When news broke of Charlie Kirk’s death, corporate media rushed to frame the far-right activist in glowing terms. Major outlets offered reverent obituaries, politicians lined up to praise him, and even the New York Yankees held a moment of silence before a game. To those who lived through Kirk’s career of incendiary rhetoric, relentless bigotry, and deliberate radicalization of young audiences, this hagiography felt less like journalism and more like an erasure of truth.
Charlie Kirk’s record was not one of peacekeeping or principled politics. It was a lifetime spent amplifying hate, weaponizing conspiracy theories, and targeting women, Black Americans, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and anyone else he deemed unworthy of equal rights.
A Record of Hate, Sanitized
Kirk’s words speak for themselves. He argued that gay people should be “stoned to death.” He claimed that Black pilots instilled fear in passengers. He insisted that Martin Luther King Jr. was “an awful person,” that the Civil Rights Act was a “mistake,” and that Black people were “better off in slavery.” He dismissed empathy as “new age nonsense” even while school shooting victims bled in classrooms.
These weren’t slips of the tongue. They were deliberate provocations, crafted for maximum impact, and rewarded with money, influence, and access to power. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center documented his role in spreading white nationalist conspiracies such as the “great replacement theory.” Yet in death, much of the mainstream press reduced this trail of hatred to the tidy phrase “controversial.”
Manufactured Martyrdom
The speed with which Kirk was elevated to martyrdom reveals a troubling pattern. When a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband were murdered by a MAGA supporter, national sports teams didn’t hold moments of silence. Presidents didn’t issue solemn statements. The media didn’t elevate her name into national headlines for weeks. The disparity is glaring—and instructive.
Instead of reckoning with the escalation of political violence, corporate outlets whitewashed Kirk’s extremism. Axios called him “a fierce champion of free expression.” Ezra Klein suggested he was “practicing politics the right way.” MSNBC, after briefly acknowledging Kirk’s divisiveness, fired a commentator for daring to speak too plainly about his hateful legacy.
The Dangerous Gaslighting of History
This is not just about Charlie Kirk. As I and others noted, the reverence around his death foreshadows how the media will treat Donald Trump when his time comes. The script is already written: a “charismatic leader,” a “peacekeeper,” a “complex man.” What we are witnessing now is the rehearsal.
Malcolm X warned six decades ago about the power of media to make the guilty appear innocent and the innocent appear guilty. The whitewashing of Kirk is precisely that: a reshaping of memory to absolve institutions complicit in nurturing extremism. It is gaslighting at a national scale, convincing audiences to feel empathy for a man who openly scorned the very concept.
A Moment of Reckoning
Kirk’s death has already been weaponized. Before a suspect was identified, Donald Trump and his allies declared the left responsible. Right-wing pundits on Fox called for “war on the left.” National Guard troops are stationed in blue cities under the guise of security. The seeds are being sown for escalation, and the media’s complicity in framing Kirk as a fallen hero gives cover to those who seek violence.
The question is not whether Charlie Kirk deserves empathy—by his own standards, he rejected it. The real question is whether we will allow corporate media to rewrite the truth about who he was and what he stood for. If the record of his words and actions is erased, the consequences will not only be historical but political, paving the way for the normalization of extremism under the guise of respectability.
Kirk built his career on hate. That is his legacy. And no amount of whitewashing should be allowed to obscure it.
