Charlie Kirk’s Views on Masculinity and Politics Were Amazingly Ignorant

And despite his death, those ideas live on, and deserve to be utterly repudiated

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Charlie Kirk may be gone, but the noxious views he held about so many issues — immigration, race, sexuality, and gender — soldier on, and will, unless dismantled, continue to poison the well of American political discourse.

A few weeks before his horrific assassination, I came across one of his latest absurdities: a claim that there was a natural link between testosterone levels and political affiliation.

More to the point, he was insisting that low-T males are more likely to be “compliant” liberals, while high-T men are, naturally, more independent and conservative. As a side note, one imagines this would also have been Kirk’s explanation for why women tend to be more liberal — too much estrogen or some such thing.

On the one hand, it’s hard to know when MAGA types make these kinds of arguments, whether they’re just trolling, knowing that such reductionist nonsense will trigger anger from their adversaries, or whether they really believe the asinine things they say.

But even if the goal was pure trolling, the danger of such commentary is that what begins as a joke can easily come to be…