Charlie Kirk isn’t Martin Luther King — He’s Nick Naylor

Canonizing a partisan spin doctor as an American Saint is just another layer of spin.

Aaron Eckhart as Nick Naylor in the 2005 film adaption of the novel Thank You For Smoking.

This article is a guest post by John-Paul Hyde.

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On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk, the right-wing pundit and founder of Turning Point USA, was murdered at one of his debate tour stops. The public reaction, justifiably appalled, went far beyond the typical single news cycle and customary thoughts and prayers. Seemingly four fifths of the nation has mourned Kirk as an American saint. President Trump ordered that flags fly at half-staff, an honor normally reserved for fallen high-ranking government officials or national tragedies. There was a school shooting in Colorado that same day; Charlie Kirk got the half-staff order, the children didn’t get a mention.

Across the Internet, a cottage industry of Charlie Kirk hagiographies has been booming. Obituaries extolling Kirk’s virtues deluge the media landscape everywhere outside the far left. Even Ezra Klein penned a tribute in the New York Times about how Kirk had been doing politics “the right way.” Unsurprisingly, the most glowing praise has come from the political right, who have blown past eulogies and into outright sanctification:

Elected leaders from Florida and Texas have commissioned statues of Charlie Kirk to be built on university campuses. Politicians from other states, such as Utah, Illinois, and Alabama, as well as members of US Congress in Washington DC, have initiated bills to raise statues of their own. One Texas State Representative has even called for Kirk monuments to be built across the nation. Meanwhile, social media is awash in AI fantasy-tributes of Kirk standing with fallen American heroes such as John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and even Jesus Christ himself. Another Texas Republican went so far as to claim that Kirk would have been Christ’s “13th disciple.”

Let’s be clear. Charlie Kirk wasn’t Abraham Lincoln. He wasn’t MLK. He wasn’t a fascist, either. In truth, he had more in common with Nick Naylor, the fictional spokesperson for the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the 1994 novel Thank You for Smoking and its 2005 film adaptation starring Aaron Eckhart. It’s a story about flexible morals and rhetoric wielded dangerously by the rich and unscrupulous.

Rhetoric was the talent Nick Naylor and Charlie Kirk shared, and there are many instances where they used this skill in contradiction with the truth.

In defense of his profession, Naylor compares his job to a lawyer defending a mass murderer — everybody deserves a fair trial and even big, morally questionable corporations deserve defending, too. He appeals to due diligence and fair shakes, but omits that lawyers, unlike him, are bound by layers of legal guardrails.

Charlie Kirk used similar chicanery in service of a political agenda, whether it was railing against universal healthcare or pushing for the privatization of the education system. In one video about healthcare, he invokes LASIK eye surgery to make his argument, noting that these procedures used to cost ten thousand dollars an eye — with no insurance, no pesky regulation — and now the price is five hundred dollars! Competition works! The unfettered free market for the win! Of course, Kirk neglects to mention that hardly anyone needs laser eye surgery — glasses and contact lenses are widely available and suffice for nearly everyone. That isn’t the point. They feel related — it makes for a good sound bite.

In Thank You for Smoking, Nick is challenged to respond to the New England Journal of Medicine reporting that cigarette smoking causes Buerger’s disease, an inflammatory condition that can require amputation. Nick rebuts:

Where are the data?

This was a double-blind study?

And how big was the control group?

Was this a prospective study?

At a Turning Point USA event in 2021, Kirk is questioned about Trump’s fossil fuel industry-approved climate policy. Kirk rebuts:

Can you prove humans are contributing to it [climate change]?

Can you prove how long it’s been happening and what the causation is?

And can you prove that anything we can do can stop it?

Naylor and Kirk both set their sights on information the presenter doesn’t know or could not possibly articulate on the spot. They clock their opponents’ inability to instantly produce comprehensive scientific answers — unencumbered by its irrelevance — and fell them with it. Why doesn’t he know that? He should know that, right? How can I trust anything he’s saying?

Charlie Kirk went to Oxford to debate critics of Donald Trump. In one clip, he stands triumphantly in a sharp suit with his hand raised chest-high to emphasize every point he makes as if to pop liberal falsehoods with every jab of his finger.

“I’ll give you a thousand pounds right now if you can tell me the US Citizen that was deported under Donald Trump,” Kirk challenges his opponent, then the audience.

“Kilmar!” Someone offers.

“Wrong, not a US citizen, [Kilmar was] a citizen of El Salvador!”

Kilmar Ábrego Garcia was legally living in the United States when he was deported without trial to a prison in El Salvador. But that didn’t matter — what mattered was that Kirk made his opponent look like an idiot by carefully framing the issue as hinging on whether Garcia was a US citizen rather than a legal resident whose rights were violated. Clip Created. Liberal owned.

Owning the opposition in favor of their clients was the primary goal of both Nick and Charlie. And when their clients required a change of narrative, both men’s arguments shifted to accommodate them.

At one point in the narrative, Nick Naylor blabs to a reporter that he knows cigarettes are dangerous and that he’s paid to dupe the public on behalf of tobacco companies. Naylor is fired and the tobacco industry suffers a PR loss when these remarks are printed in the news. Cut loose from Big Tobacco but looking toward his next industry gig, Nick needs to show he can still talk his way out of anything. He goes before a Vermont Senate hearing and testifies that smoking obviously is harmful for health, but reframes it as a matter of personal freedom, arguing that customers should decide for themselves if they want to smoke. He contradicts his career spent poking holes in studies about the links between tobacco and disease. The narrative changed, so Nick’s argument changed. He doesn’t argue for the truth — he argues for his client.

This is what we saw with Charlie Kirk whenever Trump changed narratives. Kirk beseeched America to turn away from a war with Iran. Then Trump bombed Iran, and Kirk applauded him as a “man made for the moment.” Charlie Kirk was a staunch free trade guy. Then Trump started pushing tariffs, and Kirk instantly became a protectionist. Charlie Kirk used to believe in the separation of church and state. Then Christian nationalism grew and merged with the MAGA movement, and Charlie Kirk became a Christian nation defender.

It’s technically conceivable that Charlie Kirk was just so in sync with the GOP zeitgeist, his finger so skillfully on the pulse of red-state America, that all of his shifts were genuine changes of heart he underwent alongside most rank-and-file Republicans. Perhaps the fact that his positions always evolved in ways that were the most beneficial at any point in time was simply a happy coincidence.

Kirk spent his career using debate tricks and verbal sleights of hand to persuade people to take the positions of his benefactors. Vice President JD Vance stated that Kirk was a major part of the Trump White House decision-making. He even helped Trump choose cabinet members. Charlie was an inside man. There’s a recurring line in Thank you For Smoking: “Tobacco takes care of its own.” MAGA takes care of its own, too.

Both Kirk and Naylor also had attempts made on their lives. Naylor survives his; Kirk doesn’t. But both of their (would-be) murderers had a sense of poetic irony. An anti-tobacco group abducts Naylor and covers him in dozens of nicotine patches in an effort to assassinate him and enact Justice for all the deaths they feel his rhetoric is responsible for. It doesn’t work. Doctors tell Nick that if he hadn’t been a smoker, with a built-up resistance to nicotine, he would have overdosed on all the patches. Naylor soars on the winds of victim-publicity — with the boast that smoking saved his life — and takes the tobacco industry up with him.

For his part, Charlie Kirk was shot while debating gun control, his final words questioning an opponent about whether the gun death statistics accounted for gang violence. Kirk had previously stated that a few gun deaths a year was the necessary price of freedom.

Thank You For Smoking has its own more direct ties to the Republican Party as well. The novel was written by Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley Jr., the master rhetorician who built the conservative movement of the mid-to-late 20th century.

If Charlie Kirk could be compared to anyone he might have found favorable, it’s William F. Buckley. Both men used debate and oratory to forward their agendas. Both mixed what was probably a genuine rightward disposition with opportunistic political maneuvering. Both men defined the movements they were part of. And both are lionized as champions of spirited debate and freedom of speech. Buckley on Firing Line and Kirk on college campuses. Buckley was a McCarthyite who rose to prominence advocating for the defunding of Yale because it had left-leaning professors. Kirk’s Turning Point USA has a watchlist of leftist professors complete with their employer’s information should you like to call and try to have them fired.

Now Kirk is being apotheosized across the country — his death a call-to-arms against all who oppose the MAGA agenda. In a social media video, right-wing commentator Matt Walsh says: “Charlie tried to have conversations with [the left], and they killed him for it.” Not he — Tyler Robinson, the murderer of Charlie Kirk — they: the left, the Democrats, progressives, anyone out-of-step with the movement Kirk represented.

The consensus position among right-wing culture warriors is calling for the firing of anyone celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk. More than that, anyone offering even the mildest critiques of Kirk’s positions — the positions of the Republican Party — is being cast as crossing the threshold of celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death or inviting further violence onto conservatives.

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas posted a picture of a woman in handcuffs with the words “This is what happened to the person who was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Texas Tech. FAFO.” (FAFO stands for fuck around and find out.)

The woman in question wasn’t actually arrested for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. She was arrested for assault. The important part is the narrative, though. Abbott wanted his public to assume that this woman was arrested for saying something they don’t like. Like Charlie Kirk and Nick Naylor, Abbott knows that it isn’t truth that matters, it’s what people feel is true — what people want to be true.

Right-wingers are the masters of messaging and the sultans of spin. Nick Naylor was a parody; Charlie Kirk was an exemplar.

At the end of the book, Naylor gets his moment of redemption: he wields the rhetorical skills he used for the tobacco companies against them. William F. Buckley Jr. also had time to correct himself and call his support for racial segregation a mistake. Charlie Kirk has no such opportunity. He’s frozen in time as a 31-year-old spokesman for MAGA. As a man of faith, Charlie Kirk surely would have agreed that he knew not when Christ would return to judge the living and the dead, and that Christians must act righteously because we don’t know if we’ll have time for redemption.

In his final decade, Charlie Kirk lived and died as a tool for MAGA. And MAGA will continue to use him for at least the next few. Is this Charlie’s Hell or his Heaven? Whatever the answer, I suspect Charlie would know just what direction to spin it.

See also: “We All Live on 4Chan Now”

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