The morning after the murder of Charlie Kirk, NPR’s Morning Edition turned to Kyle Spencer, a leftist author of a 2022 book titled Raising Them Right: The Untold Story About America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement And Its Plot For Power. NPR host Michel Martin repeated the “ultraconservative” title three times. Spencer’s personal website describes her book as explaining “how radical extremists message anti-democratic ideals via social media, online celebrity culture and false facts.”
When asked about Kirk’s ideas, Spencer argued:
SPENCER: As he evolved, he became more of a cultural warrior. He became increasingly religious, spoke often about Christian nationalism, the need for Christianity to lead the country, the Christian values to lead the country. He was a firm opposer of reproductive rights. He did not believe in gay marriage. He was very, very vocal about traditional marriage, quote-unquote traditional values, and believed that there was racism in this country and it was very intense, and it was racism against white men.
Martin asked if Kirk had an “origin story,” asking “what was it that was so formative in these beliefs? You know, for some people, it’s, like, countercultural experiences that turn them off. Like, they feel that — you know, they encounter people who they feel reject them or who just — did he have a story like that?” Spencer elaborated on the notion that Kirk was a racist:
SPENCER: Charlie Kirk went to a high school in the suburbs of Chicago that had moved from being a majority white school to a majority black and brown school. And while he has never really said that that particular demographic change impacted his politics, it’s hard to imagine that it didn’t because Charlie really positioned himself as somebody who was supporting whiteness, white people, white culture and the white culture of this country against what he saw as efforts that were efforts to create equity in the country and to support the disenfranchised. He saw those efforts as disingenuous, ill-timed, bad for America.
Wow, Spencer knows about spreading “false facts.” Later, Spencer wrapped that into the larger narrative: “eventually, Charlie Kirk wanted to absolutely transform American culture and bring it back to an earlier time that he saw as more ideal.”
“Public” broadcasting is deeply suffused with the “DEI ethic” that they must “center the marginalized,” and so anyone who opposes the black left should be marginalized as a far-right white-nationalist fringe. But they aggressively defended Marxist leaders of Black Lives Matter and promoted anti-police rioting as righteous “black rebellion” in 2020.
