Forget X, forget Bluesky. Forget all the high-profile pundits and influencers who long ago beclowned themselves. Scroll through your own personal Facebook feed, and you are likely to read some of the most heinous remarks imaginable regarding Charlie Kirk’s life and death from people you actually know and, until now, otherwise considered politically milquetoast acquaintances.

In the wake of Kirk’s death, the left immediately pounced to say through gritted teeth that political violence has “no place in America,” though it didn’t take long for them to land on their “but.” But, they say, Charlie Kirk was an “extremist,” a “white nationalist,” and a “fascist.” Copypasta memes began circulating with bulleted lines detailing Kirk’s supposed extremist positions. These memes were very quickly ready for mass distribution through Facebook, Bluesky, and beyond.

Noted left-wing extremist and streaming personality, Hasan Piker, gives the most concise exposition of this view via his X account:

Charlie kirk opposed the civil rights act, called george floyd a scumbag, said he’d be worried abt black pilots & that he’d force his daughter to carry a pregnancy to term if she was raped. He shouldn’t have been killed but he def was an extremist.

Let’s take each of these positions along with Kirk’s supposed words of support. Far from being controversial, they are totally commonsensical views. They are obviously and objectively true, all eminently reasonable, and they are moderate, normal positions for an American to hold. They can only possibly feel otherwise to an individual who is caught up in a world dominated by leftist culture. Yet Charlie’s great gift was his ability to communicate the reasonableness of unfashionable positions in defiance of leftist control. In his absence, I’ll do my best to show the late Kirk’s reasonableness.

Charlie Kirk, while speaking at a Turning Point USA Conference in December 2023, called the Civil Rights Act (CRA) a “mistake” and an “anti-white weapon.” Piker is, therefore, correct when saying Kirk “opposed” the CRA, but Kirk’s opposition was not without merit.

In the name of ending racism and segregation, the Civil Rights Act prevented whites from excluding blacks from schools, jobs, and even private life, which, through increasingly radical judicial interpretations (e.g. disparate impact doctrine), laid the basis for the modern DEI regime. While the original American Constitution preserved individual liberties, the new parallel constitution of civil rights, as Christopher Caldwell has demonstrated in his book The Age of Entitlement, emphasized equal outcomes—liberty and justice be damned.

It’s considered blasphemous to ask whether preserving the individual’s right to be racist is worth the cost of tolerating some amount of racism in society, but in an age when our institutions are beholden to an unending number of totalitarian anti-racism policies, it’s a trade-off worth pondering. After all, it’s hard to argue that poor blacks are any better off today than they were in the 1960s. And it’s absurd to imagine that overturning something like disparate impact doctrine would mean a return to discrimination against qualified blacks. Contemporary America is obviously not a racist country, and the overwhelming majority of Americans do not harbor racial animus.

What racial animus remains in America today is seemingly directed at whites in the form of DEI recruitment and hiring.

In the years following George Floyd’s death, corporations announced their intent to recruit and hire nonwhites. Even airlines promised to put more minorities in the cockpit.

In 2021, United Airlines pledged to have women and blacks as 50 percent of its pilots by 2030. Delta dropped recruitment requirements to attract black workers.

During this mad dash for non-white-male pilots, Charlie Kirk said on his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, “I’m sorry. If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”

Kirk “worried about black pilots” and was right to worry.

Within a few years, planes began falling out of the sky in high-profile incidents caught on video. By 2025, 65 percent of Americans said recent crashes made them “more nervous” to fly.

It’s perfectly reasonable for Americans—including Charlie Kirk—to link the two developments. Using skin color as a hiring factor necessarily means some more-qualified pilots will be passed over if the quota for blacks is above the ex-ante meritocratic outcome. Most Americans understand this, even if they’ve never dug into the statistics; 65 percent would like to see a return to “color-blind” society.

Piker complained that Kirk called George Floyd a “scumbag.” In a color-blind society, a man like George Floyd would be regarded as a scumbag—to put it lightly.

Between 1997 and 2005, Floyd served eight jail terms on charges of theft, drugs, and trespassing. However, there is no evidence of Charlie Kirk calling George Floyd a “scumbag” despite consistently setting Floyd’s defenders straight. But so what if he did?

Supporting Floyd and the movement he sparked was undeniably popular in 2020, but Americans didn’t then—and often still don’t—have all the information. In reality, per medical testimony, Floyd most likely died from an overdose while in police custody. Sad, sure—but he’s no martyr, let alone hero.

It’s completely reasonable to suggest that a career criminal who died under the self-imposed repercussions of his poor choices was a pretty bad guy.

Unlike George Floyd, who infamously held a gun to a pregnant woman’s womb during a home robbery, Charlie Kirk was a staunch defender of the unborn.

While speaking on a college campus in 2024, a student asked Charlie Kirk if his young daughter were impregnated through rape, would he insist she carry her pregnancy to term. “The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered,” Kirk responded.

This exchange of Kirk’s takes on the most straightforward issue on the list for a practicing Christian. A human life is just that, a human life—the sanctity of which cannot be defiled under any circumstance. Yes, even in the event of one’s own daughter conceiving a child through the heinous means of rape, the resulting child is still a human being. But this remained Kirk’s personal choice and opinion, not a national solution he sought to enforce through law.

Kirk did not mince words on abortion and consistently equated it to murder. This is the necessary belief of any Christian. Yet his post-Roe prescription for abortion policy was notably pragmatic: He opposed the 15-week national ban some Republicans preferred as a decidedly losing issue. Rather than declaring an arbitrary cut-off for murder, the only practical and moral solution is to let states individually fight for the most restrictive bans they can codify.

As the leftist talking points continue to spread more accusations and calumny will certainly follow, but they are effectively all the same. There’s no arguing with people who simply don’t want to be persuaded and who feign compassion for imaginary victims just to justify their hatred and need for dehumanizing people they disagree with. Yet Kirk never stopped trying to change their minds.

Charlie Kirk was not a “white nationalist” or an “extremist”—whatever that even means anymore—but an incredibly reasonable man who defended long-standing American principles and traditions. Far from destroying his legacy, his critics only confirm their own extremism. In time, their deranged hatred will serve only to make it clear how much more reasonable Charlie Kirk’s opinions were than theirs.