I’ve been amazed at how often I’ve heard people say they disagree with Charlie Kirk. Yet, according to public polling, Kirk held the majority opinion on many issues. That raises a question and shows the magnitude of his courage.
Kirk was eighteen when he started Turning Point USA in 2012. One of its primary purposes was to let young people, especially college students, understand that the worldview they were immersed in at school was not the only viable way to see the world. Professor Johnathan Haidt had been studying that issue for years. He went to Duke in 2016 to give a talk about the frightening lack of diversity of opinion on college campuses. In response, Haidt created the Heterodox Academy to try to add some variety of opinion and ideas in college faculties.
To make things worse, most people see no variety of viewpoints in the information in the major media and daily entertainment. Most of the public considered The New York Times and National Public Radio to be moderate news sources. Bari Weis and Uri Berliner are both quite liberal and explained that they left those organizations because the groups had become lopsided and uncomfortably extreme.
You have a world where adults and students have lived with their views and opinions unchallenged. They are the proverbial “fish in water” who don’t understand the nature of water and can’t consider an alternative.
Especially with the internet, there are groups on the right that are isolated, but it is, or was, much harder for the right. I’m almost eighty. It may be different for young people, and I am not claiming virtue for one side over the other. The authors and material I read are not fashionable on the left or in the mainstream media. Heather MacDonald, Christopher F. Rufo, and Charles Murray are excellent and thoughtful. But they are either ignored or demonized in the major outlets.
Thomas Sowell described the insiders as viewing themselves as “the Anointed.” They were and are a group whose opinions are unquestionable. In polite company or on college campuses, the rule is simple. “To get along, go along!”
This explains why Charlie Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” was brilliant, provocative, and daring.
Jonathan Haidt had described the severe opinion monopoly on campus. Many conservative students were uncomfortable expressing different views. Kirk was their champion. The challenge to prove him wrong was brilliant. He dared students to understand the whole nature of what they thought they believed, and that there was an opposing view. In many cases, they had absorbed an idea without having to understand it completely.
Kirk was provocative because the students were in a bubble and had heard only one side. John Stuart Mill described their problem in a debate when he wrote in On Liberty:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; If he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.
There is always a problem when a group’s views go unchallenged. They get more extreme. There is a need within the group to be better or purer than the next person. The ideas become increasingly radical and move further away from the middle. Those outside the group become less acceptable. They move from wrong to bad to evil.
Kirk was described as a “right-wing extremist’ with no recognition of the fact that universities and media have moved far to the left of anything Dr. Martin Luther King would have recognized as moral and sensible.
Kirk was a traditionalist in terms of marriage, locker rooms, and men in women’s sports. He was opposed to open borders and unlimited immigration. He also opposed restrictions on energy. These views are admittedly unfashionable in some areas, and those who want to “get along” are willing to “disagree,” at least publicly, with Charlie. But his views are polling on the “80” side of “80-20” poll results.
Kirk did for younger people what Trump had done for the general population. He made it OK for them to say what they believed. Schools, culture, and the internet had created a smothering environment where only one set of opinions was acceptable. Those opinions worked against the best interests of young people, and they knew it. Kirk came to the campuses and gave the students a chance to hear both sides and make up their minds.
That change had an impact on the 2024 elections. His death caused an instant jump in Republican voter registrations by first-time voters around the nation, including blue states. Young people joined his Turning Point organization, which his widow now heads.
Charlie Kirk’s ideas and legacy are now stronger than they were before he was martyred.