Ezra Klein Is Doing Politics the Wrong Way

Last week, political commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a college campus. Immediately afterwards, there were calls by many against political violence in all its forms, and these calls are obviously correct. Furthermore, murder creates a blast crater after the loss of a loved one, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the pain such violence causes.

What’s been surprising in the aftermath of Kirk’s death has been the rush to sanitize his positions and rewrite his beliefs. If you were only casually aware of Kirk, you may assume he was a Republican speaker or perhaps a right-leaning Christian speaker, but the specificity of his claims would escape you, as people like New York Times columnist Ezra Klein rushed to claim that Kirk was simply speaking to people to change their minds.

That’s the gist of Klein’s article last week, Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way. Klein argues that Kirk’s practice of podcasting, making YouTube videos, and going to campuses to debate college students was the correct mode of politics. “Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics,” he writes. For Klein, it’s very much the misattributed Voltaire quote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

However, Klein willfully ignores Kirk’s positions, particularly about political discussion. Even if you set aside all of Kirk’s beliefs that could be labeled as misogynistic, racist, and transphobic, you shouldn’t ignore his larger political project to silence dissenters and applaud political violence when it agreed with his mission.

Kirk’s organization, Turning Point, kept a running Professor Watchlist of academics who they felt ran afoul of conservative beliefs, and would harass these people. Were these liberal academics not entitled to their own beliefs? When Trump repeatedly lied that the 2020 election was stolen, Kirk echoed that lie. Were the people who voted for Joe Biden and those who believed in the democratic process not entitled to their beliefs? When an attacker came to Nancy Pelosi’s house and beat her husband, Paul, with a hammer, Kirk suggested someone should bail out the attacker. Are Nancy and Paul Pelosi not entitled to be safe from political violence?

These are uncomfortable truths. I understand the desire not to speak harshly of one who has died, especially in such a horrific and unspeakable manner. However, Klein’s refusal to grapple with the reality of Kirk’s political beliefs—that those who disagreed with him should be silenced—highlights that Klein’s interest here isn’t honesty but flattery. It shows Klein isn’t writing about Kirk at all. He’s writing about himself and saying, “I’m doing politics the right way because I’m lauding someone who disagrees with me.” And sure, if you wipe away all the specifics of Kirk’s beliefs and actions as Klein does in his op-ed, then it’s easy to appear magnanimous and avoid the paradox of tolerance.

I would go so far as to say that Klein’s article is not only dishonest but deeply cynical in its self-aggrandizement. Klein is making a calculation similar to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who applauded Kirk for his “spirited discourse”, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who lowered his state’s flags to half-staff even though Kirk was not a Pennsylvanian. These men are making the political calculus that they can perform benevolence. “Look, we may not agree with this man, but look at how we honor him. Look at how we embrace people of all beliefs. We are doing politics the right way.”

But eliding the truth allows bad actors to prosper, and those on the right are truly honoring Kirk’s legacy by shutting down people whom they deem insufficiently mournful of a right-wing activist. MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd and Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah were fired for accurately describing Kirk’s views, even though they acted with far more professionalism and respect than Kirk displayed in the aftermath of the attack on Paul Pelosi. Is it spirited discourse to get people fired from their jobs because they chose to be honest rather than polite?

What Klein celebrates in his noxious editorial is not truth or debate but the illusion of manners. Maybe in the coming days we’ll see an op-ed from Klein saying people shouldn’t be fired for speaking the truth, but I’m skeptical. He doesn’t seem concerned with the people who were harassed and silenced by Kirk’s operations, or else he would have mentioned them in his editorial. Instead, Klein is performing for his readers in the Times, exploiting a horrifying event to burnish his image as a thoughtful, empathetic political observer. And this matters because a lot of Democratic politicians listen to Klein. He has a major platform, and what he’s telling them is that it’s better to tell people pleasant falsehoods if it makes you appear gracious. Furthermore, to address a person’s complexities and their desire to shut down dissent would be rude, so it’s best to avoid that.

But all Klein has as a columnist and a journalist is his honesty. To lie so brazenly to his readers and to obscure Kirk’s positions signals that his foremost interest is not to inform but to perform. If you think Kirk was “doing politics the right way,” then political outcomes aren’t real, and it’s all just a game of people shouting at each other. Klein can cosplay as a serious thinker all he likes, but it’s past time we stopped taking him seriously.