Was Charlie Kirk a martyr? Many on the right have declared him a martyr for freedom of speech, which is understandable, but they use his tragic death as if it were a final, irrefutable proof of their beliefs and a call to take radical action — ironically including suppressing free speech if it’s leftist.

Not to do what Kirk would want would be a moral and even religious failing. My language isn’t hyperbolic. A lot of people on the right really believe it, or speak as if they do.

“But Charlie Kirk!” is thrown out as if it settled the question. So who was he? What kind of man was he? Was he a hero and a martyr? (It’s not a question one would ask — speak no ill of the dead — if the right’s use of his life didn’t require asking it.)

A literal martyr

I think the question is whether he was the idealist his supporters believe him to be — and need him to be — or a hugely successive political operative, or some mixture of both.

Typical of the praise was an article by Josh Hammer, Newsweek’s senior editor at large, who declared Kirk “the living embodiment of the First Amendment,” who “died as a (literal) martyr for free speech.” His death was a call to action. “We have a nation — and a civilization — to save.”

Many, many who wrote like this, though not Hammer, wrote with hatred for “the left” and took his murder as a call to a crusade against it. Your social media feed is full of examples.

Why do people speak of Kirk as one in that special category of martyr? Martyrs’ deaths seem to settle the rightness of the cause beyond question. How could we not follow them? They believed in the cause so much they died for it.

But there’s a second, darker reason we love martyrs, and I think it’s also at play here. Martyrs mean an enemy who did the martyring and in doing so proved themselves completely evil. By killing a hero, they justified anything we want to do to defeat them and made defeating them obviously imperative.

And Kirk was a perfect martyr, the kind a PR agent might invent: young, good-looking, married with a pretty wife and cute children, happy, successful, charismatic, smart, liked and respected by many of his opponents, a man with an apparently unlimited future in front of him. A future president, even.

And many of his enemies were perfect martyrers. Those hundreds of thousands of leftists who rejoiced in his death were morally unhinged. Radical politics should grow from a belief in universal human dignity, including that of your enemies. Theirs does not, and that is why they have failed politically and will fail.

A possible martyr

Charlie Kirk was a perfect martyr, but was he a real martyr for free speech? I don’t think so. He was an extraordinarily gifted political operative promoting his cause, doing something he loved doing, and making a very good life for himself doing it (with a reported worth of over $12 million).

And fair enough. That’s the kind of life most of us aspire to. But living the dream is not an heroic life and losing it does not create a martyr. It does not justify the kind of appeal to him the right is making.

Martyrs die for their beliefs, living out their beliefs in public knowing they might. The Christians in ancient Rome, martyrs. A political operative murdered by a fanatic, not a martyr.

He was a political operative. He made his name setting up a way to doxx academics of the sort the right despised, to intimidate them into silence. That was hardly a defense of free speech.

His famous college debates were to a great extent set ups, with a man who’d memorized all the facts and arguments and gotcha! lines facing kids who were out of their league. Sometimes he was kind and sometimes he “owned” them, and those were the clips that went viral, apparently with his organization’s careful editing.

It’s what a political operative does. And Kirk did it superbly. But not heroically.

A real proponent of free speech would not have served so faithfully a man like President Donald Trump, who completely dislikes it and wants an America in which he decides what can be said in public. Trump despised the virtues Kirk is said to have valued, like civility, truth-telling, and respect for those who disagree with you.

Yet Kirk gave himself to the complete and uncritical support of the president and his ambitions. A true martyr would have risked challenging the very powerful person violating his beliefs, who held his future in his hand. Kirk did not.

He did run more risks doing his job than most of us in this general line of work do, but the risk was very small. No one doing what he did had been harmed, much less killed, for a very long time. Anyone would have taken the same risk for the benefits that it brought.

A man like the rest of us

This is not, let me say for those of you about to pop a cork, not to say that he was a bad person, that you can’t admire him and shouldn’t mourn his death. It is only to say that Charlie Kirk was a man like any man, maybe better than you and me, maybe not, the judgment being above our pay grade.

But not a martyr. Not a man whose death justifies a political program. A man like us and so deserving of our saying rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

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