Charlie Kirk. Creative Commons image.
By Lamar Hankins / The Rag Blog / September 21, 2025
It should be axiomatic to any freedom-loving person that no one should be harmed for their beliefs, views, or opinions. Yet our country, the supposed citadel of freedom, has experienced assassinations, firings, and other negative actions toward those who express unpopular ideas. Upon learning of Kirk’s death, I thought of the period from 1963 to 1980, a seminal time of my life, and counted seventeen deaths, by guns, of people on the national stage who meant something to me. We are a tragically violent society.
As a leading constitutional rights organization has said throughout most of its history, the answer to views you don’t like is not violence or intimidation or retribution, but more speech.
Before Charlie Kirk’s killing, he was barely known to me. In fact, if you had asked me whether Turning Point USA, Kirk’s organization, promoted views right, left, or center, I could not have given you an informed answer. Kirk was not on my radar. Since his death, I have learned why; he was a youth-influencer. He could not have cared less about those of us in our 80s. Maybe that was because some of us who lived through the civil rights struggles of the 1950s to 1970s could have educated him about why Martin Luther King, Jr., was not an “awful” person. King practiced non-violence, unlike the white people who killed four little girls with a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, and the white killers of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman a year later. Did Kirk ever read King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail? Had he done so, his views about race in this country might have been changed. Regardless, those of us with 80 years of living and learning could have explained to him that the term “awful” should be reserved for people who indiscriminately kill children because of their race, who murder peaceful civil rights workers trying to help black people register to vote, and those who kill people for what they believe or say.
We could have explained why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was essential to combat the virulent racism in which we grew up. As a fellow “white” person, I could have explained that that law was not “an anti-white weapon,” but an effort to help black Americans become full participants in our society. It is not apparent in what he said that Kirk was even aware of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was aimed at ending a century of unconstitutional black disenfranchisement by white racists, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibited real estate advertisements that read “No blacks need apply.”
I grew up in a time when black people had separate water fountains in our local grocery store, were relegated to sitting in the back of city buses, and could not attend school with whites. I might have been able to fill in some gaps in Kirk’s education had I the chance to do so. I could have explained that the 1964 law he opposed made it possible for a black friend to have a career as a pilot for American Airlines, in spite of Kirk’s misgivings about his ability to fly the plane, something he had done for years before as an Air Force pilot.
Had I been able to sit down with Kirk for a talk, I might have helped him see that the color of a person’s skin has nothing to do with that person’s abilities or achievements. Perhaps I could have helped him see that an accomplished African-American woman on the Supreme Court was no more of a diversity hire than is the African-American man who sits on that court. When I was involved with hiring in a job I had before going to law school, all affirmative action meant was that we made sure that minorities and women were aware of job offerings, and their applications for employment were wanted. Discrimination on the basis of race or sex was forbidden.
Of course, this explanation would have meant that I would have to address Kirk’s sexism as well as his racism. He believed women should not have the freedom to work in occupations of their choice until after they stayed home and raised children. “The biggest thing is this: more younger women need to get married at a younger age and start having kids. The single woman issue is one of the biggest issues facing a civilization.” He even criticized birth control, claiming “It is awful, it’s terrible, and it creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women.”
When women don’t get married young and have children, Kirk believed (without any evidence I could find) that there are terrible consequences: “We have more single women in their early 30’s that are the most depressed, suicidal, anxious, and lonely in America’s history because there’s a biological clock that’s going off and they realize that they’re not going to be able to have kids, that they’re not as desirable in the dating market or in the dating pool and so they start to lash out on the rest of society by voting democrat.” It takes an underdeveloped mind to not see that there are a range of choices available to women regarding marriage and child-bearing. It is not an either/or proposition.
It is unclear what made him think he had the right to direct the lives of other people in such a way. The same concerns involve his view that women did not have a right to make reproductive choices about their own bodies. Maybe he would have reconsidered that idea if a law insisted that he have a vasectomy now that he had fathered two children.
Kirk’s commitment to free speech seems to have fallen in the category of “free speech for me, but not for thee.” He wanted teachers fired whose ideas about gender identity did not match his. And he opposed gay rights in equal measure.
Of even greater concern to me is that Kirk did not support Jefferson’s views, echoed in the First Amendment, that the state and the church should be separated, neither impinging on the other. The evidence suggests that he was a Christian nationalist, the group that wants the United States controlled by Christians to the exclusion of everyone else.
Kirk was a virulent anti-semite, promoting “replacement theory” — the conspiracy theory that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants. His conspiratorial nature led him to believe that “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country,” and he believed that Jews controlled “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.” His unqualified support for Israel did not negate his anti-semitism, but it earned him Netanyahu’s undying adoration.
Kirk’s views about Islam were on a par with his views of blacks and Jews. Islam was a danger to the United States. This past April, he said, “America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank. Large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.”
The more I review Kirk’s opinions, the more I think that there may not have been any way for me to have had a rational discussion with him. He did not want to think critically about these issues with someone whose age, education, and experience provided informed perspective. He wanted to influence young people, whom he saw as impressionable and malleable. Often, Kirk was nothing more than a glib troll with a microphone, not a thoughtful critic.
I could go on about his ideas, but I will stop now, except to point out the tragic irony of his views on gun control. “We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Rather than support sensible gun control, Kirk wanted more people in the U.S. to have guns. It was during a discussion about guns at Utah Valley University on September 9 that Kirk was killed. I don’t have answers for what to do about America’s love affair with guns, which take nearly 50,000 lives here each year. But I wish Kirk’s had not been one of those lives taken.
[Rag Blog columnist Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, City Attorney, has a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the University of Houston.]
I like what you wrote. I lived in Austin studying at U of T and was impacted by all the events you have described. For a while it seemed like life, politics, were getting better but now it seems people (globally) have been persuaded to turn to the “right” or just given up. Keep writing!
Dear Rag Editors:
I’m not sure if you consider unsolicited articles for the Rag. I’m a retired professor and scientist who was formerly at UT from 1974-1996. I left UT because I was told there were no positions for me, except to continue to recruit minority students to UT and do my teaching and research. I’ve now returned to Austin as a retiree.
Here’s an article on the current UT leadership and my take on their actions.
Ideological Warfare at the University of Texas: Make UT Great Again (MUGA)
Daniel Acosta, Jr.
The University of Texas is facing an existential crisis because of its decision to appease the Texas governor and legislature by providing a more ideologically diverse curriculum to UT’s current programs. According to UT’s Provost, “our university leadership is having constructive behind-the-scenes discussions with the White House on the Trump Compact”. He further says that UT “aligns with the principles of conduct that they (the White House) want” (see the October 28th Chronicle of Higher Education interview of Provost William Inboden).
Certain UT colleges have been targeted for restructuring to bring their curricula more in line with what the President and Provost want the colleges to offer the students (i.e., a more optimally structured academic mission). The Provost states that “we will in time be announcing reforms and restructurings in the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Natural Sciences and others”. His plea to everyone on campus is: “Wait until we have something announced, and then we have that discussion”.
And so it goes. Cryptic messages to the public and the faculty on how UT will become great again with limited debate with those people most involved in higher education on campus—the faculty and students. Of course, an ideologically diverse curriculum is not the same as promoting a faculty and student body that are culturally and racially diverse. That is not allowed in the great state of Texas.
I returned to Austin in 2019 to spend my retirement years with my family. Although UT has had three different presidents in the last six years, UT still remains one of the best public universities in the country (see the 2026 U.S. News & World Report). So why do the UT president and provost proclaim that our great state university has “lost its way” and needs to regain the public’s trust? Is Make UT Great Again the new slogan for this new UT administration, instead of the current one-What Starts Here Changes The World?
Fifty years ago I was the second Mexican-American PhD professor on the pharmacy faculty since the founding of the College in 1893. Today there is only one Chicano professor. The number of Black and Hispanic tenured faculty at UT is embarrassingly low, compared to the other top ten public universities.
The Presidential leadership team of VPs and deputies consists of seven white men and six white women. Out of the fifteen active deans of colleges (plus three interim deans who are not included) there are seven white men, four white women, two Hispanic men, one Hispanic woman, and one Asian woman. Diversity has never played a role in the leadership of the University of Texas for over 170 years. So why is everyone now complaining that DEI has lowered the quality of education and research at UT?
I left UT after 20 years as a tenured professor and director of the toxicology training program because I was told I wasn’t suited for a higher administration position. I finished my career as the dean of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and later as the Deputy Director for FDA’s major research center—The National Center for Toxicological Research.
My wife and I helped fund a graduate student endowment in pharmacology and toxicology at the College of Pharmacy to assist students attend scientific conferences. I reached out to the new dean of pharmacy to establish an endowment to attract more Hispanic faculty to the college. But my efforts to improve the diversity of faculty and students at the college have been blunted by state regulations which hamper attempts to add more diverse and well-qualified individuals to the faculty.
Acosta is retired and lives in Austin. He’s Dean Emeritus of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and former Deputy Director of FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research.