NYT Columnist Ezra Klein: Charlie Kirk Was ‘Practicing Politics in Exactly the Right Way’

Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said in an op-ed following the horrific murder of the Turning Point USA founder.

Klein took a different approach than many of his colleagues and radical leftists and did not celebrate the assassination of Kirk or suggest that he “had it coming.” Rather, he wrote, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

“He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion,” he wrote. “When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it,” he continued, noting how effective he was as shown by the fact that large numbers of college-age voters swung to President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

And while he suggested that the movement was bigger than Kirk, Klein admitted that the father of two was “central in laying the groundwork for it.”

Further, Klein said that while he did not know Kirk personally, he “envied what he built.”

“A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” he wrote, later deeming political violence a “virus” and pointing to political assassinations of the past — John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and Medgar Evers. Further, he warned that it spreads.

In the 1970s, Gov. George Wallace was shot by a would-be assassin but survived, and Gerald Ford faced two assassination attempts in one month. In 1981 Ronald Reagan survived after John Hinckley Jr.’s bullet ricocheted off his rib and punctured his lung. These assassins and would-be assassins had different motives, different politics and different levels of mental stability. When political violence becomes imaginable, either as a tool of politics or a ladder for fame, it begins to infect hosts heedlessly.

Klein added that he and Kirk “were on different sides of most political arguments.” However, he said, “We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics.”

Arguments are won with words — not bullets — he continued, adding, “I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project.”

Klein’s position is very different than that of many men and women on his side, including the New York Times itself, which asserted in its obituary of Kirk that he was someone who “continued to provoke,” peddling many of the mischaracterizations of Kirk the establishment media loves.

Kirk’s assassin is still at large. The FBI is asking the public for help in identifying a person of interest whose photo they divulged.