Ezra Klein is taking a lot of grief for the column he wrote about Charlie Kirk in the New York Times. I suspect a lot of these critics didn’t read the whole piece and are just taking one part of it out of its fuller context. Here’s the offending part:

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. 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. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.

I have a bunch of problems with what Klein wrote in this paragraph but I do want to emphasize that the overall point he was making in his piece is sound. Political violence begets more political violence and a democracy depends on debate and is threatened when speech is threatened.

My issue with the paragraph above is that it’s misleading. If all Charlie Kirk was doing was showing up to college campuses and having a rigorous debate with progressives, that might be “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” But that’s not all that Kirk was doing by way of practicing politics.

He was working hand-in-glove with the anti-Democratic forces of the MAGA movement and Trump administration. He launched the Professor Watchlist to harass and intimidate academics. He was a podcaster who spread vile racist views about immigrants and the intelligence and character of black people. He was a proponent of the Great Replacement Theory– a favorite of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. This went beyond debates about urban policing, transgender youth health policies or proper levels of immigration. This wasn’t just some healthy debate that a democracy should welcome.

Now, in theory, what Kirk was engaged in at the moment of his death was a good thing. I’d point out that the last words out of his mouth were meant to convey that mass shootings by gang members (i.e. people of color) should be categorized differently from mass shootings by white people. He didn’t get a chance to expand on that view. But let’s be charitable and grant that this was a healthy debate Kirk was engaged in and he was “practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

That’s still far from the only thing he was doing in politics.

I’ll be honest. There are a lot of decent people who think Kirk got what was coming to him and I don’t think any of them feels that way because he engaged in mostly civil debate on college campuses. They feel that way because of the hatred and abuse he spewed, and because he was so effective in poisoning the minds of young people and convincing them to adopt these views.

I just fundamentally disagree that you can practice politics in the exact right way and have decent people celebrate when you are murdered. I think Klein is being far too nice.

Two things can be true at the same time. It can be true that a healthy democracy needs to debate differences without violence and that Kirk should not have been murdered for showing up to a college campus to argue with progressives. It can also be true that Kirk was absolutely not, in the greater picture, practicing politics in a healthy way, and that this is likely why he was targeted.

This is also why Klein’s column can be simultaneously smart and edifying on the one hand and myopic and infuriating on the other.