Death, violence and the art of persuasion for a better world than Charlie Kirk envisioned.
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published Sunday to those subscribed to Beacon Media’s newsletter list, published weekly. Occasional pieces are republished here. Subscribe here to receive each edition.
For those of us who follow the news — some of us a bit too closely — we are awash in making sense of the murder of Charlie Kirk. The right-wing commentator was a powerful MAGA force, and in many ways we are living in the bigoted, hateful world he envisioned for us.
That’s why grappling with his death is important for all of us, even organizations like Beacon Media that are focused on how local leadership and community-based media can lead us to a stronger democracy in North Carolina.
The New York Times’ Ezra Klein caught a lot of flack for writing in a recent piece that Kirk “practiced politics in exactly the right way.” In this, Klein meant how Kirk would seek out people who disagreed with them and debate them, while also showing up, in person, in hostile environments to make his case. Kirk’s debate style was hardly in good faith, as his facts were often selective, cherry-picked or flat out wrong and he preferred bombast over nuance, to put it mildly.
More importantly, Kirk’s vile case was often why Black people were genetically inferior or re-litigating battles of the 1960s when it came to race, even denigrating Martin Luther King Jr.
The Nation’s Elie Mystal, a well-known national commentator who I often look to for wisdom in times like these, said he would have put it differently:
“Charlie Kirk represented the very worst American political discourse had to offer, and I wish he were still alive so I could say that to him, to his face, over and over again. I wish he lived long enough to see everything that he worked to achieve crumble all around him.
You see what I did there, Ezra? It’s really not hard.”
I don’t necessarily see a contradiction here. It is true that the politics of confrontation were effective for Kirk and his achievements have been detrimental to all of us.
On the confrontation front, I remember being challenged by these tactics as an undergrad at UNC-Chapel Hill. I was someone who was deeply proud that the words of the First Amendment were engraved on the walls of the journalism school’s Carroll Hall. And then on multiple days while walking across UNC’s main campus quad, a massive banner was unfurled from anti-abortion activists that said in block letters: “GENOCIDE.” Along with it was a picture of a dead fetus, equating abortion with genocide.
Did these fanatics have the right to push this on me while I was just trying to live my life and go to class?
I decided then, especially at a public university — yes, they did have that right. And we still feel the results of those anti-abortion politics concretely today in North Carolina and across the country.
What is the lesson there? It’s not that hate always wins in the long run. Rather, it’s that we who disagree should not take for granted the moral certainty of our positions or that we will prevail without effort and debate.
Beacon Media was founded in part around those principles: that we have to fight for our values and ideals where it matters most, by amplifying community leaders to make persuasive arguments for a different version of democracy than what we have today.
In much of North Carolina and across the country, we are too often ignoring the media and leaders that matter most to so many local communities because we are failing to recognize that is where it is most important to bring our arguments.
We can’t win if we don’t compete — we can’t block out perspectives that we disagree with or only make these arguments to people who already agree with us.
And that especially includes local media and local social media influencers in ‘Countrypolitan’ and rural areas in North Carolina.
A few years ago, I took on a research project about the decline in quality and number of newspapers in rural North Carolina. I talked to rural area advocates who were fighting hard for their communities, on issues like the environment and healthcare. They weren’t angry at their conservative neighbors — they were used to that. They were beyond livid, though, at those on the left who were supposedly on their side, but who never showed up, including in the only media that really mattered to them: their local outlets.
Even in a diminished state, it was those publications that moved community sentiment and action.
Beacon Media is determined to make sure that those fighting for the exact opposite of what Charlie Kirk stood for — an inclusive democracy, where everyone has opportunities, no matter what’s in their bank account or what they look like — have support they need in places that are most hostile to them.
The syndication of persuasive, values-based content in English and Spanish to newspapers and radio in these places is just the beginning. Tapping into networks on social media at the community level, amplifying new voices, and offering values and issue-based persuasive arguments on what our democracy could be like there will be a big key.
We’re working to make sure that our trusted messengers, who we call Beacon Voices, are seen and heard in all of these spaces. In the future, it may also mean helping to build the community-based digital media those communities need to thrive.
These are uncomfortable, dangerous times. And as the media equivocates on “who is responsible,” for those of us who say we believe in the opposite of what Kirk preached, we should ask ourselves: How are we going to fight for what we believe? Is it by doing what we’ve already done, talking to the folks we usually talk to, where we feel comfortable? Or are we going to try new, riskier things — and show up in ways that make us uncomfortable but will serve those who need support to achieve a vision of a different world?
I will ask myself those same questions as we go into a new week and a new opportunity to fight for a different world than the one Charlie Kirk envisioned.
