Martin Gelin: Charlie Kirk understood the exclusion that radicalizes young men
Cornelius Hamelberg
https://www.dn.se/kultur/martin-gelin-charlie-kirk-forstod-utanforskapet-som-radikaliserar-unga-man/
Martin Gelin: Charlie Kirk understood the exclusion that radicalizes young men
Published 08:51
A minute of silence for Charlie Kirk in New York. Photo: Kena Betancur/AP
You could fill books with Charlie Kirk's prejudiced rhetoric, and studies have shown that he lied the second most of all. Yet he became one of the most influential voices of the American and now the global radical right. Why?
Martin Gelin paints the picture of a contradictory debater who attracted millions of young people.
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In one of the clips with Charlie Kirk that has received millions of views on social media in the past week, he is asked by a young woman whether it is really reasonable to compare abortion to the Holocaust.
“Absolutely,” Kirk replies. “It’s worse.” With his eyes fixed on the young girl in the audience, he repeats with emphasis: “It’s worse.” They are two distinct forms of evil, he points out, but abortion is worse, because more people are killed.
For some reason, these kinds of comments were omitted from many of the hagiographic summaries of Kirk's life published after he was assassinated last week, in the middle of a political speech in Utah. It gave a misleading picture of who Kirk was.
There were at least two sides to Kirk. One was the relatively subdued inspirational speaker in a suit and combed sideburns who spoke at Christian conferences, with messages of self-help and personal improvement. The other was the brash and deliberately provocative debater who demonized minorities, believed that women should live subordinate to men, and that black women, his main target, had limited brain capacity. It was the latter persona that made him world-famous, far beyond the megachurches of the American South.
Mural by Charlie Kirk in the city of Ashdod, Israel. Photo: Debbie Hill/UPI/Shutterstock/TT
You could fill books with Kirk's prejudiced rhetoric. But more interesting is to explore why this extreme debater became one of the most influential voices of the American and now indeed the entire global radical right. What attracted millions of young men to this demagogue?
I met Charlie Kirk twice, reporting from the conservative conferences for Turning Point, the young right-wing organization he founded with the support of Republican billionaires. There were always tens of thousands of young attendees there, and Kirk had a stardom that only Trump and his immediate family came close to. As he moved around between meetings, he had a swarm of young fans surrounding him, standing in long lines to get a selfie. When I saw him at the Turning Point conference in Arizona in 2024, only one person had a similar fan base: Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who became famous for killing two Black Lives Matter activists in Wisconsin; and was later acquitted of the crime.
But what united Kirk's church work with his political debate role was that the target audience was young men. What made him so popular was his ability to focus on the sense of marginalization and exclusion that is currently radicalizing white men all over the world.
I remember a packed room in Arizona where hundreds of young men either sat with notepads and wrote down basically every word Kirk said, or recorded the entire speech on their phones.
People gathered to pay tribute to Charlie Kirk in Utah. Photo: Michael Ciaglo/TT
Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social after the assassination that “no one was as beloved by young people in America” as Kirk, a rare instance of truth on his platform, at least if we limit the statement to young men.
When Kirk spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer, historian Rick Perlstein described the speech as the most memorable moment of the convention:
“He expressed with great clarity and passion, and in apolitical terms, the alienating feelings that a typical young person might be expected to feel today, and then, with quite astonishing skill, offered fascism as a solution.”
The ability to articulate this sense of alienation made Kirk the most important leader of the young right in the United States since William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual leader of the conservative movement in the 1960s. Like Kirk, Buckley led a nationwide conservative counter-revolution to the contemporary civil rights movements. Buckley was the leading voice of the student right of the 1960s, just as Republicans were finding their new identity in opposition to civil rights legislation, feminism, and the student left.
Charlie Kirk during a Turning Point conference in Arizona 2024. Photo: Cheney Orr
We remember the 1960s in America today for the social progress and civil rights movements, but it was the backlash against these movements that became the most politically lasting. Buckley was the most sought-after guest on college campuses in the United States in the 1960s.
It looks like it will be the same today. Kirk embodies the backlash against feminism and anti-racism that has gained such immense power in American university environments over the past decade.
Both Buckley and Kirk understood that this environment was the battlefield where political futures would be decided. Both also began their careers by fighting against an alleged leftist shift in universities. Kirk created lists of professors accused of leftist views and then subjected them to orchestrated harassment by the radical right's troll armies. It was a direct continuation of the 1950s witch hunt against leftist intellectuals, led by Senator Joe McCarthy. Tellingly, Buckley's first political assignment was as an aide to McCarthy.
A 2023 study by the Brookings Institution, in which they analyzed 79 political podcasts, found that Charlie Kirk lied the second most of all. The lies were often racist, misogynistic, transphobic, or anti-science.
Where they differed was primarily in intellectual honesty. Buckley was active in a different public sphere, when it was not just possible to make things up. Kirk, on the other hand, was active in the Trump era, when lies are more effective than the truth. A 2023 study by the Brookings Institution, in which they analyzed 79 political podcasts, showed that Charlie Kirk lied the second most of all. The lies were often racist, misogynistic, transphobic or anti-scientific. The fact that he has been praised in the past week as a fighter for freedom of speech and serious political dialogue is a media failure.
Regardless of what we ultimately learn about the perpetrator's motives, the murder will inevitably be exploited by Trump to expand repressive measures against the opposition. Elon Musk has already called for war on the left. The same week that Trump appeared on one of America's biggest political morning shows, "Fox & Friends," to reveal that they had found the perpetrator, the show's longtime host Brian Kilmeade said that homeless people should simply be executed. Give them an "involuntary lethal injection," he suggested. "Just kill 'em."
Charlie Kirk. Photo: Lynne Sladky/TT
Trump's nationalists are currently just looking for an excuse to go out and beat up dissenters and minorities. There are not many who can stop them. Trump himself has pardoned more than a thousand convicted right-wing extremists, despite the fact that the country's intelligence agencies have warned for more than a decade that right-wing extremism is the greatest domestic threat to the United States - so serious that they called in terrorism experts from Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan to map the right-wing extremist networks.
They are also now being helped by the new FBI director, Kash Patel, whose response to the murder of Charlie Kirk was to embrace the very rhetoric and worldview that right-wing extremists themselves advocate. Patel ended the press conference about the murder by calling Kirk his brother and exclaiming: “See you in Valhalla!”
Read more:
Malin Ullgren: Kirk's blood in live broadcast is not enough to explain martyrdom
Kirk's widow: The movement will not die
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Gun dealer Jim Evans, right, says American society rests on the right to bear arms and the ability to defend oneself against a repressive government. He sells handmade wooden weapons at a gun show in southwestern Utah, 20 minutes from where Charlie Kirk's suspected killer was arrested Thursday night. Photo: Björn af Kleen
SALT LAKE CITY. Right-wing extremists in Utah are preparing to launch an armed attack if they encounter anyone celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.