The debater I never knew until he was gone: Considering Charlie Kirk

I’ll admit something that may sound odd in this wired world: until a few days ago, I had never heard of Charlie Kirk.

His name only reached me because of his untimely death, and curiosity pushed me to learn who this fast-talking American really was. I began, as one does, with a debate on YouTube he’d taken part in at Cambridge University in England.

What I saw was not what I expected.

Kirk struck me as a sharp, almost slippery debater, full of tricks that would have earned approving nods in a school debating society. He would change the subject midstream, ignore inconvenient contradictions, and turn questions into stage props. It was clever, but it wasn’t deep. Compared with the political thinkers I sometimes listen to on The Rest Is Politics—Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart—he seemed like a boy playing chess against men who had once hobnobbed with world leaders and run governments.

Charlie Kirk

He reminded me a little of William F. Buckley in his prime, except without the wit or vocabulary, and faintly of Christopher Hitchens, though without the erudition or razor blade tucked behind the smile.

Kirk was no philosopher-king; he was a performer. A stage act. If you had asked him to swap sides of the argument, I suspect he could have done it just as fluently.

Watching him, I was reminded of my stepson many years ago, who served as a kind of street evangelist for a fundamentalist church.

He went onto campuses armed with a script of ready-made answers to every conceivable question, like a magician with a trunk of tricks. It gave him an obvious edge, and it didn’t much matter whether the (usually unprepared) student opposite him was asking questions in good faith—he already had the script. Kirk seemed to work from the same kit. Only instead of converting souls, he was winning clicks, applause, and probably somehow making a good living, although it is not exactly clear where the money came from.

What also struck me was how stripped of anecdote his style of discussion was. Unlike Campbell or Stewart, who sprinkle their arguments with recollections of Cabinet rooms, far-off travels, or conversations with figures like Bill Clinton or Vladimir Putin, Kirk relied almost entirely on a battery of preloaded talking points. There was no sense of political views moderated by lived experience, no human texture to ground his rhetoric: Just a relentless flow of rehearsed lines. It made him quick and tidy, but also oddly bloodless.

So what was Charlie Kirk really? To my eye, not an ideological conservative but a polished Trump apologist, a political preacher, borrowing the cadence of Christian apologetics and dressing it in the garb of political combat. He could win rounds against unprepared opponents, perhaps even audiences, but I couldn’t shake the sense that the convictions were negotiable.

It left me thinking about how blurred the line has become between politics, religion, and performance. Kirk had the presence of a preacher and the tenacity of an insurance salesman.

In the end, I found myself wondering less about what he believed than about what he thought the act was worth.