A Second Look at Charlie Kirk and Where He Was Taking Us
The message might sound plausible, especially if one shares similar frustrations. That doesn't mean that the ultimate destination will be any less a disaster.
William Thatcher Dowell·
This article by our Americas' editor William Dowell was first published in Substack in his A Different Place column.
When I was still in junior high school, I came across a slim volume in the local public library entitled: “A Youth Primer for the National Socialist Movement.” “National Socialist” was the official name of the German Nazi Party. I checked the book out, primarily because at the tender age of 14, I was interested in the philosophical arguments that had led to the most destructive war in human history. (See first article on Charlie Kirk by William Dowell in Global Geneva)
Surprisingly, I found the arguments presented in the book to be both logical and entirely reasonable. Nature, the text began, is full of obvious differences. Both a horse and a cow are animals, but they are obviously not the same.
Just as animals are different, we can see differences in human beings. The tall, blue-eyed, blond people who live in Northern Europe tend to develop more slowly than the shorter, olive-skinned, dark-haired people who inhabit southern Europe. But as the northerners develop more slowly, their development is much deeper, and in the end, they are more complete.
Hitler convinced Germans he could create a new world order
The book neglected to explain how its logic had led to Adolf Hitler, who was short, dark-haired, and the opposite of its description of an ideal member of its self-styled Aryan master race, had managed to convince Germans that he was the one best able to create a new world order.
I had checked the book out in the late 1950s, and its arguments appeared relevant to discussions of race relations in the U.S. The southern states were still racially segregated, and even northern states had some serious questions about the level of achievement that different ethnic groups were able to achieve.
At a dinner table discussion on the pros and cons of racial integration, a member of my own family said, “There are differences in nature. A horse is not the same as a cow…” I remember thinking, “I have heard that argument before.”
The Nazi primer had sounded reasonable enough, but at 14, I was still too young to recognize a false syllogism - the weak point at which a seemingly logical argument veers into the illogical and arrives at a false conclusion.
The classic example, often used to illustrate the error, is: “All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.” Obviously, Socrates was not a cat, but the camouflaged flaws in other, seemingly logical arguments can be harder to detect.
Charlie Kirk almost seemed reasonable...
I had honestly not heard of Charlie Kirk before his murder in Utah. I don’t regularly watch Fox News, scan the commentary on X, or watch rightwing influencers. Most of the arguments these outlets push are usually based on incorrect or obviously false information, and listening to them seemed a waste of time.
Charlie Kirk’s untimely death forced me to finally pay attention to what he and his influencer podcast had actually been saying. When I finally went through his comments, I was transported back to that slim volume I’d accidentally stumbled across in the public library.
Charlie Kirk, handsome, charming, and well-spoken, managed to make the right-wing racist arguments that had torn the country apart in the 1960s seem almost reasonable. Charlie noted that he had second thoughts about taking a plane with a Black pilot in the cockpit.
The statement is an expression of personal opinion, and it describes Kirk’s personal feelings of insecurity. He’s not necessarily racist. His concern, at least the one he is putting out in public, is that because the pilot is Black, he might have gotten the job because of affirmative action. Nothing racist in that.
Kirk’s culprit is affirmative action - the idea that a candidate’s achievement level might be overlooked in order to create a racial balance in the upper echelons of the workplace. Kirk raised the specter of an individual who might be less qualified than the usual white person, making a mistake that could put his life in danger. Forget about pilot examinations or Federal Aviation regulations; who knows what rules the government might overlook in an effort to boost racial equality?
Kirk had personal reasons for disliking affirmative action; He dropped out of college almost as soon as he started. He wasn’t interested. His real dream was to obtain an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The slot that he had hoped would be his was filled by a woman instead. Charlie, it turned out, had a few problems with the women’s movement as well. He was not alone.
When I was starting off and looking for a job in Washington, I was regularly told, “Gee, we’d like to hire you, but you are the wrong sex and the wrong race.” Everyone was rushing to fill their quotas. Sooner or later, most white males found a job anyway.
Kirk expressed his frustrations through his podcast, which turned into a profitable enterprise. It turned out that he was not the only white male who felt frustrated.
The question of race
Where I differed most from Charlie Kirk was on the question of race. I had attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the early 1960s when North Carolina was still segregated. Although my childhood was spent in New York, and later in a suburb, I had distant family roots in the South. My great-grandfather, Julian Cone Dowell, lived in North Carolina through the Civil War, but like anyone who had initiative, he had migrated north, in his case, to Washington, DC, where he eventually became a page in the US Senate and finally one of the city’s successful lawyers.
My grandfather and my father had always been nostalgic about the South, but they lived in the North. When my father finally came to visit me in Chapel Hill, he remarked, “I guess you are right. Things are kind of slow around here.”
Shocked by what I saw in the South
I was both shocked and embarrassed by what I saw. In the 1960s, much of theSouth was still run by an assortment of notoriously racist “good old boys” who colluded in back rooms to maintain order through an iron-clawed tyranny whose result was cultural stagnation. The place looked dead. Anyone who was Black knew their place, and usually tried to keep a low profile. When an African American approached you, he would often step off the sidewalk into the gutter and diffidently mumble, “Good morning, Sir.” That greeting was out of fear, not respect.
The first time I walked through Durham, which was near Chapel Hill, I was horrified by the emotional and cultural damage that segregation had caused. My instinctive reaction was, “I am not responsible for this.” But I knew that I was. Anyone who had roots in the South had to be responsible.
You didn’t need the Bible to tell you that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons for three generations, and the Southern sin, the American sin, was slavery. In the case of the South, retribution for that sin was likely to be more than just three generations.
A story that I was assigned to write for the University newspaper, The Daily Tarheel, dealt with an incident in which a white student had refused to pay for a lunch he’d ordered in a local fast-food chain, The Toddle House. The restaurant’s manager had refused to serve the student’s best friend, who was Black and seated next to him, even though the waitress had already taken his order. Segregation, America’s version of South Africa’s racial apartheid, was on the way out, but wasn’t gone yet.
I interviewed the chief of police in nearby Durham. An obviously intelligent man, he reassuringly dismissed the incident as a simple “misunderstanding,” and then offered to let me interview the arresting officer. An overweight, not very bright cop entered the room and stood by the Chief’s desk. “Would you want your sister marrying one of them?” he asked me. The Chief, who saw me scribbling the conversation, word-for-word, quickly told him to shut up and leave the room.
Times have changed: The South's Atlanta - dynamic, international, diverse and affluent
The South has changed enormously since I attended university there. I recently moved to Atlanta, Georgia. When I was in college, Georgia had seemed like enemy territory. Today, Atlanta is dynamic, highly international, extremely diverse, and surprisingly affluent. The Black population in Atlanta is mostly well-educated, thoughtful, and refreshingly polite.
The contrast that impresses me the most is that everyone I meet, Black, white, Asian or Hispanic, seems confident and happy with life. Confidence gives the space that is needed for people to act graciously, and here they do.
My impression from recent statements by JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and the Breitbart/MAGA crowd is that they want to return to the bad old days before the country decided to put the evil of slavery and racial segregation behind it.
Vance and Trump’s statements indicate an eagerness to search for an ideological enemy that they can blame for Charlie Kirk’s murder. That approach seems intended to inflame the situation rather than calm it. The image that comes to mind is the Reichstag fire – the destruction of Germany’s parliament that Hitler used as a justification for seizing all power for himself, even though the Nazis were suspected of starting the fire as a necessary justification for silencing their opposition.
MAGA: the sheer cruelty of expelling migrants to a war zone
Charlie Kirk was much more subtle than Stephen Miller, the inspiration behind detention (concentration) centers such as “Alligator Alcatraz,’ and the guy who had the bright idea of exiling unsuspecting Hispanic immigrants to Sudan. Sudan, Miller knew, is currently involved in the planet’s most vicious and uncontrollable civil war. The MAGA objective in sending immigrants there was pure cruelty.
The objective that ICE had in arresting 300 workers from South Korea who were helping establish a cutting-edge factory to build batteries and electric vehicles in Georgia was likewise to spread terror. Germany, in the 1930s, was more discreet. Instead of the suggestively named “ICE,” the Nazis turned to the paramilitary Waffen-Schutzstaffel (protection squads), better known as the Waffen-SS.
Trump’s Big Beautiful budget bill seeks to give ICE an operating budget of $8 billion - more than most of the world’s armed forces. Names change. It takes a while for the ultimate intentions of these organizations to reveal themselves.
In contrast to the MAGA wolves, Charlie Kirk simply expressed personal frustrations at racial and gender differences that anyone might experience. What he and the MAGA crowd failed to mention was how the situation developed in the first place.
If the country were really concerned about the intelligence and ability of its non-white population, it would have invested in public education. To a certain extent, it did. It is that investment in America’s future that Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are now trying to roll back, supposedly to make America great again. It doesn’t take a genius to see that these are false prophets.
Probably the institution that had the greatest success in integrating America was the US Army. A rifle squad in combat learns quickly that survival depends on working together as a team, and when your life depends on the person next to you, you don’t really care what color skin he has. You are more concerned with his qualities as a man.
I was initially drafted in the lead-up to the Vietnam War, and I was initially skeptical. I later had to admit that the army taught me a great deal. Some of the finest and most intelligent men that I met were African American. There is no affirmative action when you are being shot at. I have no problem flying in a plane that is piloted by someone who is Black, because I know many people who are Black, whom I would stake my life on.
Charlie Kirk never had that experience, and to a certain extent, he never really knew what he was talking about. His advantage was that he sounded more reasonable and thoughtful than Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, or JD Vance. That didn’t mean that he was right.
The Nazis boasted to make Germany great again...and MAGA?
Like Charlie Kirk, the Nazi youth primer didn’t sound catastrophic either, but we know where National Socialism led Germany in the 1930s. Like the MAGA movement, the Nazis boasted that they would make Germany great again.
Instead, they reduced what had been Europe’s most intellectually advanced country to a heap of burning rubble. Sometimes it is hard to see the dark place where a seemingly reasonable argument will ultimately take you.