The Enemy Is Us

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Sept. 20, 2025

Nothing Charlie Kirk ever said rationalizes, much less justifies, his murder. Celebrations to the contrary were, and continue to be, reprehensible if for no other reason than a three-year-old little girl and a one-year-old little boy are left without a father.

At the same time, his near beatification by some seems excessive. His death does not erase what many considered offensive comments or positions. There is a certain irony in the fact that some of his most ardent supporters, including Donald Trump, now wish to punish anyone who speaks unkindly of Kirk in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Irony because Kirk, having had his appearances canceled on some college campuses, was a fervent supporter of the First Amendment. One assumes he would have opposed people being fired or ostracized for unpopular speech since he was a victim of that attitude himself.

Kirk was also a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and said more than once said the solution to gun violence was more guns in the hands of more people. He believed gun deaths are an acceptable price to pay for protecting those Second Amendment rights.

He claimed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had become an “anti-white weapon” and that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an “awful person.” He strongly opposed affirmative action programs and said Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was an unqualified “diversity hire.” He also infamously said on his radio show in 2024, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be, like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” It made for an unpleasant sound bite for someone claiming to be far from a racist.

(It should be noted that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is a self-admitted affirmative action beneficiary, having been admitted to Yale Law School when they were trying to increase minority attendance. He said it got him into Yale but branded him as being somehow less qualified, which led to his opposition to affirmative action thereafter.).

Kirk was a strong public supporter of Israel but also fell into some antisemitic rhetoric. He believed in “replacement theory,” the unproven notion that Jews and other non-whites are taking over leadership in government and business, replacing white folks in the process. He claimed that “anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors” when discussing the George Floyd protests. Then there was this, an old antisemitic trope that has circulated for decades. Kirk said Jews “...control not just the colleges—it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it...”

Lately, he tried to connect New York City’s likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to al Qaeda and 9/11. Mamdani, a Muslim born in Uganda and naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018, was a child on 9/11 and has repeatedly condemned Islamic extremism and violence.

Charlie Kirk would have been happy and eager to debate most anyone on any of these subjects, and he was a smart and well-prepared opponent. It’s not likely he’d have been pleased with the threats of violence now circulating against anyone currently daring to contradict him.

So we have yet another sorry chapter in our country’s ongoing history of bipartisan political violence followed immediately by politicians of all stripes cynically attempting to exploit it. The voices asking for calm and unity are once again being drowned out by the voices of anger, revenge, and violence, accomplishing nothing.

Efforts by Trump and others to make this a problem of “the left” have short memories. In the last five years alone, Democratic legislators in Minnesota were shot and one killed, the residence of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was set ablaze, a former GOP candidate in New Mexico paid people to shoot up the homes of Democratic candidates, our own governor was the target of a kidnapping plot, and Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer.

There is plenty of violence coming from both sides.

Donald Trump will certainly make no efforts to unify us. On Fox & Friends on September 12 he was asked how Americans can “... come back together... to fix this country.” Trump’s response? “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”

We aren’t likely to get help from politicians who mostly see a grotesque public murder as an opportunity for some campaign fundraising. And we aren’t going to get any real conciliation from our president, though he made a feeble attempt after being chastised for first saying he didn’t care.

Instead of rejecting the voices of anger and hatred, we keep right on electing them. And, it seems, the angrier and more irrationally hateful they are, the bigger their vote totals.

Cartoonist Walt Kelly, through his character Pogo, said it best in 1970: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”