By Gary Houchens
The murder of Charlie Kirk has hit me like a ton of bricks. It feels very personal. Of course, this kind of political violence impacts every American, but I was a bit surprised at my own deeply emotional response.
While I was aware of Charlie Kirk and his work, I didn’t know the man. I had never heard him give a speech. I didn’t follow him on social media. He was a generation younger than me. He was a professional activist whose mission field was college campuses, while I am a college professor whose activist mission tends to be in the world of K-12 education.
While we are both “men of the right,” my own level of influence is a sliver of Kirk’s. I’m barely known at the state level, and then within the narrow domain of education policy. Charlie Kirk was a massively popular influencer at the national and even global level.
I have been in higher education long enough to see leftist ideology take over college campuses and drive conservative voices into the shadows or completely out of the universities. So of course, I was heartened when Turning Point USA, which Kirk founded, began to open chapters across the country, finally giving young conservatives a strength in numbers to finally share their views in the open.
I was especially proud when, in 2024, the Turning Point chapter on my campus invited Kyle Rittenhouse to speak, and while there was a massive chorus of voices seeking to silence him and cancel his presentation, my university insisted that we would be an institution committed to viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech.
The Rittenhouse speech was a great example of Kirk’s approach: hosting a campus event that its sponsors knew would provoke the worst instincts of their opponents yet doing so in a way that utilized freedom of speech and argumentation as its key strategy for winning the public argument.
This seemed to be central to Charlie Kirk’s style. Watching videos of him interacting with hostile students on campus this morning, I was struck by his intelligence, charm, and generosity. He seemed genuinely committed to overcoming his opponents through reasoned debate and effective persuasion. In this sense, he was a great model for young people seeking to engage in public discourse in productive ways.
But of course, he was also a provocateur, a talent that in our social media-soaked era is also probably key to his success. It was one such provocative statement on Kirk’s part that caused me to quietly end my own brief affiliation with the Turning Point chapter at my university.
In January 2024, Kirk made statements attacking Martin Luther King, Jr. and questioning the legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Kirk called on his followers to reject MLK as an American hero.
MLK was a complicated figure, to be sure, and I understand the argument Kirk was making about the unintended consequences of federal civil rights legislation, but the Civil Rights Act marked a major public policy victory over one of the great lingering evils of the modern age. Strategically, rhetorically, and historically, I thought Kirk was deeply mistaken to take this stance, and I felt compelled to disaffiliate with the organization as a result.
Not for a second did I think Kirk was a racist for his misguided position on Martin Luther King. But accusations of racism, fascism, misogyny, and hate have been part and parcel to the way the left has regarded Kirk, and how many on the left met the news of his murder.
Social media feeds last night were filled with posts either celebrating his death or rationalizing it in some way. The more diplomatic among these commenters would qualify their language with phrases like, “I don’t condone political violence, but…” (there is always some “but” to quietly justify or minimize the horror of leftist terrorism), while others just blatantly claimed Kirk got what was coming because of his alleged sins against various left-wing identity groups.
And here, I suppose, is where all of this feels so personal. Because, while I’m no Charlie Kirk, I too have felt the sting of brutal personal attacks for voicing opinions that most ordinary Americans held until just about the day before yesterday.
My life has never been threatened for the political things I’ve written and spoken about, but my livelihood certainly has, and I’m extremely blessed to work at a university that values and defends intellectual diversity (colleagues elsewhere have not been so blessed). I have faced unfair, questionably legal political repercussions that should embarrass and trouble Kentuckians of all parties.
I have been publicly vilified on social media, sometimes by former “friends,” and on the floor of the Kentucky Senate chambers by people who have never met me, with attacks on my character, my motivations, and my professional competence, all for my views on things like school choice, the relative size of the federal government, and the legal definition of marriage.
And of course I am not alone. For a generation or more, I have watched people on the left condemn every position even slightly right of center as fascist, dangerous, and bigoted. I know because, sadly, I was a person who used to make those kinds of false claims.
Political philosopher Yoram Hazony has written how this persistently false narrative about conservatives has the effect (perhaps intended) of delegitimizing the views of half the population. If you can dismiss a person’s views as hateful and beyond the moral pale, then you are justified in using institutional power to silence them. It’s not a stretch to then justify killing them if they can’t be silenced through other means.
Of course, the right has its own version of this pattern too. But the shamelessness with which so many people on the left, included people among our professional elites, feel free to condone violence to meet their political goals, is simply unparalleled on the right.
It makes me wonder, if someone took my life because of my perceived political views, would there be people who celebrate or rationalize it publicly (or privately)? As unlikely as this scenario seems given my relatively small role as a public conservative, I think the answer is yes. And that is deeply troubling, not just for me personally and my family, but for what that means for our democracy.
It’s especially grievous that so much of the vitriol directed at me, Kirk, and others is based on frankly false claims. Even if Kirk held truly reprehensible views, that would not justify violence against him, but he is not, in fact, a racist or misogynist, or any of the other terrible descriptors used against him.
In the hours after Kirk’s murder last night, it was revealed to me that a person who is very close to me personally has held a range of assumptions about things they thought I believe that are utterly incorrect. Not one word of the things they thought I believed was true.
If such deep misunderstanding is possible among those who love each other, what ocean of false assumptions are we harboring toward strangers we perceive as our opponents? What hope do we have for salvaging the American republic when we consider our interlocutors monsters?
I debate hard on the issues that matter to me, and I certainly think there are some ideas promoted by the political left that are frankly evil. But I try my best not to see the people who hold those views as evil. We have all been mistaken about things in the past, and we are all capable of growing and changing, and I am committed to using reasoned debate and civil persuasion to change minds and hearts.
There have likely been times, when under attack myself, that I have used less than noble rhetoric toward my attackers, and for that I repent and vow to do better. But in general, I try to stay committed – and I now renew my commitment – to engage those who disagree with me with respect, calm, and reasoned arguments, just like Charlie Kirk was doing yesterday when he was gunned down.
If we don’t repent – all of us, but especially our friends on the left – of the tendency to frame our opponents as moral monsters, Charlie Kirk will only be the first martyr in the bloodbath to come. Many more of us will follow.
Lord, save us from ourselves. Show us a better way.
Gary W. Houchens, Ph.D., is professor in the School of Leadership and Professional Studies and Director of the Educational Leadership doctoral program at Western Kentucky University. From 2016-2019 he served as a member of the Kentucky Board of Education.