How to Respond to Charlie Kirk’s Legacy of Racist Bullying

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FEATURING TARIQ KHAN - In the days since the fatal shooting of rightwing extremist podcaster Charlie Kirk, conservative and centrist politicians and media outlets have worked hard to rehabilitate Kirk’s legacy. Ezra Klein of the New York Times has claimed Kirk was “practicing politics the right way,” and California Governor Gavin Newsom  decided that "we should all feel a deep sense of grief and outrage" at Kirk's killing and that "the best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work.” But what does it mean to “practice politics the right way,” and “continue [Kirk’s] work”? 

Tariq Khan, a historian and lecturer at Yale University, found out first hand what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Charlie Kirk’s work. In a now-viral social media post, he wrote, “Members of Charlie Kirk's organization spent two years aggressively stalking me, harassing and threatening me and my family, spreading lies about me, wasting my time and energy with a bogus lawsuit, attempting to end my academic career, and attempting to incite violence against me. They did similar things to hundreds of other academics who they saw as easy targets or obstructions to far-right goals. Kirk was not simply a guy with different views who liked to debate. He actively worked to try to destroy the lives of people like me.”

Khan is the author of the book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about his experience being targeted by Kirk's group.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I suppose writing about anti-left repression makes you an expert in more ways than one, when we're talking about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Tell us, take us through what it was that Kirk did to you, his organization, Turning Point USA, basically has kept a watch list of academics like yourself that they have deemed too dangerous to American discourse, this supposedly from an organization that claimed to be about debate. What exactly is that list and how did you get on it? 

Tariq Khan: Sure. So this was way back in I would say late 2017, early 2018, during that fall semester. I was a PhD student at the time, so I wasn't a professor. I wasn't somebody with really any kind of major power or influence in society. Just an ordinary person working on my PhD.

I gave a speech at a rally on campus at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign shortly after Trump's inauguration there were… A lot of protesters were arrested, you know, nonviolent protesters who were given just ridiculous charges under the Trump administration for terrorism and all these things. We called them the J20 defendants. And so, their case was kind of in the works at that time. And so, I gave a speech just raising awareness about that case.