The Left Has Abandoned Rational Debate And Embraced Political Violence
The aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder should leave no doubt: the left has become a political movement predicated on violence and coercion.The aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder should leave no doubt: the left has become a political movement predicated on violence and coercion.Charlie Kirk thrived on truth and virtue over grievance-mongering
The average American parent has no idea who Ta-Nehisi Coates is — and that would normally be a blessing. His writings on race offer nothing new or edifying. He is a darling of the intellectual left who advances its racialist philosophy through anecdote and grievance.
But his recent denunciation of Charlie Kirk in Vanity Fair should prompt parents to take notice. If your kids plan to attend a university — especially a public one — they will be taught Coates’ worldview: that America is a systemically racist nation steeped in “heteronormativity” and “exclusion.”
Coates substitutes personal narrative for reasoned debate, even as he cashes checks and accepts awards from the very nation he condemns.
Much of my career has been spent exposing the radical left’s capture of the humanities. The method is always the same: sweeping declarations, superficial evidence, and endless personal stories of mistreatment that become excuses for remaking the world. Coates’ work fits the pattern perfectly. It is not inspirational. It is self-pity repackaged as wisdom.
Caricaturing Charlie
In his postmortem of Kirk, Coates warns that memorializing him might overlook his faults. At first, that sounds like a truism — we all fall short. But funerals are not for airing grievances. They are for remembering what we loved in the departed. The “bad things” fade into insignificance, and the dead cannot defend themselves against unfair caricature.
Yet caricature is exactly what Coates serves up. He repeats leftist talking points with such confidence that casual readers may mistake them for facts. They are not. They are distortions that reveal the low academic rigor of today’s radical left. For Coates, everything revolves around feelings of “hate,” never truth or argument.
Feelings over reason
This has always been Coates’ style. He substitutes personal narrative for reasoned debate, even as he cashes checks and accepts awards from the very nation he condemns. The hypocrisy is obvious. Consider Ibram X. Kendi, another star in Coates’ circle, exposed for wasting millions meant to “end racism” while achieving nothing of the kind. The pattern is grievance rewarded, not results delivered.
What Coates really offers is a window into a mind shaped by anger, envy, and resentment. A man showered with praise and wealth should rejoice in the opportunities America provided and use his platform to inspire others. Instead, he insists that structural racism explains every hardship. He never considers alternative interpretations or the role of moral choices in shaping outcomes.
Staying in school, avoiding drugs, marrying before having children — these choices matter. The statistics are clear. None of them hinge on “structural racism.”
Kirk understood this. When confronted by students claiming that poverty forces crime, he rejected the premise. That view dehumanizes the poor, excuses immorality, and reduces human life to material conditions. Kirk countered with a vision rooted in responsibility, virtue, and perseverance.
Coates, by contrast, repeats the falsehood that Kirk hated immigrants and LGBTQ people. He didn’t. He hated the sins that enslave people. He loved them as fellow humans and wanted them freed through Christ. He urged compliance with immigration laws not out of hate but out of respect for the rule of law — the same standard applied to Americans abroad. These facts are easily verifiable if one is willing to look.
The hypocrisy goes deeper. When Jimmy Kimmel was recently suspended, comedian Jim Gaffigan urged people to read his words directly rather than rely on secondhand distortions. Good advice. Why won’t the left follow it when it comes to Charlie Kirk? President Barack Obama claimed he never censored opponents, but his record shows otherwise. For decades, the left has policed speech, thought, and hiring.
A grievance parade
Coates claims to fear that American history is being covered up. What he really fears is that his interpretation of history has been challenged and found wanting.
He dwells on slavery but ignores the hundreds of thousands of young men who died to end it and the countless Christians who fought for abolition. He invokes Jim Crow and redlining but skips over the Democratic Party’s role in enforcing them. He wields “racism” as a bludgeon against dissent. But that weapon has lost its power.
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American history is human history — the story of sinners, yes, but also of a nation shaped by Christians who proclaimed that true freedom comes only through Christ. Charlie Kirk preached that message. He affirmed the dignity of his opponents by debating them. He loved his country, he upheld its laws, he wanted its people to flourish — but above all, he loved Christ and urged students to turn to Him as Savior.
That is what we should remember. And that is what Coates cannot understand.
Vanity Fair smears Charlie Kirk — but race-hustling author just ends up attacking common sense
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the race obsessive who suggested in 2020 that rioting was a "natural reaction" among black Americans, has joined David Corn of Mother Jones and other radicals in smearing Charlie Kirk after his assassination, allegedly by a leftist homosexual.
In his desperation to demonize Kirk, Coates — who penned hagiographies for Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown — provided the public with a reminder both of his own radicalism and the left's intolerance of common sense.
The critical race theorist was apparently prickled when some of his fellow travelers — namely Ezra Klein of the New York Times, Sally Jenkins of the Atlantic, and California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom — dared to say nice things about Charlie Kirk.
Coates evidently decided to compensate for his liberal peers' relatively decent remarks by penning an anti-Kirk polemic for Vanity Fair, thereby contributing further to the genre of conservative demonization that appears to have helped set the stage for the Turning Point USA founder's slaying.
In his Sept. 16 article, Coates, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, argued that Klein, Jenkins, Newsom, and other members of the "political class" were "sanitizing" Kirk's legacy by focusing on his numerous good-spirited campus engagements with people from different walks of life, instead of complaining about the murdered patriot's politics, which Coates claims "amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire."
Coates, who wrote in one of his books that the firefighters and police who died in the process of saving lives on 9/11 "were not human to me" but rather "menaces of nature," noted:
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views — that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s "civility" are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as "freaks" and referring to trans people with the slur "tranny."
Coates was clearly upset by Kirk's use of the term "freaks"; however, in context, it's clear that the TPUSA founder was being charitable, as more damning words may have been more appropriate.
Kirk stated on a Dec. 9, 2022, episode of "The Charlie Kirk Show" that the Biden administration was "being run by freaks. That's not an exaggeration; that's not hyperbole. At the highest stakes imaginable, people that have very deep-seated mental problems are running some of the most consequential government programs conceivable."
Kirk specifically referred to Demetre Daskalakis and Samuel Brinton, a pair of individuals who fit the bill.
Daskalakis is the sex-obsessed homosexual "activist physician" who until recently served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and previously served as Joe Biden's monkeypox adviser.
'I want to be able to get married, buy a home, have kids, allow them to ride their bike till the sun goes down, send them to a good school, have a low-crime neighborhood, not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school.'
Blaze News previously reported that Daskalakis, an LGBT activist with a track record of pushing drugs to facilitate promiscuous sexual behavior among homosexuals, had a history of denigrating straight Americans, sharing satanic imagery on social media, and showing up in public in bondage gear.
Brinton, a mustachioed nuclear engineer who ran a "Physics of Kink" class and made a habit of dressing in women's clothing, served as deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Energy Department. He pleaded guilty last year to petit larceny for stealing women's luggage.
Brinton's profile on CLAW Corp.'s website reportedly stated that he has "been active in the kink world since 2013, [hosted] monthly kink parties in their dungeon in Washington, DC, and estimate they have spanked over 2,000 cute butts."
In addition to suggesting Kirk was bigoted for calling sexual deviants "freaks," for criticizing racially motivated black-on-white crime, for expressing concern over Haiti's infestation by "demonic voodoo," and for suggesting the southern border was transformed under the previous administration into the "dumping ground of the planet," Coates faulted Kirk for another common-sense assertion, namely:
The American way of life is very simple. I want to be able to get married, buy a home, have kids, allow them to ride their bike till the sun goes down, send them to a good school, have a low-crime neighborhood, not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school while also not having them have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.
Just in case advocacy for homeownership and marriage didn't strike readers as bigoted, Coates — who reportedly likened the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks against Israel to the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831 — insinuated that Kirk was anti-Semitic, even though days earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the fallen patriot was a "lion-hearted friend of Israel" who "fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization."
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After rattling off numerous mainstream American views Kirk espoused, Coates stated, "Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known."
Coates, who is the Sterling Brown chair in the English department of the federally funded Howard University, continued his bitter rant, insinuating that Kirk got a taste of his own medicine — writing that "Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes" — calling Kirk an "unreconstructed white supremacist," and suggesting that his public life was cancerous.
The Vanity Fair piece concludes by hinting that Kirk, a man who worked diligently to improve his country and promote civic engagement among American youth, was like the "men who sought to raise an empire of slavery."
Blaze News has reached out to Vanity Fair for comment.
While Coates appears to have moved on from writing comic books, his hateful article demonstrates that he's not finished writing fiction.
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