gen Zier who plays any attention to politics at all who doesn't know who Charlie Kirk is, just virtually impossible. All of those things together, I think, mean that this is a more seminal cultural event than we might otherwise think.

What are students going to be thinking about debate on campus now? What is, you know, people who speak on college campuses, and I know all of us here or do, how do we feel approaching an event on a college campus now? These college debates, these college discussions, these are some of the, this is some of the lifeblood of our democracy. And when you had a murder in the middle, in the middle of a college event, in addition to the tragedy, horrific tragedy impacting Charlie and his family and his friends,

we have this radiating impact into the culture as well, specifically into the culture of the college campus. And this is something that I've been thinking about is that it's the horror of the moment and then the radiating impact that we're going to have on American discourse. I take that observation. I take that point about the consequence and the weightiness of this particular incident. My response here is less about those making that point, and more about what I sense is a kind of sanctification of Kirk as this exemplar of dialogue and discourse in the country. And I just, I don't think that's an accurate picture of the man who lit.

And, I mean, you know, he was prolific. So it's not particularly difficult to get a good sense of what Kirk believed about things and whose stated beliefs were, in essence, that people of his ideological persuasion ought to be able to suppress the views of the people they don't like. That's what the professor watch list was, something his organization continues to maintain. a watch list of professors and instructors and adjuncts and whomever is in the college campus of their speech for saying things he doesn't like and saying things the organization doesn't like. And it's been strange to me to see Governor Gavin Newsom praise Kirk as having been committed to good faith discourse and then read an entry on this watch list of a professor not speaking in the classroom, speaking as a, you know, private citizen in his own life. And then at the bottom of this entry, it says,

contact this guy's employer to harass and maybe try to get him fired. I want people to basically be able to do two things at once, to sort of say in line with David, that this was a tragedy for Kirk and his family and his friends, that this should not have happened, that this is very consequential. And at the same time, say, we're not going to airbrush.

this guy's life and this guy's legacy, right, as a political communicator. Well, that is one of the things you see with violence and these sorts of tragedies. It kind of flattens the victim and you create martyrs. I mean, already we're seeing Trump referred to him as a martyr. There's a pastor in Oklahoma who founded the pastors for Trump Network, who said that Charlie died for what he believed in. He died for something greater than just himself. we hope and we pray that Charlie's death is not one in vain,

which is this at all worrying, David? Well, yes, it's all very worrying. I mean, anytime you have an event like this, you do have this kind of fork in the road moment that the shock, the horror, settles in, and then you sort of have this choice. Am I going to use that to stoke rage and hatred and fury against my political opponents,

or I'm going to realize we are walking down the road to oblivion, and I'm going to become a part of a political culture that is going to condemn this unequivocally, commit itself to treating people with decency, even across big differences. Because, you know, one of the things is a political culture can tolerate very large differences against a background of decency.

It cannot tolerate and survive small differences. if the background environment is one that is soaked in violence and hatred. And so one thing that does absolutely concern me is that you are seeing in response the political leaders, the writers, the pundits, all of those people, every living president has put out a statement about this. You know, you're seeing a lot of very responsible, sober behavior in sort of the political elite. Including from characters that you would not necessarily explain. back to like Marjorie Taylor Green. Totally. I mean, you're seeing a lot of calls for calm,

a lot of calls for peace, a lot of calls for reconciliation, and that's one path to walk down. That's the path we should go down. I'm also seeing calls for civil war. I am seeing calls for unrelenting vengeance, mass raids, mass police raids against political opponents. That's your fork in the road. Every time you have political violence, which path you're going to walk, and I'm seeing a lot of people online. Thankfully, not most of your political elites or whatever, but it's still a lot of people online taking that path towards more vengeance, viewing politics, not as an arena of disagreement on important matters, but as a blood feud. And that is what is alarming me. One of the principal things that's alarming me right now. So, Jamal, you mentioned

President Trump. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. And he went further than that, saying that he was going to root all this out. What we have that's new in these situations today that we didn't have, say, you know, in the 60s or before, we have the immediate outlet of social media where we were watching people grieve in real time last night

and rage in real time. And a lot of the responses were appalling, whether it was people gloating over the violence or people calling for the left to be tracked down and destroyed. I'm hoping that, you know, 24 hours in, 36 hours in, everyone will have had a moment to catch their breath. I mean, where do we think this is going? You know, I don't know. It is, I think, simply true that the president and his allies do want the state suppression of their political opponents. I think they're very open about that. I think they're probably looking for some excuse. I doubt this will be the excuse. One thing about these sorts of events, the perpetrator to these events is that contra, I think the desires of some people,

they don't have particularly coherent political beliefs or ideologies. They are acting in ways that are often inscrutable. And so my suspicion is that if and when authorities find the shooter in this case, they're going to find someone whose beliefs are a grab bag of nonsense in the same way that the shooter in Pennsylvania targeting Trump, his views were a bag of nonsense. The same way that so many would be and successful assassins have belief structures that just don't make any sense. And that will make it more difficult to use the event as some kind of rallying cry for a crackdown. One thing I want to say, though, kind of just reflecting on

what David just said, is that if this had happened to someone else, what do we think Charlie Kirk's reaction would have been. It would have been the thing that we're decrying. Yeah. And I feel, you know, maybe it's too soon for this kind of conversation. But in keeping with trying to be honest about Kirk's life as it was lived, I think we should acknowledge that his work contributed to the kind of political atmosphere where people rage about civil war and crackdowns against their political enemies. I do think that I saw a quote from him about decrying political violence. One of the things that's made the rounds is he is saying when we stop talking to each other,

that is when violence occurs or something along those lines. I think there was one. I mean, after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the attacker, he made light of it. I remember there was that. That was disgusting. And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail's like 30 or 40,000 or 40,000 bucks.

Bail him out and then go ask him some questions. Well, this is interesting. It's interesting that you point to Paul Pelosi because one of the things that's different about the Charlie Kirk situation is this is not a politician, right? So it is not Donald Trump. It is not Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, just like Paul Pelosi was not himself in the political arena. Now, Pelosi was, you know, he was kind of collateral damage from somebody who was seeking out his wife, whereas Charlie Kirk was himself the target here. But it does speak to kind of the widening circle

of political violence, right? Yeah, this is something, I'm glad you're bringing that up, because I think that this is a horrific evolution that was inevitable. And one of the reasons why it was inevitable is because the prominence and power position between politicians versus sort of your world of influencers and pundits, et cetera, I think especially on the right, has shifted to the point where a person like Charlie Kirk, I said, I think he might be the single most successful conservative not named Donald Trump

since the Trump era, which Republican elected official had more hold on the Republican public, other than Donald Trump, than Charlie Kirk. Honestly, I think Charlie Kirk had more of a hold on particularly Republican young people than any other Republican politician. And so as sort of the influencer and pundit class and whatever has grown in its power and influence, then you're beginning to look at, okay, in a world of escalating political violence, this was never going to be contained to the politicians. And so I've long felt it's just a matter of time before this happens. And so, yeah, it's crossing a line that was absolutely going to be crossed because of the metastasizing political violence

and the changing way in which power works in our culture right now. Jamel, did you have anything you want to throw in on that? I'm always wary of saying that things are novel. This is the problem with your studying history. You know too much. I guess what I'm struggling with is trying to understand why we've had this nationwide outpouring in the way that we didn't for, you know, the assassination of Hortman in June, right?

In the way that, you know, the intimidation and threats of violence against judges and election workers is basically invisible to most people, right? That we're talking as if there isn't, there hasn't been just beneath the surface for the last five years, you know, maybe political violence not as dramatic as this, but certainly very real and certainly with very real victims. Well, isn't part of that because there is a video of the actual shooting

that might just be it, right? Social media. It happened. So it's not just that he was shot and it is caught in gruesome video images. It's that it was on also a college campus where you, like that triggers something with a lot of the public.

You had all these terrified kids running and recording this and texting people are you safe? And it was just a very dramatic example of what is usually something that people hear very antiseptically after the fact. And for obvious reasons, you don't want to put these images out there unnecessarily. But in this case, you couldn't repress it. It was out there. Yeah. I mean, images matter so much. I mean, there would not have been the reaction to the George Floyd murder that existed, had all the information that we had been a press report. release about it or eyewitness testimony about it. The circumstances combined with sort of the

omnipresence of Kirk in sort of Gen Z America, the place, the images, the video, the audience. I mean, this was a, this was shocking and jolting for a lot of understandable reasons. And one other thing, though, to point out, that's making all of this worse, I'm seeing people continually repeating something online that is the political violence, is all coming from the left. And I'm pretty convinced. I've spent so much of my life living in very, very red areas that a lot of these people who say that, you could put them under a lie detector, and they pass the lie detector test that this is all coming from the left, or that only the left celebrates political violence. And this is coming from a movement that had the January 6th prison

choir opening a recorded track of the national, a version of the national anthem from the January 6th choir, some of Trump's rallies. And then people are saying with a straight face, only the left celebrates political violence. And this is a giant problem. There is a long list of right-wing political violence, deadly right-wing political violence, including mass shootings. And so when you look at it like this, it is so incumbent upon those of us who have a memory longer than a goldfish, speaking of memory, to be able to place this in a context that says, America has a political violence problem, and one of the things that makes America's political violence problem

is when our partisan blinders convince us that my community is the one completely under siege, and your community are the ones who are besieging us. And that that mindset is only causing us to double down on this apocalyptic vision, and that stokes all of that civil war conversation that you're seeing pop up in dark, corners the internet. I mean, that's one of the reasons or the main reason why it was so disappointing

to see Trump go there in his video yesterday about Kirk. I mean, he focused solely on the left, and he drilled down on the idea that his team is under assault. And I do think it probably is something of, not a revelation, but I do think most of the folks on the left would flip that script and say, well, it is absolutely the right that is the problem. It is two different realities that people are functioning in. From an empirical standpoint, so you can categorize stuff, it is the case that more political violence comes from what you would describe as like the right than it does from the left. And I'd say that if you're looking for some kind of, you know, what forces in the culture

have unleashed this. I think you could make a very strong and empirically grounded case that Donald Trump's presence in American politics has had an instigating effect on comfort with the use of violence and violent rhetoric against political opponents.

I don't think that is a stretch. I thought that I have, though, it's just this term political violence and how it's a more amorphous term than I think it appears to be because it tends to designate certain kinds of violence as being political violence, mainly violence against recognizable political figures. And other types of violence or threats of violence is sort of the background noise of American politics,

not necessarily worthy of the designation of political violence. And it excludes violence, you know, from the state against individuals. Like, I think that's a complicated term. And, you know, the extent to which, like, who is the target of violence? violence shapes notions of what constitutes political violence beyond them being a political figure, but just I think it's important to say. So the violence speaks to the fact that, you know, politics is seen as existential. I mean, the House couldn't even have a moment of silence for Kirk without it degenerating

into squabbling. I mean, is there a way that this could help turn down the temperature on that, or are we still just too much in the thick of the fever at this point? I don't think so. And that's because it is my view, right, that the fever, as it were, is not simply the spontaneous result of, you know, all Americans engaging in getting angry at each other. That there are like specific people that we can readily identify who have like made it their work to heighten tensions. At the National Conservative Conference last week, the far right. influencer, activists,

I believe Jack Posobiak spoke on the theme of his book, which is called Unhumans, and the argument of the book is that people on the left are not actually human beings deserving of respect and dignity. And he spoke and received applause.

And this is a gathering of influential people in the world of modern day conservatism. the president of the United States last year during his campaign referred to immigrants and people on the left and any of his political opponents as poisoning the blood of the nation, right? Referring to people he opposes as a little more than vermin. Why would this event lead these people to moderate their rhetoric, moderate the rhetoric, like not speak about people as subhuman? when what we're seeing right now is that they're using it, they're making suppositions about the causes, right?

They're assuming that this was, you know, some left-wing assassin and using it as an opportunity to push forward with this. And I'll say, to be honest, is that like a lot of these figures on the right, their response to Kirk's killing was this, we have to have a solicit. Civil War, we have to round them up. You know, Chris Rufo was doing this.

Like a bunch of these guys were doing this. These were supposed to be Kirk's friends. And his body's not even cold. And they're already weaponizing it. I obviously had no sympathy for Kirk's politics. But I would think that if I were one of his friends who shared his politics, that I would not be using his untimely demise for, you know, my narrow part. artist and political purposes.

And the fact that that is what happened, I think, is a testament to the fact that there's no path from this for these particular people to turning down the temperature. David. One thing that we've not talked about that I think is worth mentioning is that I also see this, there's a danger point here with the shooting, and that it's also an ideal opportunity for social media. The malign, and when I say malign actors on social media to do what they do, one of the things that has become abundantly clearer is that a lot of American political conflict isn't just

driven by terrible people who are engaging in wildly apocalyptic and hateful rhetoric who are real live human beings. But we also have influence operations using social media to take existing cracks and fissures in American life and just blow them up. and expand them. And things like this are ideal opportunities. And so you're starting to see stuff like, well, look at this horrible person celebrated Charlie Kirk's death and they got 44,000 likes, as if that's a genuine measure sort of of what the left is. And we have to realize that some of this isn't real. Some of what's stoking us isn't actually real. And so not only does social media

draw a kind of participant that's not typically representative of your media and American voter, that reality is uncompounded by the fact that some of the people in the social media debate aren't genuine participants even to begin with. And so that's why I think this is in some ways even more perilous because it presents that opportunity for people to utilize our own technology against us once again. All right. So I have to admit that any time something horrible is exploding on social media, my mind automatically goes because this has happened to me with stories and before. I'm like, how much of this is a Russian bot or a foreign influencer or just kind of some sinister, not real American response to this? So I know that makes me sound really

strange and paranoid, but I'm just going to admit that up front. And with that nod to social media and the shadowy forces, I just want to say, I'm glad we're all real people. here. I'm talking through some of our disagreements this week. I really appreciate your thoughts on this, as always, guys. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Michelle. Thank you very much. And I promise I'm not an AI bot or anything. I have my suspicions. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Bishakadarba, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. Edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzick. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones,

Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuoski. The director of Times' opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.