The Grief Is Real, but Tributes Overlook Parts of Kirk's Record

In eulogizing Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Edward Kennedy said, "My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life." Jamelle Bouie sees that human tendency resurfacing since the killing of Charlie Kirk. Democrats, Republicans, and other commentators reacting to the horror of his assassination have praised Kirk "for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion," Bouie writes in an opinion piece in the New York Times. That assessment of a logic-based influencer competing with grace in the marketplace of ideas doesn't mesh with reality, he says—not since Kirk made his initial public splash.

In his national political debut, Kirk started "a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics," Bouie points out—a catalog of speech acts in the classroom and out. Kirk called on website visitors to report violators. "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 writes. A note at the end of each entry on the searchable list urges users to contact the teachers' employers. Those named have said they've been harassed and threatened with violence.

There's a School Board Watchlist, too, on Turning Point USA's site. Other groups have followed Kirk's lead in targeting teachers, per NBC News. "The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign," Bouie writes, "and you can draw a line directly from Kirk's work attacking academics to the Trump administration's all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent." Bouie's full piece, which also looks at Kirk's attacks on other groups, can be read here.