Why the left has no Charlie Kirk

And how to solve the problem

Kirk at Boise State University for the 2021 TPUSA college tour, Gage Skidmore

Why does the left have no Charlie Kirk? That question seems to be going around a lot lately. This morning, my social media feed served up two articles that both posed roughly the same question. Namely, why is there no figure on the left who is going into ideologically hostile spaces, engaging young people in open dialogue, and trying to win them over with facts and logic?

The first was “Why the left also needs figures like Charlie Kirk” by

Slavoj Žižek

, in which the Slovenian Marxist philosopher draws a parallel between Kafka’s The Judgment and today’s political climate. In Kafka’s story, an overbearing father condemns the protagonist Georg to death, pushing him to suicide. Žižek likens this to President Trump’s UN speech on September 23, which was all condemnation for Europe, climate action, and multiculturalism, echoing the father’s destructive judgment. Žižek then invokes philosopher Henri Bergson’s reflections on World War I in his 1932 book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, in which he observed that before a catastrophic event, such as the Great War, the human mind tends to reject its possibility as “impossible though probable.” Reason accepts it could happen, but sentiment refuses to accept it. Once the event occurs, however, the impossible becomes the real and the mind retrospectively normalizes it as if it had always been possible, if not normal. This is reflected in

Rob Henderson

’s formula:

Step 1: It’s not really happening
Step 2: Yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal
Step 3: It’s a good thing, actually
Step 4: People freaking out about it are the real problem

A simplified version of this formula is the Kafkaesque phrase, it’s not happening and it’s good that it is. Žižek concludes that the central change today is the rise of right-wing populist nationalism, fueled by failures of the centrist left. Populists exploit fears of immigration, while liberals prefer to silence uncomfortable facts to avoid charges of racism or Islamophobia. The racist silence over the recent murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte illustrates this. She was stabbed on a train by a black ex-convict while nearby black passengers remained passive. The right used the case to fuel racial narratives, while the left ignored it because it didn’t fit their racial calculus. Or, more specifically, because it played too perfectly into right-wing concerns about black violence that progressives regard as radioactively racist, just as UK progressives refuse to talk about the very real problem of Muslim violence because they similarly view the topic as radioactively racist.

In sum, we are living through a Kafkaesque moment where judgment, condemnation, and catastrophic shifts, once “impossible,” have become normalized. In the end, Žižek doesn’t answer the question posed in his own headline. Instead, he critiques both right and left, noting how the left avoids or downplays uncomfortable realities out of fear of seeming racist, while the right confronts those realities in order to exploit them. His point is not that the left needs a Kirk, but that its failure to confront reality openly creates the space for people like Kirk to dominate the narrative. And he’s right.

The other essay I read this morning was “The Other Martyr: MAGA has found its George Floyd” by

Thomas Chatterton Williams

. Here, the argument compares the quasi-religious fervor surrounding Floyd’s death in 2020 with the right’s current sanctification of Kirk after his assassination. In 2020, Floyd was transformed by the left into a Christ-like figure, with his image and memory being used to justify sweeping cultural and political changes, from Pelosi and Schumer kneeling in kente cloth to the adoption of the 1619 Project in schools. His death became a sacred symbol, and to criticize him or the BLM movement risked social ostracism and being called a racist. Now, Williams writes, the right is undergoing a parallel moment with Kirk. His killing has been treated as divine martyrdom with Trump lowering flags, Congress creating a memorial day, and clergy comparing him to saints. Invoking his name has already been weaponized as conservatives have used it to silence critics, purge educators, and enforce ideological loyalty. But crucially, unlike in 2020, this is now backed by government authority, not just online mobs. Williams stresses that both sides reduce flawed men to one-dimensional saints, transforming tragedy into political mythology. This idolization erases complexity and fuels culture-war absolutism. He concludes that if Americans are to learn anything meaningful, they must resist opportunistic canonizations and confront deaths like Floyd’s and Kirk’s without turning them into tools for ideological domination. But the comparison to Floyd garnered pushback from conservatives such as Matt Walsh, who wrote:

George Floyd was a junkie criminal whose most noteworthy achievement was overdosing on the street while being arrested. His second most noteworthy achievement was barging into a woman’s house and robbing her at gunpoint. He contributed nothing of value to the world. Nobody cared about him until he died. He was a loser and a fuck up and a predatory vagrant, which is why, amid all of the incessant eulogizing and performative mourning in the wake of his death, not one person was ever able to provide even one example of any positive contribution that Floyd ever made to his community. There is no comparison between him and Charlie Kirk, who was mourned for what he actually achieved in life, and whose death inspired his admirers to come together in peace and prayer and unity. Floyd was a disgraceful man whose disgraceful death inspired legions of nihilistic savages to behave in ways even more disgraceful still. Does that help you understand the difference or should I keep going?

Williams was not making a false equivalence so, as I often find myself having to note, it seems many people are reacting merely to the headline without having read the essay. But also, many don’t seem to care about the essay. The offensive headline is apparently enough. Megyn Kelly took one look at the headline and said, “How dare he utter these names in the same sentence.” And, to be clear, I agree with both Walsh and Kelly that the comparison is not just intellectually dishonest, but also, morally repulsive. I just don’t think they are giving Williams a charitable read, or possibly any read. Yet what bothers me most is not the difference between these two men so much as the difference between the left and the right, as exemplified by their sanctification of these men, a sentiment the X user i/o summed up nicely by saying, “I do not think it is useful to make a comparison between the ‘one-dimensional sainthood’ of Charlie Kirk and the ‘one-dimensional sainthood’ of George Floyd because making Floyd a saint reveals a profound moral rot while making Kirk a saint does not.”

I am not saying that Williams is wrong in his argument, but that the left is wrong to lionize a scumbag like Floyd while balking at any lionization of Kirk, who is not only a far better man than Floyd, but also Martin Luther King, Jr. Yes, I said it. King played a noble and beautiful role in the history of American civil rights, and I have expressed my admiration for his achievements. But if we’re going to de-mythologize famous men, then let’s be frank. King had multiple extramarital affairs throughout his adult life, something that didn’t exactly groove with his image as a Baptist minister. He also plagiarized his doctoral dissertation at Boston University. And folks who worked with him in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) said he had an authoritarian streak and little tolerance for disagreement. He was a lying, cheating asshole. Not to mention a largely absent father, a drunk, and possibly even someone who once watched and laughed as a woman was raped in front of him. Achilles could be a monster too, but he wasn’t meant to be Jesus. Like King, he was born to win battles. He was born to drive his ash spear into the hearts of Greeks. My point is, turning flawed men into one-dimensional symbols of a beautiful cause, such as civil rights in King’s case or freedom of expression in Kirk’s case, is not something we should necessarily oppose. But that doesn’t mean we must ignore their flaws either.

So why does the left have no Charlie Kirk? I find the answer rather obvious, but instead of explaining, let’s walk through a selection of some of the major contenders and why things didn’t work out for them. First up, there’s the Twitch streamer Destiny (Steven Bonnell II), who built his brand by debating conservatives, alt-right figures, and anyone else. But he’s also been attacked by parts of the online left for debating right-wing extremists “too charitably,” for being blunt about sensitive racial topics, and for criticizing aspects of progressive activism. He was banned from Twitch for political speech at one point, ostracized from the communist BreadTube scene, and often described as “not really leftist” anymore, despite holding progressive views on most issues. Next, we’ve got Michael Tracey, a journalist once seen as a progressive muckraker in the Glenn Greenwald mold, he often debated people on campus politics, Russiagate, and cancel culture. But he took contrarian stances against left-wing consensus, especially about speech and foreign policy, and became increasingly labeled as a crypto-right grifter by the online left.

Two older contenders that come to mind are Glenn Greenwald and the late Christopher Hitchens. Greenwald was originally the darling of the progressive left for his work on Edward Snowden and government surveillance. He frequently debated issues of censorship, free speech, and U.S. foreign policy. But by attacking Democratic Party elites, defending free speech, and criticizing progressive cancel culture, he was essentially exiled from many left spaces and now often appears on conservative or heterodox platforms. Similarly, my hero Christopher Hitchens — another deeply flawed character, by the way — was long a Trotskyist and left-wing intellectual who thrived on campus debates. But his support for the Iraq War, partly born out of his first-hand experience with the horrors of Islam, and his attacks on that faith, put him at odds with much of the left. In the end, even though his debating style and rhetorical identity were formed in leftist circles, he was denounced as a neocon shill.

Here’s the pattern, in case it didn’t jump out at you. Leftist debaters who wander too far into heterodox territory, or who debate right-wingers in a way seen as “legitimizing” them, or who disagree with leftist orthodoxy in any significant way, often lose their left audience before they gain any traction on the right. The reason there is no Charlie Kirk on the left is because the right tends to reward confrontational debate styles whereas the left often punishes its own when they step outside consensus. As Žižek notes, “To get rid of the self-sabotaging layer of today’s Left, one has to go through their apparently most radical opponents.”

Given this, what would a solution look like? It might help to reframe debate as advocacy for the public, not dueling for prestige. Instead of “owning the opponent,” the leftist debater should make it clear that their purpose is to reach the audience — the students, the livestream viewers, the undecided — so that this lowers the risk of being seen as “platforming” the opponent or dunking on students, something that helped build Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Steven Crowder’s brands. Also, this leftist debater would need institutional support. The right has Turning Point USA, PragerU, Daily Wire, and a pipeline of funding for confrontational public debate. The left has fragmented YouTubers and academics. If progressive organizations backed public-facing debate initiatives instead of avoiding them, it would normalize the practice.

Okay, now for the hard part. The left needs to redefine “harm.” Part of the problem is that many left spaces treat argument as if it’s violence. And if you believe words are violence, this creates a permission structure to respond in kind. College students increasingly think violence is an acceptable way of protesting a speaker. However, as

Greg Lukianoff

recently wrote, we must bury the “words are violence” cliché. There is no negotiation around this. Progressives simply have to put down the knife.

But what I am trying to describe is that the problem is far deeper than just finding a leftist who is willing to do what Kirk did. The entire leftist ideological structure prohibits a Charlie Kirk from existing. It would be like asking, why don’t Catholic priests freely compose sermons in the way that Protestant ministers do? The answer is not because priests haven’t had the idea. The answer is because priests are meant to be subordinate to the Vatican. The structure of the Catholic Church itself prevents it, just as the Progressive Church does. Moreover, even if a leftist did venture onto conservative campuses — never mind that, outside of religious and military institutions, there are essentially none of these — they would not reap the same rewards, and so the risks would make the project less worthwhile.

Put simply, the right wins status by fighting in debates while the left loses status by doing the same thing. The solution is to flip the incentive. Instead of Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” or Crowder’s “Change My Mind,” which frames the engagement as a kind of provocation, perhaps a leftist version could be branded around advocacy for important causes. Example titles might be, “Let’s Think This Through” or “Talk to the Left.” It might also be smart to not start with the most radioactive culture-war topics such as trans rights or Israel. This is where a right-wing speaker would go first, to drive traffic, but we are looking to avoid those viral dunking clips, so instead we might begin with broader issues: universal healthcare, student debt relief, minimum wage, or climate adaptation. Build credibility and normalize the format before wading into the culture-war minefields.

But there is another problem. It would also be good to avoid topics like trans rights because progressives simply have no winnable position at this point, and that’s ultimately why they have no Charlie Kirk. The purity testing and internal cancel culture is a huge part of the equation, probably the second biggest factor, but the biggest, I would argue, is that progressives don’t debate things like trans rights. They don’t want to debate. They use authoritarian tactics like policing what you can say, what nouns and pronouns you need to use, or who gets to speak at all, through various deplatforming efforts, but they do not debate the topic because their position is illogical, unscientific, and ultimately incoherent. So instead of trying to persuade with facts, they either dip into postmodernist arguments about how words mean whatever we want them to mean, or they cite lived experience and cry transphobia, if not genocide, and if you do not fold then you are a very bad, no-good person.

Part of what I just described above is cynical, but part of it also is that they literally believe a trans woman is a woman. They are not lying about that. They literally believe it is reasonable and fair to refer to women as cervix-havers. They literally believe Trump is a Nazi dictator. They literally believe Kirk was a fascist, or at least far-right. And you simply cannot effectively debate people if they do not subscribe to reality. Particularly if they pearl-clutch or cry out every time you step on the wrong word or say Kirk was a moderate. So what they do instead is demand that people concede rather than having to do the “emotional labor,” as they put it, of defending their position. This is the progressive playbook on trans issues. So it’s not just that people justified Kirk’s assassination, though that does tell us something meaningful and disturbing. But far more people on the left will not even concede that he was moderate. If we can’t even agree that a chair is a chair, as Obama once said, we cannot move forward from there. But like QAnon, progressives want to say that all their political opinions are objectively chairs. Meanwhile, they reject the notion that actual chairs, such as biological sex, even exist. They make the subjective objective and the objective subjective, and that too is why the left has no Charlie Kirk.

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