The Unfortunate Death of Charlie Kirk and the MAGA Phenomenon

This article by our Americas' editor William Dowell was first published in Substack in his A Different Place column.

Charlie Kirk went to the University of Utah to engage students in a debate over MAGA values. Photos of Kirk, early in the event, show him tossing red MAGA baseball caps to enthusiastic kids in a jubilant audience minutes before a bullet sliced through his neck.

It obviously wasn’t the debate that killed Charlie Kirk, but an argument can be made that his death resulted from the values that he had gone to Utah to promote. His murder, outrageous as it was, constituted one of the most dramatic arguments possible in the debate that Kirk was about to present to Utah’s students.

The right to carry guns: it does not matter if a few people get killed

A staunch advocate for the 2nd Amendment, Kirk had previously argued that the right to carry guns was so important that it didn’t really matter if a few people were killed each year He probably never thought that he might be one of the victims. Moments before he was shot, he was asked about mass shootings. He didn’t live long enough to answer the question.

His understanding of the 2nd amendment was inaccurate. Most Constitutional scholars acknowledge that the amendment was drafted not to protect American rights, but because the state of Virginia, the most populous of the former colonies, refused to ratify the U.S. Constitution unless it included a provision that guaranteed the right of an armed militia to hunt down and capture escaped slaves. Slavery is long gone, but the damage caused by the amendment lingers on, especially in Utah, where no one can stop you from carrying a concealed weapon, including the kind of rifle that killed Charlie Kirk. No one seems to have seriously asked themselves what these weapons might be used for.

The 2nd amendment and the right to carry a concealed tool for killing people is one consideration. The other broader aspect of the MAGA movement that very likely contributed to killing Charlie Kirk was the return to 19th-century racism, xenophobia, and divisiveness that the movement advocates. Charlie Kirk was a skilled debater. Others turn to less subtle means of expressing themselves.

Trump: A instant blame of the Left

Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed leader of the MAGA herd, wasted no time in attributing the murder to violent rhetoric from radical left-wing liberals. Trump is particularly angry these days that his administration ‘s actions are increasing compared to the rise of Hitler’s fascism.

Trump was understandably angry and hurt at the loss of Kirk, whom he genuinely felt close to, but his immediate reactions on his social media platform, the ironically labeled, ‘Truth Social,’ seemed directed at enhancing the divisiveness that contributed to making someone like Kirk a target.

Far from being radical and left-wing, the liberals that Trump denounces are, to a large extent, those Americans who still support traditional American values. If Democrats have been accused of anything, it is of not being radical enough when it comes to stopping Trump’s wanton dismantling of the American government, and more importantly, of the civil rights of individual citizens, not to mention America’s role as self-styled ‘Leader of the Free World.’

America does not necessarily need to be a superpower running the world, but it has traditionally believed in democracy, and that is what the MAGA crowd, especially its Silicon Valley billionaires, seek to change. The argument we hear increasingly from these advocates is that, at least in their thinking, autocracy is more effective than democracy.

If Trump’s efforts to redefine what it means to be American are increasingly compared to the arguments used by Hitler, it is because, to a great extent, they increasingly resemble German and Italian fascists in the 1930s. There has always been a minor strain of thinking in America that preferred Hitler’s concept of a new world order governed by a Germanic master race to the democratic ideal that holds that all men should be treated equally under the law.

A failure to resolve differences

Trump’s obsession with eliminating anything that might resolve differences in ethnic or racial diversity, his attempts to deny the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in America, and mostly his progressive attacks against anyone he considers to be “not purely white,” do sound like an echo of Hitler’s belief in German Aryan superiority.

Trump’s sudden obsession with creating concentration camps—his Alligator Alcatraz—also recalls Hitler’s efforts to eradicate not only Germany’s Jewish population, but also its homosexuals, handicapped people, and smaller ethnic groups such as the Gypsies. The MAGA crowd insists that people need to work before they can receive medical help from the government. Hitler’s concentration camps carried the slogan, “Arbeit macht Frei—Work will make you free.”

Right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson have increasingly given space to MAGA followers who ask whether the U.S. didn’t make a mistake in fighting Hitler and should have let Hitler demolish Stalin instead. The fact is that the U.S. might never have entered World War II, if Japan had not managed to awake us from our inattentiveness to the rest of the world by bombing Pearl Harbor and sinking the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet.

A call to back the isolationism of the 1930s

Now it looks like the MAGA crowd wants to take us back to the isolationism of the 1930s, and undo America’s dominant role following World War II. If that means following the fascist model, so be it. It’s been done before.

Trump: Lessons from Hitler

Trump’s efforts to turn the National Guard of compliant states into a national police force that he, himself can direct, his decimation of U.S. intelligence agencies, the FBI and the Justice Department, his intimidation of the U.S. Supreme Court, his vicious, ad hominem attacks against individual judges and against the rule of law in general, all follow a pattern that Hitler used to dismantle and eventually control Germany, which had previously been one of the most advanced countries in Europe, but which his policies eventually reduced to a shattered ruin.

Before his death, Charlie Kirk, who had dropped out of college himself, tried to package all of that into a convincing argument that might sway college students to his way of thinking. Utah seemed fertile ground.

In his favor, Kirk tapped into a widespread cultural nostalgia for an America in which individuals were not afraid to act, and were not bothered by intellectual or philosophical considerations. The pioneers who built the West were not afraid to shoot first and ask questions later. As Charlie Kirk saw it, they built an America that was more vibrant and more successful than the America we have today.

The only problem is that America never really existed except in the fevered minds of Hollywood screenwriters. When I was in the U.S. Army, I was initially assigned to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, which had once served as a crossroads for gunfighters in the Old West. More than a few street corners displayed a brass plaque commemorating a specific gunfight that had taken place at that very spot.

One I remember recounted the court case of a deputy sheriff accused of shooting a well-known gunfighter in the back. “If he shot him in the back,” the presiding judge later commented, “it showed good sense. If he was facing him when he shot him, he is damn lucky to be alive.” Is that the America we want to return to?

The deadly consequences of the 19th century

To a certain extent, Charlie Kirk was successful in convincing a number of American college kids that the 19th century and the values of the MAGA crowd are where we want to be. What he failed to realize was the deadly consequences that we face when these outdated, retrograde notions do become a reality.

Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.

Subscribe to A Different Place

By William Thatcher Dowell · Launched 2 years agoArticles and essays by William Thatcher Dowell