Charlie Kirk was a digital Klansman

Kirk weaponized free speech to terrorize hundreds of academics as part of a campaign to systematically attack Black progress

Left media analysis about Charlie Kirk has ranged from informative though predictable to simply appalling.

There is a pervasive failure to understand how Kirk weaponized free speech to terrorize academics, and that it was the most visible part of a campaign to advance white supremacy and roll back a century of Black social and political progress.

Charlie Kirk was a digital Klansman.

I am intimately familiar with Kirk's strategy because I spent years covering far-right extremism in Portland. Kirk used the exact same model that Andy Ngo used, a right-wing digital provocateur who used deceptively edited videos to inflame hate and target left activists in Portland.

This is not a free speech issue. Even the left media has failed to grasp that Kirk, Ngo, and their ilk learned to weaponize free speech. Six years ago I described Ngo’s terrorist technique, in which he deliberately misrepresented confrontations to incite right-wing violence. Kirk scaled up the technique to a national level.

"The incident [by Ngo] was an example of a disturbing media model for the Trump era: opportunists using biased reporting, social media, and wild accusations inflame vigilante and digital mobs to target “enemies” such as the media, Democrats, and left-wing activists."

At the time, in 2019, I talked to a researcher named Madison who tracked Ngo. They said, "Ngo signals this is a person that should be targeted, should be harassed, and should be threatened. Andy puts a target on them and that results in the person being doxxed. Andy is giving people explicit permission to unleash hatred and violence on people. He absolutely knows what he is doing.”

This is exactly what Kirk did with his Professor Watchlist. Whenever Turning Point decided to target someone, they only had to write an article about them. They knew there is a cancerous dark ecosystem on Redditt, 4Chan, Telegram, X, Facebook, and so on that would take the information and crowdsource a terror campaign against them.

In the last few days, I have seen four academics post accounts about the torrent of harassment they faced when Turning Point targeted them. They received hundreds of emails full of racist and sexist invective. They were bombarded with death threats. They would pick up their phones to people screaming slurs and threatening to kill them and harm their families. Their universities would be barraged with the same assault and demands they be fired.

The harassment spilled over into the real world sometimes with people stalking them, photographing them, and even showing up at their home. Sometimes the university would provide them with security, which is unnerving because it makes real the scope of the threat. People lost jobs and were pushed to the brink of suicide. (I will publish another article with details and examples of how Turning Point targeting led to academics being terrorized.)

Charlie Kirk was the leader of a virtual lynch mob. He never got his hands dirty and would even denounce the harassment, but plausible deniability was part of the game. Mainstream journos are so short-sighted and cowed by the right they never forcefully exposed Kirk's or Ngo's stratagem.

There is some pushback over attempts to beatify him, such as with a decent new article by Jamelle Bouie. But he does not see the bigger picture. Denouncing Kirk as sexist, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, nativist is true but misses the point. It turns Kirk’s strategy into a listicle. His viciousness was in service of advancing an agenda to make U.S. politics and society white supremacist and Christian nationalist. That’s why I call Kirk a digital Klansman.

Anti-Black racism was at the heart of that. Kirk was a general in the MAGA war on Black America. Kirk demeaned, degraded, and demonized African-American people, history, and culture whenever possible. His outpouring of anti-Black racism was not random. He systematically attacked the progress Black people have won through great struggle and sacrifice for a century, and he wanted to reverse it. The Professor Watchlist disproportionately targeted people of color, particularly Black academics. (In 2021, five of the seven Harvard professors on the watchlist were African-American.)

Kirk demeaned the most prominent Black women in America as lacking “brain processing power,” and that they steal “a white person's slot.” He portrayed Black airline pilots as inherently unqualified. He said Blacks were “better off during slavery” and Jim Crow terrorism because it kept their violent criminal nature in check. He was obsessed with “Black crime.” He painted a picture of Black people as subhuman so making them second-class citizens simply reflected their true worth. With his last words on this mortal plane he blamed “gang violence,” a dog whistle for Black people, for rampant gun deaths that he thought were “worth it.”

His free speech was far more than "controversial positions." He was a modern-day Julius Streicher, using the media to demonize Black people and incite violence against them.

Kirk’s work meshed perfectly with Trump’s agenda. Trump and MAGA have many targets in their sights — Immigrants, Latinos, trans people, Muslims, Palestinians — but at heart it’s about anti-Blackness.

Trump is obsessed with cleansing history of both Black progress and the crimes of African slavery and Jim Crow that are fundamental to the making of America. It's why he attacks DEI, is trying to shut down the teaching of Black history, is hellbent on removing the first Black woman to serve on the Fed Board of Governors. And most of all is sending the military to invade Black-majority cities because of a fabricated "crime epidemic." This is not to downplay the ethnic cleansing of Latinos and brown immigrants or the fascist strategy to make life impossible for trans people socially and legally. But apart from Los Angeles, his rage is completely directed at Black cities: D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans.

We are witnessing a reboot of the American Civil War. Not as overtly violent, even if shrouded in rhetorical and performative violence. Trump and MAGA are using the state to systematically mobilize the criminalize justice system, media, academia, and police and military force to subjugate Black people.

In this new war, Charlie Kirk was a general, now a fallen one. He should be remembered as a digital Klansman only worthy of being interned in a cesspool.