What does the beatification of Charlie Kirk say about us?

The interview began calmly enough. NPR's Steve Inskeep was talking to Joe Mitchell, a former Iowa state representative and founder of Run Gen Z, a group with the goal of electing young conservatives. Mitchell was a friend of Charlie Kirk, and described him as a mentor.

Inskeep asked Mitchell about his relationship with Kirk, and allowed Mitchell to describe it in some detail. Mitchell said Kirk was "a friend, and he was a mentor. And, you know, Charlie was a God-fearing man, and he was a father and a husband and a patriot and friend to many."

Mitchell described how Charlie Kirk helped him start Run Gen Z. Inskeep was interested in Kirk's role in getting the group going. Mitchell willingly explained, ending with: "And so, you know, again, can't overstate how huge of a impact Charlie had not only in my personal life, but also professionally - Run Gen Z." This was September 11, the day after Kirk's murder. Mitchell was surely grief stricken.

Inskeep then said: "I'm thinking his public persona - Charlie Kirk's public persona is very well known at this point. He was in public so much. He was in front of people or on camera so much. He made a lot of polarizing remarks about people who were different from him or had different views from him, but he also stood in front of people who disagreed with him and engaged with them and took their questions and criticisms and responded. I'm just curious. Having known him over a number of years, do you think that he learned or evolved in any way from his interactions with so many different kinds of people?"

Inskeep's phrasing was about as measured and diplomatic as could possibly be.

Mitchell's voice dripped with incredulous indignation: "Steve, what remarks? What are you guys talking about?"

He continued: "Because here's what happened, Steve, is that he was called a Nazi and Hitler and a fascist for so many years, and that's what led to the shooting yesterday. And it's despicable. What the news media is doing right now is saying that he was so divisive. He said these things. Charlie was the most kindest person in the entire world that I knew. He believed in civic debate more than anybody else that I knew. And so the rhetoric that's been spewed out in the last 24 hours is what led to the shooting yesterday and the execution and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And it makes me just sick to my stomach what's happened. And so people need to get ahold of the rhetoric. They need to understand that what they say has implications. And that's what happened yesterday."

What remarks? Joe Mitchell asked. I suppose we need to list some. Doing so is depressing.

Charlie Kirk said: "The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different." And: "You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated." [my italics -mb]

Like many before him (including Trump), Kirk characterized the vast numbers of migrants (who were overwhelmingly refugees and asylum seekers) at the southern border as an "invasion of the country." Not a swarming teeming writhing out-of-control poorly regulated mass migration of men, women, and children fleeing horrors, but an invasion. Which of course is a threat.

Texas, Kirk said, should ignore legalities and take matters into its own hands. "I know so many amazing patriots in the great state of Texas, and I love Texas, that have been waiting and are willing for this moment. Deputize a citizen force, put them on the border, give them handcuffs, get it done. Sure that's dramatic. You know what's dramatic? The invasion of the country."

The Left, he emphasized, is guilty of a replacement conspiracy. "The other side," Kirk said, "has openly admitted that this is about bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America." [my italics -mb]

White people are imperiled, intentionally and by design. They need to fight back.

"Whiteness is great," Kirk posted on Twitter. "Be proud of who you are."

Democrats, Charlie Kirk said, "love it when America becomes less white." Immigration is a threat to whiteness. He said the "Democrat Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse." Well that seems polarizing. [my italics -mb]

On a lark, I decided to see if Charlie Kirk had anything to say about the hateful and unfounded claims last year that Haitian immigrants were eating peoples' pets. Alas, he was a principal early instigator. A September 11, 20204 report titled "The Origins of Trump’s Ohio Pets Conspiracy" in New Lines Magazine put Kirk near the beginning of the conspiracy, after which it was quickly picked up by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. The subtitle of the article is "Local racists claimed that Haitians were eating pets; Republicans then turned it national."

From the article: "The origins of the conspiracy theory remain largely unknown, but a New Lines investigation has identified several points of amplification from known spreaders of disinformation. Its fairly rapid spread reveals how extremist narratives travel from the fringes of the internet into the mouths of politicians, seemingly overnight."

The article continued:

Less than a week earlier, End Wokeness, an account on X (formally Twitter) that has been connected in the past to the white nationalist Jack Posobiec, shared a Facebook post alleging that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. The claim was quickly repeated by the political commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, during his broadcast hosted on Steve Bannon’s media network.

Kirk commented that this brought the United States “one step closer to the great replacement,” referring to a white nationalist narrative that claims non-white immigrants are replacing white people in the U.S. The narrative was originally obscure but has been increasingly embraced by the GOP mainstream in recent years.

Kirk is a close associate of Posobiec. Both his claims and the End Wokeness account’s tweet reference a single anonymous post on a private Facebook group as proof of their claims.

 

On September 13, 2024, Newsweek had this:

 

A man has accused conservative political activist Charlie Kirk and his team of taking advantage of his grandparents for a video about claims that pets are being eaten in Springfield.

Accusations that Haitians are eating cats, dogs, ducks and geese in the Ohio city have been spread across the U.S., despite being debunked by city officials. The claims were even repeated by former President Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday night.

On Thursday, Kirk, one of the first conservative figures to pedal the allegations, posted a video made by FRONTLINES Turning Point USA that showed residents saying "ducks are disappearing" and reporting that they have heard of pets being abducted. [links in the original -mb]

Not just immigrants. Not just Haitians. Jews, Charlie Kirk insisted, also threaten whites. "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them," he said. 

The threat isn't just Jews and brown people. He had plenty to say about Blacks.

"In urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact," Kirk said. There's no credible evidence for this, and it's been widely criticized as hate speech.

"More than six hundred white women a year are murdered by Black men," Kirk also said, after admitting that he didn't "know if that stat is real." He said it anyway.

Kirk told his show's audience that "by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested." Actually, it's almost half, according to the University of Maryland in 2014. What that by now dated article also said, and Charlie Kirk didn't say, was that by age 23, almost 40 percent of white males have also been arrested. (Both statistics seem shocking to me.) Aggressive and biased policing against Blacks can partially explain this gap. For example and to illustrate, Blacks and Whites use marijuana at similar rates, but Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession—about 3.6 times more than Whites. [my italics -mb]

Charlie Kirk said: "If I see a Black pilot, I'm gonna be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified.'" He justified that by saying the Black pilot might be an affirmative action hire. You never know, right? He also blamed affirmative action for his prejudice that the Black women Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson "do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously." Charlie hated affirmative action because it made him think unwholesome things about Black people: "If I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic Black woman, I don't -- I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?" Kirk needn't wonder about moronic White women.

Only a racist could anguish so much about what affirmative action is doing to his brain. Charlie wasn't alone in imputing blame. Donald Trump blamed DEI for the DC plane crash that killed 67 people, on no evidence at all, saying the assumption was "common sense." And if you're a racist or bigot, it surely is.

Charlie Kirk said that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson "is what your country looks like on critical race theory." He said "Kamala Harris has now become the jive speaking spokesperson of equity." He said "MLK [Martin Luther King] was awful. He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe." Charlie Kirk said: "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s."

Tell us, Joe Mitchell: Was Steve Inskeep right when he said that Charlie Kirk's "remarks" were  "polarizing?" Can we at least agree on that?

As I said, this is all very depressing. And yet we must continue.

In an editorial demanding battle with the political left, Charlie Kirk said: "'Investigate first, define the crimes later' should be the order of the day. And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy." Why? Because Donald Trump was indicted in four different venues.

Charlie Kirk was as anti-Muslim as he was anti-Black and anti-brown. He said: "America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank. Large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America." He said "Islam is not compatible with western civilization." He asked "are you comfortable with both London and New York having Muslim mayors? I'm sorry. I think we should have a little bit of caution with that. That doesn't feel right." Kirk called New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (a Muslim, a legal immigrant, and a naturalized citizen) a "parasite." "It’s legal immigration that is also the problem," Kirk said. "When you allow a bunch of people into your country legally and they don’t share your values, turns out they don’t always assimilate." Charlie made it abundantly clear what his values were.

Charlie Kirk said: "There is no separation of church and state." If Charlie was right, then Thomas Jefferson must have been mistaken. It was Jefferson who said, in correspondence in 1802, that the first amendment to the Constitution created "a wall of separation between Church & State." Those were Jefferson's words. Jefferson had long been best friends with James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, and had strongly advocated for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution. The first ten amendments constituted that Bill.

In addition to what Charlie Kirk had to say about racial and religious minorities, he was also a genuine all around conspiracy theorist. According to ABC News, he "spread falsehoods about voter fraud during the 2020 election and misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine." According to Wikipedia, he "promoted climate change denial, calling global warming a hoax." He said there is "no factual data to back up global warming" and that scientists do not know the cause. (I wrote this on the overwhelming scientific consensus. As for factual data about measured warming, see this, this, this, and this.) According to Wikipedia, he did not believe human activity is the driver of climate change. (On the matter of belief, I wrote this and this.)

On the 2020 election, Charlie Kirk asked: "How do we explain the 100% ballot drop in Michigan, where just every ballot that was dropped was just for Joe Biden. Why is no one asking about Dominion Voting Systems?" Of course, on the right there was nonstop and baseless "asking" about Dominion, and Fox News ultimately settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion for almost $800 million. If Fox had incriminating evidence against Dominion, it would surely have produced it. The claims about Dominion, such as ties to Hugo Chavez, were nonsensical.

We could go on, almost endlessly. We could describe how Charlie Kirk said "College campuses have become islands of totalitarianism & intolerance." Columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote that Kirk's "first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who 'discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.'"

"The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right," Bouie wrote. "Targets of the watchlist," he wrote, "attest to harassment and threats of violence." [Bouie's link -mb]

Whether you abhor it or extol it, this is Charlie Kirk's legacy. Can we at least agree with Steve Inskeep that he was polarizing?

On the same Morning Edition program as Steve Inskeep's interview, NPR host Michel Martin spoke with Matt Schlapp, CPAC Chairman and former White House political director in the administration of George W. Bush. As was Joe Mitchell, Schlapp was a friend of Kirk's. Martin acknowledged that this was "a difficult day." Her first question was: "So Charlie Kirk was obviously a gifted man. What would you say his gifts were?" With Martin's prompting, Schlapp described them.

The conversation turned to feeling safe at public events, and veered into Schlapp's experience fleeing the White House on 9/11.

Schlapp: "And I will say this. I don't talk much about what the threats you face when you're in these types of positions because I think, you know, there's no sense instilling panic in people, but we're in a very bad and dark place in our country when it comes to violence. And I think we're just seeing a rapidity of really shocking events."

He continued: "And, you know, what I would encourage everyone to do is fight like heck in politics, you know, push, push, push for what you want. But at the end of the day, you've got to - you've - there's got to remain some respect for those that you're fighting and an understanding that they're doing what they think is right, too. And the other thing that needs to happen is, quite frankly, people in the media - we need to stop villainizing people. You know, people have ideas, and, you know, might not like them. There's a lot of people whose ideas I think are abhorrent. But, you know, would I help them change their tire if they were on the side of the road? Hope I would."

To which Martin asked: "But, you know, on Newsmax, yesterday, you called on leaders of the left to stop normalizing hatred and violence. Are you also calling on leaders of the right to do the same?"

Martin pointed out that "Two elected Democratic state officials and their spouses were shot in Minnesota by a man who had a hit list of 45 elected Democrats he intended to kill. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband attacked in his home, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's official residence set on fire." She said violence seems to be "an equal opportunity problem."

Schapp said: "Well, I'm not sure it's equal, but I think there were examples on both sides that are repugnant." He then got wound up with increasing indignation, saying: "Someone who's very close to my family and to the conservative movement was assassinated yesterday," and "I don't think this is the right moment for you to say to me that I am not sufficiently concerned about violence that happens from anyone [only violence on the left, as Schapp said on Newsmax -mb]. I think this is a moment to reflect on the life of a young man who made a big difference. And a lot of people are mourning it."

This, from the NPR transcript, is how the conversation ended:

MARTIN: Yes.

SCHLAPP: And it is the wrong time for you to start assigning blame and to say I should have better commentary.

MARTIN: Oh, forgive me, but didn't you surface that issue, and am I not...

SCHLAPP: Ma'am.

MARTIN: ...Listening to you?

SCHLAPP: I can understand why you're getting defunded. This is outrageous.

MARTIN: I'm sorry that you feel that way.

SCHLAPP: This young man deserves some thoughtful appreciation this morning.

MARTIN: And we...

SCHLAPP: He's the father of two children.

MARTIN: And we certainly are giving him that.

SCHLAPP: And you're turning this into just (ph)...

MARTIN: No, I think we're certainly giving him the attention he deserves. [On that point, in the entire interview Martin did not mention a single controversial viewpoint of Kirk's. -mb]

So here we are. The fact that Charlie Kirk's views (laid out in painful detail above) were odious does not and cannot justify his murder, but their broad acceptance surely says something troubling about us. Charlie Kirk's rapid glorification raises profound and disturbing questions about what kind of people we are.

Joe Mitchell complained that Charlie Kirk "was called a Nazi and Hitler and a fascist for so many years, and that's what led to the shooting yesterday." But what if he was in fact a fascist, as what I've laid out above might suggest? If he actually was a fascist, would it be wrong to say so, as a descriptive matter? Would it be wrong to warn that fascistic tendencies and prescriptions threaten the values and constitutional foundations of the country? Whatever you rightly call his beliefs, they weren't good—at least not from my side of our yawning societal divide.

Joe Mitchell said Charlie was "a God-fearing man" who "was the most kindest person in the entire world that I knew." Isn't that remarkable? Charlie's wife, Erika, said Charlie "went to see the face of his Savior." One can only wonder what that meeting was like, and how Charlie is handling the throngs of colored people he wanted out of his country, but with whom he now shares heaven.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

 

The experts were right. They usually are.

Noncitizen voting, and voter fraud more broadly, has been an enduring myth on the right for many, many years: one of those alternative realities that just won't die.

It's the nature of alternative realities and the minds that inhabit them that empirical evidence counts for nothing. So it matters not at all to those inhabitants that whenever anybody has made a serious attempt to look for noncitizen voting in the United States, they find that it is vanishingly rare—rare enough to conclude that it's essentially nonexistent. Election and democracy experts have examined the question many times, and the conclusion is always the same: The U.S. has hardly any voter fraud.

Updated tools have recently been brought to bear on the question of noncitizen voting. On September 4, Louisiana's secretary of state, Nancy Landry, announced that Louisiana was "the first state in the nation to use the newly revamped SAVE [Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements] database from the Department of Homeland Security" to analyze the state's voter rolls. The SAVE database was designed to help states verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for government benefits, and its use is being extended to analyzing voter rolls.

The Department of Homeland Security has expanded the range of personal data that agencies can access through SAVE. SAVE is itself problematic because it has potential to create false positives due to bad data, meaning that persons could be incorrectly identified as being noncitizens. At the same time, DHS has allowed state and local election officials to search for hundreds of thousands of voters simultaneously.

When Louisiana used SAVE to look at voter records going back to the 1980s, it found up to 390 registered voters who could be non-citizens. Of those, 79 voted at least once during that more than 40-year period. The number is minuscule relative to the number of votes cast.

The Brennan Center For Justice says: "To put that number in perspective, we estimate that at least 74 million votes have been cast in Louisiana since the 1980s — and that estimate is a significant undercount due to data limitations. In other words, out of tens of millions of ballots cast in Louisiana over more than 40 years, only a tiny fraction of them were possibly cast by noncitizens, and even those cases are unconfirmed."

The Brennan Center adds that "list-matching alone — whether with SAVE or any other database, all of which contain flaws — isn’t enough to identify ineligible voters, let alone voter fraud. That’s why Landry has rightly acknowledged that the actual number could be even lower, as some of the potential noncitizen voter registrations flagged by the SAVE program could be the result of outdated or inaccurate data."

Once again, noncitizen voting has been shown to be practically nonexistent.

Contrast Louisiana's results with the beliefs of conspiracy-addled right wing minds. One such mind belongs to Mike Johnson, who is presently speaker of the House, and who also happens to be a congressman from Louisiana.

As I wrote last year, Johnson said: "We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections."

Johnson also said that noncitizen voting poses a "clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system."  It does no such thing. As an empirical matter, noncitizen voting is neither clear nor present.

A mind situated in a powerful role that uses intuition to know things that can only be verified with evidence—evidence that in this case thoroughly refutes the intuition—is a very dangerous mind indeed. Johnson has shown repeatedly that his own mind struggles with reality. Notably, he was a proponent and agitator in Congress of the utterly false belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

Regarding human-caused global warming, on which there's overwhelming scientific consensus, Johnson said: "The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver." To which I said Johnson doesn't think at all. His beliefs are utterly disconnected from any kind of principled learning. How dismaying that this mind is second in line to the presidency. The two ahead of him, and the one behind, are no better.

The possibility of widespread noncitizen voting and other forms of election fraud has been examined many times over the years, both by experts and officials performing good-faith investigations, and by partisans who were just sure that it was happening. Whenever it's looked for, it's found to be essentially nonexistent.

Two noteworthy partisan inquiries occurred in recent years. One was the months-long "audit" under the auspices of Arizona Republicans examining 2020 Maricopa County election ballots, looking for fraud. Amusingly, the audit ended up finding 99 additional votes for Biden, and 261 fewer votes for Trump. Arizona was an epicenter of 2020 election controversy.

President Donald Trump himself convened a very short-lived commission created by executive order in May 2017 following Trump's unsubstantiated claims that millions (millions!) of illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 election, costing him the popular vote. Its aim was to investigate voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression, with Vice President Mike Pence as chair and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chair. The commission held only two meetings, produced no major findings, issued no reports, and had no impact on election laws. It disbanded in January 2018.

Trump had repeatedly claimed that illegal voting was responsible for his loss of the popular vote in 2016. Shortly after the election, Trump tweeted that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally" but provided no evidence for this assertion. In private meetings with congressional leaders, Trump claimed that 3 to 5 million immigrants living in the country had voted illegally, again offering no substantiating proof.

These are the myths that Republicans tell each other. "A a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," Trump said during the September 10 presidential debate last year. "They can't even speak English, they don't know even know what country they're in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them to come into our country." Mike Johnson said "I think that ultimately they hope to turn all these illegals into voters for their side. It sounds sinister, but there's no other explanation for what's happening down there."

Perhaps in Johnson's broken brain there really is no other explanation. Isn't that incredible?

Republicans have long sought remedies to a nonexistent problem that could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. Remedies such as onerous voter id laws and restrictions, and massive purges of the voter registration rolls. Last year a judge ordered Alabama to stop such a purge when thousands of purged voters were found to be citizens.

Louisiana isn't the only state that's gone looking for noncitizen voting and found basically none. In April, Michigan announced that a review had found 15 credible cases in more than 5.7 million total ballots cast in the 2024 general election. These 15 possible cases represent a mere 0.00028 percent of all votes, which is beyond negligible. Not even a rounding error. If, as Mike Johnson imagines, Democrats are trying "to turn all these illegals into voters for their side," they're doing a pretty pathetic job of it.

Last year while announcing its own massive purge Texas said it had found 1,930 "potential" noncitizen voters. In July, however, the state's attorney general announced investigations into just 100 "potential" noncitizen voters in the 2020 and 2022 elections, and just 33 "potential" noncitizen voters in the 2024 election. Around 11.3 million votes were cast in the 2024 election in Texas. That works out to just one potential noncitizen vote for every 342,000 votes cast. Not a great way to steal an election.

In a report issued in July, The Center for Election Innovation & Research said that "the vast majority of allegations of noncitizen registration or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data."

There is clearly no nefarious conspiracy. In the few cases where noncitizens register to vote, it's often due to bureaucratic errors or a misunderstanding about eligibility, not intentional fraud. Whatever the reason, the numbers are tiny. All this recent activity trying to chase down a nonexistent problem follows many years and multitudes of earlier studies by real experts, experts who have always said the U.S. just doesn't have a problem of voter fraud or illegal voting, much less noncitizens voting. As any thinking person would  expect, the experts were right. After all, expertise and being right generally go together, else expertise has no meaning.

 

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.