Douthat column ignores Charlie Kirk’s bigotry
Published 1:30 am Monday, September 22, 2025
I read conservative toady Ross Douthat’s column where he slavered all over Charlie Kirk’s disgusting legacy of divisiveness, partisanship, bad-faith politics and bigotry. Douthat being Douthat he ignores everything awful about Kirk. Things like Kirk’s open bigotry as when he said if he was flying on a plane and the pilot was black, he hoped the black pilot was qualified. Who says things like that? Bigots. And now that the deplorable right is saying Kirk should be elevated like Martin Luther King, let’s just hear what Kirk’s own words were regarding MLK: Speaking at a Turning Point USA gathering in December 2023, Kirk said: “MLK was awful. He was not a good person.”
Also regarding bigotry, Kirk famously said “The civil rights act was a huge mistake.” Who says things like that? Bigots say things like that.
These aren’t one-offs either, Kirk was unashamed to let his bigotry out at any opportunity. Speaking of several well-known and powerful black women, Kirk said: “Black women like Joy Reid, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Shiela Jackson Lee and Michelle Obama … used affirmative action because they do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. So they had to steal a white person’s slot.”
Bigotry, again. Kirk was a bigot and not worthy of respect. Douthat gushed that Kirk was probably likeable and would have been popular on campus. Douthat ignores the well-documented racism of the deplorable spokespersons for the right wing so he can sell a few column inches of his useless blathering and pad his pocketbook. You cheapen yourself by running that drivel. Let’s close with this famously ironic quote from Kirk: “I think it’s worth (the) cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
The man did not shed a single tear over the victims of gun violence at Sandy Hook, at Columbine, or any other of the way-too-numerous mass shootings in America. We should not shed a single tear at his passing.
Jeff Rivers
Mountlake Terrace
