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With all the lunacy surrounding the murder of Charlie Kirk — beginning with the murder itself but rapidly expanding to include its reckless politicization and weaponization, from Donald Trump on down, and the fate of those who made the career blunder of elevating truth over beatification in addressing Kirk’s legacy — it might seem hard to get worked up about a seemingly innocuous tribute from The Washington Post’s Editorial Board.

But I am worked up, and here’s why.

The Post editorial, published the day of Kirk’s killing, does something that should be journalistically impermissible, and does it for the most insidious and craven of reasons.

At first glance, the short piece might sound a lot like standard editorial fare — dismay, contextualization, and appreciation in the wake of a traumatic event. But follow me through a close reading of the text, with commentary, because the slants here are subtle and somewhat buried.

And it is that very subtlety that makes it dangerous.

First, let me make clear my own position regarding the life work of the man in question.

Charlie Kirk made a not-so-small fortune spewing scorn, derision, contempt, reality-distorting rationalization, and, yes, hate to highly impressionable audiences of the mostly young. Yes, he “got into the ring” — but rarely, if ever, with a middleweight, let alone a heavyweight who could punch back. 

His “debates” were the equivalent of boxing matches set up with pattycakes, as memorialized in Bogart’s last flick The Harder They Fall. 

Punching down in controlled “Prove Me Wrong” exchanges with hapless college students, Kirk would sneer his way through, owning the libs, winning over youthful hearts and minds to a racist, sexist, revanchist worldview. 

Here, if you have any doubt about this, is a Greatest Hits album of Kirk quotes for your reference.

Kirk did a great deal of damage. He did not, of course, deserve to die for it. But neither does he deserve hushed reverence, enforced at the point of a pink slip. 

Unlike Matthew Dowd, late of MSNBC; Karen Attiah, summarily canned by the Post itself; and a host of others deemed “insufficiently respectful,” I have no fear of losing my job at the fiercely independent WhoWhatWhy for daring to describe Kirk and his impact as they were, rather than bathed in the soft light of sainthood. 

Locked-and-loaded MAGA martyr that he now is, Kirk will continue doing damage — in fact, far greater damage in death than in life. I think we all can see where this would have gone in a hurry if it had been, god help us, the perfect political assassination from central casting that our salivating president gleefully concluded it was, before the shooter had even been identified. 

As if it mattered what the momentary political sympathies of a deeply disturbed, internet-addled young loner happen to be. But it does matter — more than matter: In Trump’s America, in 2025, it’s everything. The ridiculous little hook from which the nation’s whole future hangs on the wall of absurdity.

Fortunately, the facts have made something of a dent in that weaponized “blame the enemy” narrative, though hardly putting it to rest. There is, after all, the ever-fruitful trans angle and whatever “smoking gun,” “I’m a radical left lunatic” confession Trump’s weaponized FBI and its penitent and thus even-more-devoted director, Kash Patel, can carrot-and-stick out of Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer in custody. (Yes, I’ve seen enough to be that cynical about how Trump and his many tentacles roll.)

As if it mattered what the momentary political sympathies of a deeply disturbed, internet-addled young shooter happen to be. But it does matter — more than matter: In Trump’s America, in 2025, it’s everything. The ridiculous little hook from which the nation’s whole future hangs on the wall of absurdity.

And indeed, the latest out of Team Trump is ominous. Vice President JD Vance, bizarrely hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show”out of his vice-presidential office, blamed Kirk’s death on “a growing and powerful minority on the far left,” then pivoted to backing a “mass doxing campaign” to ferret out and punish any and all who say, or have said, anything critical of St. Charlie. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has vowed to target leftist “terror” networks “in Charlie Kirk’s name.” Guilt by association is running wild.

See here for data and methods/sources: https://t.co/zrPXrsyha1

See here for Figure above: https://t.co/FO5Ipr5vTQ

— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) September 13, 2025

After all, why let the facts — such as which “side” is responsible for the vast majority of political violence and killings in America — get in the way of a good pogrom?

Those are my opinions, admittedly strong ones, though I have little fear of being, as it were, proven wrong. 

Insidious Little Things

Now let’s see what the once titanic and fiercely independent WaPo, publishing shortly after Kirk’s death was announced, had to say, taking it one paragraph at a time.

Months before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, the conservative activist warned about the spread of “assassination culture.” He cited the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, as well as the killing of a health care CEO. And now it seems all too likely that he himself became a victim of that violent fervor while speaking on Wednesday at Utah Valley University.

Nothing here of great note, the only slight eyebrow-raise being the qualified (“all too likely”) implication that the Kirk shooting followed in the mold of both the ideologically motivated killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and the attempt on Trump’s life that, while not the doing of a left-winger, had seismic political implications. It may in fact have played a decisive role in returning Trump to the White House. Put a pin in that.

The 31-year-old, a husband and a father of two, founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA in 2012. Over time, he developed a massive following online and traveled frequently to college campuses — preaching to the choir while also relishing debate with his many detractors. That sort of dialogue is what universities are supposed to foster, and shooting someone for what they have to say is among the most un-American and evil acts that anyone can perpetrate.

Also basically unobjectionable — although it establishes, by assumption, that the shooter’s motive was Kirk’s message, what he had to say. That motive had not been established at the time the editorial ran.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) described Kirk’s killing as a “political assassination.” The perpetrators of such shootings are often motivated by a mixture of mental illness and radical politics, and we don’t yet know what drove Kirk’s killer. But political violence has become disturbingly common in the United States.

Now it gets slightly dicier. The authors acknowledge, appropriately, that the assassin’s motive(s) for killing Kirk are unknown; and it is certainly the case that “political violence has become disturbingly common in the United States.” Both statements are true, but note how the three sentences in that paragraph combine to, very subtly, reinforce the impression being built that Kirk’s killing was indeed a “political assassination.”

Elected officials in Minnesota were horrifically assassinated at their homes in June. Trump came inches from being assassinated during a rally last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. Then, last September, another armed madman was caught lying in wait for him. (That suspect is on trial for attempted murder this week.) Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) almost died when a left-wing radical shot up the congressional Republican baseball practice in 2017.

This is where the authors first clearly tip their hand — although, even here, it remains subtle enough to be easy to miss, almost subliminal. 

Four “incidents” are related in this paragraph: two attempts on Trump’s life (lest we forget); the “baseball practice” shooting from eight years ago; and this June’s killing of Democratic Minnesota House Speaker-Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband by a radical right-winger, who also critically wounded another Democratic officeholder and his wife, and had a hit list of 45 other Minnesotans and 20 more in other states, almost all Democrats, including Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI).

How was all this presented? Scalise, who was seriously wounded in the baseball shooting, was identified, by party, as a Republican. His shooter was identified as a “left-wing radical.” 

Democrat Hortman’s party, however, was not mentioned; she was referred to instead, generically, as “elected officials [sic] in Minnesota.” Nor was any hint given that her alleged killer, Vance Boelter, was a right-wing radical, let alone that he planned to take out a good number of other Democratic leaders and officeholders.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, we have a Republican victim of a left-wing radical eight years ago, and a generic — no party mentioned — victim of, well, somebody, three months ago. Sandwiched around a couple of attempts on Trump’s life. You tell me what impression all this conveys — or that the slanting is just accidental. 

There’s plenty of context here: At the time of the Minnesota killings, Trump’s reaction was to insult Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) in explaining why he didn’t bother calling the governor; and, this week, when asked about lowering the flag for Hortman’s assassination, Trump replied, “Who?”

Too often, partisans appear eager to blame their opponents after any heinous attack — rather than straightforwardly condemning it. Studies suggest that strong public denunciations of violence from elected leaders help strengthen norms against it.

True enough, but let’s see where this is going.

The overwhelming majority of prominent Democrats forcefully and promptly condemned the killing of Kirk, including New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who hosted Kirk on his podcast six months ago. Former president Barack Obama said that “this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” Though Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) decried the violence, he couldn’t help himself from taking a dig at Trump. “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” he said, a disgracefully ill-timed comment.

Ah. WaPo is not (yet) Newsmax or The Daily Caller: Its Editorial Board is not about to lie. So, yes, it accurately relates that the “overwhelming majority of prominent Democrats forcefully and promptly condemned the killing of Kirk.” No getting around that. The authors even single out a few prominent Democrats who did the right thing. 

So, in fact, did the fourth, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who “decried the violence.” 

Pritzker, however, called out Trump for fomenting violence with his rhetoric (viz., calling immigrants “animals,” his political opponents “vermin” and “scum”; invoking Nazi tropes like “poisoning the blood of our country”; telling his rally crowd to “knock the crap out of” would-be hecklers, etc.). 

Which might strike one as a critically important piece of context, as a traumatized country struggled to process the meaning and implications of what it had just witnessed, and as the president himself cued up a partisan pogrom in response to the fraught moment. But Pritzer’s contextualizing statement instead struck the WaPo Board as “a disgracefully ill-timed comment.” 

Disgracefully! How dare anyone try to contextualize or make sense of the “political violence” that the authors have just finished decrying? 

No, this is the moment for Democrats to meekly decry it — mea culpa, mea culpa! — out of respect for the dead, while Trump and Vance and Miller and Laura Loomer and just about every stray MAGA luminary with a digital megaphone points the (premature) finger and locks and loads their program of revenge!

And we’re not done yet.

Witnesses describe lax security at the event in Utah, but why should heavy security have been needed? Kirk had every right to expect that he could make his comments without fearing for his safety.

Really? A Class-A provocateur in this self-proclaimed era of “political assassination”? One who tossed off a question about gun violence by asserting that “some gun deaths” (there are over 40,000 gun-related deaths annually in the US) are “worth it” to keep the Second Amendment all but absolute?

This might have been a good place for the Board to mention that Utah just liberalized its open carry laws for public places like college campuses, such that just about anyone in Kirk’s audience of 3,000 could have been toting a long gun for one reason or another — maybe if a deer or a bear showed up at Utah Valley U., or perhaps just in case the speaker said something they disagreed with. 

With laws like Utah’s — and a whole bunch of other red states’ — I think we can all agree heavy security might just be in order, for any speaker. Or maybe if you were just heading across campus for a bite to eat.

And last, but surely not least.

The Utah event was supposed to be the first in a series of university visits this fall as part of Kirk’s American Comeback Tour. His voice might be gone, but his millions of fans will make sure his message is never silenced.

This is pure, unadulterated panegyric. Utterly gratuitous. And, given what that “message” was — and what The Washington Post once was — nauseating.

Sure, it passes journalistic muster to decry political violence, vigorously support the right of free speech, and acknowledge the accomplishments of the dead. In the case of a highly polarizing, nothing-if-not-controversial figure like Kirk — someone who, despite Trump’s claim that he was “loved and admired by ALL,” was certainly not; someone who brought pain and grief to many; someone who relentlessly divided us, whether out of deep conviction or for fun and profit — such encomiums must not drift into the realm of awed worship. 

And what else is the Editorial Board’s concluding line but a ringing peal of worship?

Consider: If Kirk’s message is indeed “never silenced,” it will mean that the marginal among us will continue to be mocked and scorned; that the Second Amendment continues to be exalted as absolute, at the expense of the First; that empathy is a “made-up word” that “does damage”; that Black Americans had it better under Jim Crow; that a raped 10-year-old should be forced to give birth; that Black women “do not have the brain processing power to … be taken really seriously”; that Taylor Swift should “submit to [her future] husband”; that it’s a fact of life that “Democrat women want to die alone without children.”

Are those really the messages that the WaPo Editorial Board wants to celebrate as worth perpetuating in perpetuity — never silenced?

If not, then just what is going on here?

Answering to a Higher Power

First, let’s dismiss the idea that this WaPo editorial might be the work of some rando subaltern having one of those days. It says, right under that cracker of a concluding line: 

Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through discussion among members of the Editorial Board… 

(Sidebar: While you’re at it, check out, at the link they provide, the slant of some of their other editorials.)

This was carefully considered and vetted, put forward as the official position of what was once regarded as one of the two or three most eminent and serious newspapers in America.

It was, I will confess, until fairly recently my own go-to source for both news and opinion, with writing that I long regarded as consistently superior to that found in its main rivals The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — which is what makes coming to grips with this piece, and the veer of the Post more generally, so personally distressing.

Although he is mentioned only twice, in passing, one can smell the subservience to Trump in this editorial, as in many others of the new era of WaPo’s journalistic fealty.

It is painfully obvious that we would have seen a very different editorial before the Jeff Bezos-mandated political shift at the Post. 

Pritzker’s comment would not have been characterized as “shamefully ill-timed.” Instead, its basic truth, that Trump has indeed fomented hatred and violence in our country, would have been acknowledged, or at least Pritzker’s perspective would have been presented without the Board’s shaming judgment.

And the final paragraph’s worshipful panegyric would at the very least have been tempered, written to acknowledge Kirk’s millions of fans without implicitly or explicitly exalting his message. 

Trump Over Truth

Although he is mentioned only twice, in passing, one can smell the subservience to Trump in this editorial, as in many others of the new era of WaPo’s journalistic fealty. The editors remaining at WaPo have a right to their opinions — but should anyone there be at all surprised by its plunging readership? Or by the constant flood of emails and ads offering WaPo subscriptions at ever lower fire-sale prices?

I was a teenager when Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch purchased the New York Post in 1976, gaining a foothold in the US media market and leading to his eventual founding of Fox News. That Post, beloved by my family, was instantly transformed into a sex-crime-scandal rag with a heavy right tilt; all the great “liberal” columnists — Peter Lisagor, Mary McGrory, Murray Kempton, Pete Hamill, James Wechsler — packed their bags or were fired. The paper, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, was soon — politically as well as aesthetically — unrecognizable.

It may be coincidental or correlative, but I date America’s decline — its long tumble and slide into the Trumpocene — to Murdoch’s purchase and conversion of the New York Post, with his addition of Fox News being a potent accelerant. 

It may have ruined our country, but it was surely good business by a savvy mogul.

Another savvy mogul, Bezos, bought the struggling WaPo in 2013, with promises to save it. Which, in a manner of speaking, he did. At least for a while. 

But Bezos’s main squeeze is and always has been Amazon. And Amazon, including its “cloud” services, does a lot of business with the federal government. It is, like Apple and Meta and Paramount and a bunch of other corporate behemoths with “deals” awaiting approval and regulators potentially making life difficult, highly dependent on the federal government’s good graces.

Trump is now running the federal government like a cross between a huge but closely held business and one of the Mafia’s “five families.” He also really likes to sue: Just yesterday, for example, he sued The New York Times — for something or other, legally baseless, of course — for $15 billion, in the state of Florida, where some of his favorite and most loyal judges sit on the federal bench. 

Such is the consequence of not being “nice” to Trump, and I’m sure Bezos is taking careful notes. By now, though, it’s right out in the open and everyone knows: To get or stay in the Don’s good graces, no matter how big you are, you have to kiss his ass. 

If you’re Jeff Bezos, that means spaying your once preeminent newspaper, letting its remaining editors know that Trump comes before truth (the whole truth, anyway) — that democracy may die in darkness or in daylight, but, if they want to keep their jobs, they know what they have to do. And it seems to mean firing anyone, like award-winning columnist and Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah, who, however good at what they do, didn’t get the message.

Just one more thing Trump has touched that has died. It seems he aims to touch everything he possibly can. 

Thoughts and prayers, then — for us.