Malcolm X and Charlie Kirk: Martyrs, Radicals, and Mythmaking

In 1917, Lenin wrote the following about the legacy of revolutionaries: “After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” Malcolm X is still often depicted as an angry, violent demagogue, but since those who have besmirched his name like to ignore the root causes of that anger, he is nonetheless rendered a ‘harmless icon,’ full of righteous fury about nothing in particular. The histrionic Cory Booker has recently performed this same operation on Angela Davis, who during her most productive years represented a political project entirely antithetical to Booker’s. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy has been sanitized to the point of being unrecognizable while his image has been endlessly commodified. It is ironic that Charlie Kirk, perhaps more than the average liberal, helped to bring King’s socialism back into focus in recent years. Kirk’s red-baiting, racist portrait of King’s legacy doesn’t do King many favors, but it may serve as a good reminder, for those willing to hear it, that MLK was a radical, not just a reformer.

In his lifetime and today, Malcolm X was despised for his radicalism. One of the greatest lies we are told about Dr. King is that he preached a message completely antithetical to that of Malcolm X, but King’s condolence letter to Betty Shabazz exposes this fraud:

While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.

By the end of his life, Malcolm X’s radicalism had expanded in scope (he was in open sympathy with anti-colonial movements abroad and anti-capitalist movements at home) while reaching out, for the first time, to the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement. At the end of his life, Dr. King criticized capitalism and American imperialism with greater openness than ever before, while also denouncing our culture of anti-communism as “irrational” and unscientific.

In the years since King’s death, his radicalism has been carefully scrubbed from the historical record; the nonthreatening, nonconfrontational version of King discussed in polite society bears more relation to Barack Obama than the real thing. Malcolm X, who lived his whole life as a radical, was eulogized in derisive terms by several major newspapers, and his death went unacknowledged by President Johnson and all other Western heads of state. For all the talk about “revolutionizing the conservative movement,” Charlie Kirk was no radical: he championed the right of white men and billionaires to dominate society, which ultimately amounts to championing the status quo. This friendliness to power, completely opposed to anything that can be meaningfully called radical, explains why numerous public figures rushed to mourn him and express condolences to his family, hypocritically claiming that ‘violence has no place in American politics.’

In high school classrooms and hallways today, it’s not uncommon to find inspirational posters of Malcolm X (at least in blue states), usually bearing this quote: “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” This in itself is a subtle but nonetheless insidious act of defanging his radicalism. While a strong student in his adolescent years, when Malcolm X entered prison he was by his own description coarse and borderline illiterate. He stalked his prison cell like a caged animal and cursed God to such a degree that his fellow inmates gave him the nickname ‘Satan.’ He did not begin his adult education until his brother Reginald introduced him to the Nation of Islam and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. This prison visit was the pivotal moment of his life: for the first time, he was provided with a convincing explanation for his suffering and an outlet for his anger and defiance. From then on he read voraciously, but not as an end in itself. He looked to Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and Harriet Beecher Stowe to understand the political and historic roots of black suffering, as well as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in order to grasp the white man’s ideological justifications for dominating and enslaving ‘inferior’ races. Malcolm X’s education was his passport to a very particular future, one that sought the collapse of white power structures and the black man’s reclamation of his destiny.

Of course, ominous suggestions of a violent reckoning among races don’t exactly make great material for inspirational classroom posters. But when a man is shorn of his character and beliefs to make his message appear less dark and unsettling, what remains? The third chapter of Malcolm X’s autobiography, entitled ‘Mascot,’ recounts the unease and alienation that the teenage Malcolm felt as the only black student at his school. While apparently popular among his classmates, Malcolm X always felt that this was because his blackness made him a fascinating and exotic object, and that he was not truly accepted for the content of his character. When Malcolm’s legacy and message are entirely excluded from the public sphere, excepting images of his familiar grin or the slightly less friendly photo of him carrying a carbine rifle, we are tacitly reviving the same fetishization and dehumanization that his classmates engaged in over 80 years ago.

Against his will, Malcolm X was reduced to a ‘mascot’ in the eyes of white America before he began the long, agonizing process of reclaiming his identity and pride. If he were alive today, it seems beyond question that he would be horrified by black leaders who have willingly taken up the mantle of mascot. In 2011, Dr. Cornel West referred to then-president Barack Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black muppet of corporate plutocrats.” Obama, as has been pointed out by others, had no ideology, no great convictions beyond his ambition; not only was he open about this, he made a virtue of it. Billionaires, warmongers, and corporatists naturally embraced Obama, as they now do with figures like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Jasmine Crockett. These politicians, as opposed to sell-out activists like Bayard Rustin or Angela Davis, never had any ambition but to be used by the rich and powerful, providing a phony progressive cover to actions that are cannibalizing our society and destroying our planet.

Charlie Kirk, in his own way, is undergoing a similar process of being turned into a mascot. His widow Erika has compared him to Vice President J.D. Vance, evidently doing her part to clear the runway for the latter’s 2028 presidential campaign. Liberal America’s favorite pundit Ezra Klein has transformed Kirk into a tolerant champion of free speech, someone who was “doing politics the right way.” Donald Trump loudly declared Kirk to have been “loved and admired by ALL, especially me,” which even to him must have sounded a bit over-the-top. Various mainstream figures have characterized Kirk as principled, charismatic, and broad-minded, when the evidence we have available shows that he was nothing of the sort.

A perpetual task for the left is to avoid reducing all historical figures, from Malcolm X or Charlie Kirk, to slogans or caricatures. It has become far too easy for the left to deify figures like Marx, Che Guevara, or Huey Newton while ignoring their very human shortcomings and complexities. It is just as wrong to think of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, or even Henry Kissinger, as pure evil, despite how much we may disagree with them; historically, socialists have found their ideas worth engaging with and even instructive, despite disagreeing with the political conclusions that follow from them. Charlie Kirk may not have been terribly complex, publicly or privately, but we should at least try to understand what complexity was there, especially if we are against falsifying the historical record. Kirk’s martyrdom, as we have seen, is intensifying the violent forces that are thriving in Trump’s authoritarian regime. We must also firmly remind ourselves that martyrdom, when weaponized by the left, has led to immense suffering. Let today’s progressive leaders be honest about Malcolm X’s radicalism as well as Charlie Kirk’s fascism. Even if we lose, at least it will be possible to say that the truth was on our side.