My Controversial Take on Charlie Kirk

Max Stearns

Since his tragic murder on September 10, 2025, I watched many videos of Charlie Kirk's campus dialogues. Doing so changed some impressions I held based on reading about Kirk both by his fans and detractors.

I've been teaching for a very long time, since before Charlie Kirk was born. Some believe that because Kirk lacked a formal education, he was unintelligent, uneducated, and lacking meaningful insight. Kirk himself fed the narrative, contrasting the college educated with what he termed the vastly larger muscular class. I know personally such simplistic narratives to be false. I've known brilliant people, including my own father, who despite holding only an Associates Degree, was more well-read and informed over a wide range of topics, from ancient history, to American history, to current events (until his passing in 2013), than many others holding impressive academic pedigrees.

In a widely circulated clip, Kirk jokes that he struggled to make it to community college, which he didn't complete, and that he struggled through high school. I don’t know if that's true or just branding. But having now watched Kirk in action, here's what I see.

Charlie Kirk was extremely intelligent and unusually widely read. In the same clip, he describes himself as an autodidact, and he claims to have read 100 books per year. That strikes me as highly plausible. I suspect Kirk might have had photographic memory. This resonates because my father likewise read a vast number of books each year and had a photographic memory. (By contrast, I'm dyslectic and lack that form of memory.) It also resonates because I have known brilliant people for whom the formal educational process simply never worked.

To say Kirk and I held vastly different world views is an understatement. It doesn't trouble me that Kirk's strong religious beliefs differed sharply from my own. I respect many people for whom that’s true. What does trouble me is that Kirk extended his evangelical lens unequivocally to insist it was the only morally compelling, or righteous, world view, and that Christianity provides the defining basis for understanding our constitutional system. I regard this not merely mistaken and misleading, but offensive.

People who adhere to other faith tenets or none—who do not embrace Jesus in their hearts—are not immoral and are not wrong. The opposite is also true. Some who claim to do so are vile. We can, and in my view must, acknowledge that good faith embraces differing faiths. I also know devout Christians whose religious commitments are diametrically opposed to those of Charlie Kirk.

Likewise, Kirk expressed views on persons who are transgender, Muslim, Jewish (he could variously be called antisemitic or philosemitic), Black, women (including Black women), and ideologically left that go beyond disagreeable and into offensive. I do not wish to suggest anyone incapable of generosity toward a man they rightly regard as ungenerous, or worse, toward them is mistaken. Dying, however brutally, neither elevates the soul nor compels generosity among those who have been hurt. Here I am only expressing my personal impressions of a man who until his tragic death I scarcely knew.

Kirk was killed at 31 years old, not yet half my age at 64. I suspect that we all might look back half a lifetime or more and feel discomfort, perhaps even cringe a bit, at things we were once confident of that now seem some combination of unkind, unenlightened, ungenerous, or unwise. Likewise, we must acknowledge that words and actions, no matter one’s age, especially for an adult with a massive, and an especially youthful, audience, hold considerable consequence.

One problem with dying young is lacking the opportunity others have to continue growing, to refine one’s thinking, and to revisit impressions once held so tight they became absolute truths. It is easier to be fully confident when you are young. Age and acquired wisdom have a way of making people bend, not because they are weak, but because bending demands greater strength. A swaying tree is stronger than one whose rigidity cannot withstand intense wind. Of course, we’ll never know if Kirk might have grown in such ways. But we do know with certainty he was denied that opportunity so many of us have to do so.

I am not an apologist for the offensive things Kirk said or the problematic causes he embraced. There’s no excuse, as one example, for his having created a target list of faculty expressing beliefs he found problematic. This is especially so in a country that has tragically witnessed so much political violence. And it is especially dangerous among disaffected young men, often Kirk’s target audience, encouraged by excessively confident, and often erroneous, claims about the meaning of the Second Amendment and about what Kirk regarded a God-given need for near-unlimited access to guns.

I regret Charlie Kirk didn't have the opportunity to live a fuller life and, with that, the opportunity to revisit questions with the broader perspective longevity sometimes provides. Personally, I would have enjoyed debating Kirk. I don’t claim to be smarter than him or than his countless college-student interlocutors. But I am more experienced than they were, and even than Kirk himself.

Some might imagine Kirk’s lack of formal education made him an easy target for students. Having spent more time getting to know the man, I now see this gets it backward. His greater experience, and his obvious intelligence, instead made them easy target for Kirk. Just watch some clips. And yet, Kirk often rested on framing or rhetorical tricks that someone with longer experience could more easily have seen and more effectively called out.

Alas, we will now be left only with dialogues recorded from the past.