We all know that Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking in front of a crowd. It’s a tragedy. Political violence is always a tragedy. That is a fact.

I’ve taken time to pull together some of the highlights of his life: the moments, words, and actions that shaped how he will be remembered. Some of them inspired his supporters. Some of them outraged his critics. All of them are part of the record he left behind. I’m going to examine the good and the bad.  

But I also know what’s coming next. People will say I cherry‑picked him. They’ll say I took his words out of context. And maybe that would land harder if Charlie Kirk hadn’t built so much of his career on doing exactly that to others:

• After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, he didn’t just condemn the violence, he implied a federal government conspiracy, turning the moment into a political weapon.  
• After mass shootings, he seized on victims’ old social media posts to frame them as political enemies, stripping away all context.  
• When public figures collapsed or were attacked, he dug up years‑old quotes and presented them as evidence of “the left’s” corruption or weakness, often within hours of the incident.

If you spend your life reducing others to soundbites and suspicion, don’t be surprised when your own words are held up the same way. That’s not cherry-picking: it’s the mirror. It’s part of his legacy. Here are some of the more inflammatory things he said over the years:  

• “Birth control makes women angry and bitter, and women over 30 aren’t attractive in the dating pool.” – Turning Point USA Event, 2022
• “The Civil Rights Act was a huge mistake.” – University of California, Berkeley, 2019
• “I can’t stand the word empathy, that it’s a made‑up term that does damage.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, September 28, 2021
• “Progressive stances on gender and sexuality are ‘sexual anarchy.’”  TPUSA Student Action Summit, December 2021
• “It’s worth having some gun deaths every year so that we can have the Second Amendment.  TPUSA Faith, 2023
• “The separation of church and state is a fabrication.” – The Charlie Kirk Show, July 6, 2022
• “If my 10‑year‑old daughter were sexually assaulted and became pregnant, I would require her to carry that pregnancy to term.” -Public Forum, Phoenix, September 2024
• “White privilege is a racist lie.”  TPUSA, 2020

But to be fair, there is another part of the record. These are the things he said that inspired his supporters and reflected values they admired:

• “Without free speech, there is no such thing as truth. The moment you silence opposing voices, you destroy the foundation of democracy.”   
• “Faith is not just a belief: it’s the moral compass that guides a society toward goodness and order.”  
• “Courage is telling the truth even when it’s unpopular.”  
• “Patriotism is not about blind loyalty, but about recognizing the greatness and potential of your country.”  
• “America is the greatest experiment in freedom the world has ever seen.”
• “Education should focus on teaching students how to think, not what to think.”  

I think he had good ideas and bad ideas. I think we all do. When we try to reduce anybody to all good or all bad, we don’t just disrespect them: we deny them the dignity of being human. We erase their capacity to grow, to fail, to change, and to teach us through the whole of their story. People need to be remembered for their humanness. We cannot idolize them. We cannot turn them into something they’re not. They’re not saints and they’re not villains; they’re just people, and people are complicated.  

As Ecclesiastes 7:20 says, “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” And as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminded us, “Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves.”  

If we can hold the good and the bad together, we keep our humanity intact, and we remember others as they truly were. And if we are to understand the climate that produces such tragedies, we must be willing to look unflinchingly at the words that shape it, from all sides.