Charlie Kirk’s shooting was a tragedy, the full cause and ramifications of which we don’t yet know. Killing someone in cold blood is unjustifiable. Killing someone who, like Kirk, was engaging in public debate and discussion, is likely to convince many that talking is a waste of time and more violence is justified.
But that isn’t the tragedy I mean. What seems tragic to me is the unfortunate direction of Mr Kirk’s brief life. Charlie Kirk presented himself as someone dedicated to genuine debate, open to all arguments: “Prove me wrong.” Genuine debate indeed implies the possibility of being proved wrong, of changing your mind about important things.
But this was not what Kirk actually did. Instead, he was a debater in the same way as a chess genius who agrees to play all comers, 10 at a time. It’s not impossible to lose, but highly unlikely. There is no real contest. Kirk was a skilled professional dismantling amateurs, mostly young college students.
If you watch his debates and read analyses of how he conducted them, Kirk’s method was to win by using well-known tactics—false binaries, rapid-fire factual recitation, interruptions, slanted rephrasings, and questionable citations—to keep his interlocutors off-balance. Further, the recordings of these interactions were carefully edited before being released to the public, to show Kirk in the strongest light and often humiliate those who disagreed with him. These were not genuine attempts to understand or even to change minds.[1] [2]They were performances designed to impress gullible bystanders and get people to join his highly partisan organization, Turning Point. [3]
In short, Kirk was a kind of sophist. Socrates, the greatest critic of sophistry, was himself accused of being a sophist or someone who “makes the weaker argument appear the stronger. A professional sophist is skilled at rhetoric—in itself the neutral talent to be persuasive—and makes their living by winning arguments and teaching others to do the same.
Whether the arguments are based on truth is beside the point. According to a 2023 study by the Brookings Institute, Kirk’s regular podcast had one of the highest rates of unsubstantiated or false claims of all popular political podcasts.[4] Kirk created and ran a growing Turning Point empire that relied on his rhetorical skills and, among other things, made him rich and famous.[5]
The opposite of sophistry, as exemplified by Socrates, is philosophy. This is the genuine search for truth. It uses some of the same tools as sophistry but for a different end, not to win arguments and gain fame or power or money, but to discover what is real, what the difference is between opinion and knowledge.
Key evidence that one is engaged in philosophy and not sophistry is a serious acknowledgement of ignorance, that one does not know what is true about the most important things. What are beauty, truth, virtue, courage, piety, nature? Socrates’s most famous ironic statement was that the only thing he knew, was that he knew nothing—which, however, put him immeasurably ahead of all those who claimed to know, but did not. An awareness of one’s own ignorance, of the weakness of one’s cherished opinions, is an essential starting point in seeking knowledge and putting one’s beliefs on firmer ground. Once you become convinced that your have found the truth and no longer need to search for it, you have, for Socrates, abandoned philosophy.
Charlie Kirk does not seem to ever have had any serious doubts about his own opinions. He came from a conservative family and remained a conservative his entire life. His core convictions were apparently formed in middle school, in part by reading Milton Friedman, and changed over time only in the direction of greater conservatism.[6] In his interview with Gavin Newsom in 2025 he said that early in his career he was a bit more libertarian, but that seems to be the extent of his flexibility.[7] Mr Kirk’s major ideological shift was in the direction of Christian nationalism and abandoning support for the separation of church and state.[8]
Mr Kirk didn’t go to college, something about which he boasted, claiming it made him more like the majority of Americans.[9] I would never say college is necessary for genuine learning—bad teaching often ruins minds. But it is also the path for a precocious youngster like Kirk to be exposed to different ideas, to have their preconceptions challenged in an environment where changing your mind doesn’t destroy your career.
Mr Kirk started Turning Point when he was 18, so instead of college he committed to creating a ‘start-up’, as he describes it, a start-up that rested 100% on his sophistry and on never deviating from a given set of positions. Kirk tells us that after speaking at a college conservative meeting, he was approached by Bill Montgomery, a wealthy right-wing businessman who told him how impressed he was, advised him to skip college, and offered to fund his new enterprise. They became co-founders of Turning Point USA.[10] Montgomery and Kirk’s other rich donors and supporters expected Kirk to vigorously defend his established views, not adopt new ones.
Plato in his dialogues shows Socrates interacting with many young men like Charlie Kirk. Men with great promise but also great ambition. They are attracted to the sophists, who promise success and fame. Socrates tries, with limited success, to turn them in a different direction, towards the kind of reflection that would deepen their understanding of themselves and the communities they live in. This reflection might, in time, make one able to engage in a different kind of politics, a politics informed by prudence and the realization that no one person has a monopoly on truth and virtue. This was Aristotle’s defense of democracy, that it was able to incorporate the views of many people.
The Greek sophists ultimately taught a kind of relativism. Skillful rhetoric could change people’s opinions, in any direction. What determines the direction is outside the realm of reason; it is whatever the skilled sophist, or his employer, wants. Charlie Kirk, of course, presented himself as a true believer—in right and wrong, in Christianity, in traditional values, in Donald Trump—and scourge of relativism. But this is part of the sophist’s playbook, since most of us are attracted to people who seem certain of their beliefs, and are confused when someone is less confident. Did he genuinely believe what he said, or was it a sham? Kirk was known for taking extreme positions, such as calling for President Biden to be executed, or claiming black people were mentally inferior—were these genuine beliefs, or an easy way to get attention? The sophist is caught in a tangled web.
Everyone agrees that the youthful Charlie Kirk was someone of exceptional intelligence and poise, with great powers of persuasion. I think his tragedy is that when he was very young, instead of a Socrates, he met people who told him how great he was and offered him money. It would be hard for any 18 year old to resist such flattery, and Kirk’s certainty about his beliefs made him especially susceptible. This path corrupted a promising soul.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2025/09/17/how-debate-me-bro-culture-ruined-civil-discourse/
[2] https://newuniversity.org/2025/04/14/the-charlie-kirk-and-ben-shapiro-debate-trap/
[4] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/
[9] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxqnkwerj7o
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