Charlie Kirk, Intersectionality, and the War on Empathy

After Charlie Kirk's assassination on September 10, 2025, many on the Left lauded Kirk's willingness to debate political adversaries on his "Prove Me Wrong" tours of college campuses. California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote in a statement that he admired Kirk's "passion and commitment to debate," claiming the best way to honor his legacy was "to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse." In The New York Times, columnist Ezra Klein called Kirk "one of the era's most effective practitioners of persuasion" and claimed that even if you disagreed with his views, "the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way."

Others took offense at what they considered the white-washing of Kirk's legacy. In Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that people honoring Kirk were unable to "separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life." Coates called attention to Kirk's political ideology, which he described as "some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known." In The New York Times Magazine, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote that for those who were targets of Kirk's bigotry, calling him "an exemplar of how we should engage politically across difference" seemed to value "the civility of Kirk’s style of argument over the incivility of what he argued." Further, Jones asserted that "Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous," especially when considering Trump's active attempt to curtail the civil liberties of those opposing his political agenda.

Hasan Piker, a liberal commentator who was scheduled to debate Kirk at Dartmouth College a few weeks after his death, said Kirk was not interested in engaging in genuine political discussion. Rather than "debating for the purpose of finding the truth or from a position of intellectual curiosity," Piker claimed that Kirk's goal was simply to "humiliate his ideological opponents." After many of Kirk's debates, for example, he would post his most confrontational exchanges on YouTube and other social media with inflammatory headlines such as "Charlie Kirk DESTROYS Naive College Liberals" or "Charlie Kirk Wrecks Cocky Liberal Who Tries to Outsmart Him."

According to Daniel Martinez HoSang, a professor of American studies and political science at Yale University, Kirk's aim was not necessarily to champion free speech but to introduce college students to extremist alt-Right ideas. In Inside Higher Ed, HoSang observed that many students on college campuses "may not identify as a conservative, but [Kirk] made it fun, interesting, compelling and culturally relevant, and they’re providing all of these inroads to conservatism. Framing his arguments around these [so-called] unthinking, dogmatic authoritarian liberals who can’t even answer a simple question about the meaning of gender allowed people to feel like [Kirk was] making some good points."

Since his death, Turning Point USA—the organization that Kirk founded in 2012 —has reported receiving over 120,000 inquiries about starting new chapters on high school and college campuses across America. Matt Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, noted in The Boston Globe that Kirk's appeal was based on a "budding, anti-establishment, anti-elite sentiment that was deeply felt in the country" by those who agreed with Kirk's assertion that liberal institutions were trying to indoctrinate students with progressive ideals. In 2016, Kirk published a Professor Watchlist to encourage college students to identify instructors who "discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom."

Teaching in this climate has led many educators to monitor carefully the ideas and theories they share with students. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Albert Ponce, a professor of political science at Diablo Valley College in California, recounted that he was put on the Professor Watchlist in 2017 after he gave a public lecture on the rise of white supremacy in modern America. Even though he claims that he has not been intimidated or silenced, he admits that “we’re all targets for these organizations that try to silence us. For anyone who touches these issues now, it’s open season.” Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College, claimed in The Guardian that “Charlie Kirk will be remembered as one of the foremost architects of the political strategy of treating faculty and students with whom he disagrees as enemies to be defeated." By targeting individual professors based on 19 categories—such as "feminism," "racial ideology," and "anti-Judeo-Christian values"—TPUSA aims to prevent the teaching of any theory that might challenge or threaten their worldview.

One professor on the Watchlist, Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA, introduced the groundbreaking legal concept of "intersectionality" in a 1991 paper entitled, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color." Merriam-Webster's dictionary has since defined Crenshaw's theory as "the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups." Conservative columnist David French noted in Vox that the theory of "intersectionality" should not be controversial because it posits an indisputable truth, namely that an "African American man is going to experience the world differently than an African American woman. Somebody who is LGBT is going to experience the world differently than somebody who’s straight. Somebody who’s LGBT and African American is going to experience the world differently than somebody who’s LGBT and Latina.  It’s sort of this commonsense notion that different categories of people have different kinds of experience.”

For conservatives like Kirk, however, the theory of intersectionality is considered "the glue that keeps the global left wing insurgency together." In an Instagram post on June 10, 2025, Kirk wrote that intersectionality "masquerades as compassion, but at its core, it's a caste system of victimhood; where identity outranks truth, grievance replaces virtue, and justice no longer serves the common good, but kneels to a hierarchy of oppression." For Kirk, Crenshaw's theory creates an "inverted moral order" where "truth is subordinate to emotion, merit is condemned as privilege, and justice is not about fairness but about redressing collective wounds." Ultimately, what is threatened is the status quo and the existing power structure, which Kirk identifies as "the pillars of civilization" that must be defended at all costs: "Either civilization will win, or we will march into the abyss. The West as we know it is at stake."

When considering the pushback that her theory has triggered by conservatives such as Kirk, Crenshaw says that she is not surprised because “[t]here have always been people, from the very beginning of the civil rights movement, who had denounced the creation of equality rights on the grounds that it takes something away from them.” What theories like intersectionality reveal is the myth that we live in an egalitarian society based on fairness and justice where the playing field is level for everyone. Rather than try to "invert" the moral order, Crenshaw claims her theory is meant simply as "a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects" so people and communities can "better see these problems and better intervene in advocacy."

When we teach Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, we introduce the concept of intersectionality—and the controversy surrounding it—as a framework in which to examine the unique challenges that Esperanza, the novel's young protagonist, faces as a result of her gender, class, and race. Esperanza, using first-person narration, tells us that she was born in the Chinese year of the horse, just like her great-grandmother, which she claims is "supposed to be bad luck if you're born female." Esperanza, however, thinks this is just "a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong." Esperanza then recounts the story of her great-grandmother, "a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry" until Esperanza's great-grandfather "threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier."

Esperanza has inherited her great-grandmother's name and personally identifies with her, but Cisneros broadens her message to include the larger feminist struggle of trying to achieve independence and self-worth within a sexist, male-dominated society. Esperanza claims that her great-grandmother "looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow," and wonders "if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be." Esperanza's great-grandmother did not live the life she had hoped, a fate that Esperanza's mother warns her daughter to avoid, telling Esperanza with a "sigh" that she also "could have been somebody." Instead, she dropped out of school and got married, just as so many of her "comadres" have done. Rather than tie her fate to a man, Esperanza's mother tells her daughter to remain strong and independent: "Got to take care all your own, she says shaking her head."

The embedded sexism within Esperanza's culture is also revealed in the story of Alicia, Esperanza's older friend who is "young and smart and studies for the first time at the university." Since Alicia's mother has recently died, her father discourages her from studying at night because he believes "a woman's place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star" to prepare food for the family. When Alicia tells Esperanza about the mice she sees while studying late at night—mice her father claims "do not exist"—Esperanza pointedly notes how the strong, determined Alicia is "afraid of nothing except four-legged fur. And fathers." Cisneros' use of the plural implies that Alicia's struggle is not just with her individual father, but with the sexist, patriarchal system that allows men like her father to discourage women like Alicia from achieving their dreams.

When we learn about the experiences of women in Cisneros' novel, we understand just how vile and offensive is the rhetoric of people like Charlie Kirk, who claimed on his August 26, 2025 podcast that Taylor Swift, for instance, was "not a great role model for young women" because she waited until the age of 35 to get married. Kirk denounced Ms. Swift for putting her "career first," but now that she was married to the football player Travis Kelce, he hoped that she would finally "reject feminism" and focus on having "more children than she has houses." He then said that she needs to change her name to "Taylor Kelce" because "if not, you don't really mean it." His last piece of marital advice? "Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge." Only if she were to do that, in Kirk's estimation, would she finally be considered a "great role model for young women."

Kirk's sexist vitriol is even worse for women of color. While we expect Esperanza and Alicia to use their intelligence and determination to achieve great things, Charlie Kirk wants to let them know that their accomplishments will never be legitimate in the estimation of white men such as he. In his July 14, 2023 podcast, Kirk noted that prominent women of color—such as Harvard-educated former First Lady Michelle Obama, Harvard-educated political commentator Joy Reid, Harvard-educated Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Yale-educated Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee—were all unqualified because they had "to steal a white person's slot" through Affirmative Action. He also stated that they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” The irony, of course, is that this accusation is being made by Charlie Kirk, who was rejected by West Point and dropped out of Harper Community College after one semester.

For Esperanza, not only is it a challenge to be born female within the type of sexist culture that Kirk epitomizes, but it is also difficult to be born poor. Before moving into the house on Mango Street, Esperanza reveals that her family "lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember." Esperanza's housing insecurity is exacerbated by the emotional and psychological impact that being poor has had on her self-worth. When her family lived on Loomis, Esperanza tells the story of when a nun from her school "passed by and saw [Esperanza] playing out front." After the nun asks where she lives, Esperanza points up to the third floor apartment with "the paint peeling" and the "wooden bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn't fall out." The nun replies, "You live there?", in a tone that makes Esperanza "feel like nothing." Even when her family moves to the house on Mango Street, she sees that the bricks on the front steps are "crumbling" and the "windows are so small you'd think they were holding their breath." Esperanza is well aware of her poverty, especially when comparing the house on Mango Street to the type of "real" house that she sees on television, which is "white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence."

When Esperanza meets Cathy, her white neighbor, she also quickly learns her place within the American racial hierarchy. Cathy, who claims to be "the great great grand cousin of the queen of France," tells Esperanza that they can only be friends "till next Tuesday" because her family is "moving away" from Mango Street. "Got to," Cathy says, and then, "as if she forgot I just moved in," Cathy tells Esperanza that "the neighborhood is getting bad." Esperanza understands the implication of Cathy's racism and how Latinos are perceived by the dominant white culture. She concludes that people like Cathy will "just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in."

In another vignette, Esperanza says that people who "don't know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we're dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives." Despite saying that these are "stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake," she admits that when her own family drives into "a neighborhood of another color," their "knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight ahead." Esperanza understands that this fear of people who are different is a "stupid" yet universal human trait, concluding ruefully, "Yeah. That is how it goes and goes." When Cisneros has Esperanza examine her own prejudices, the reader is forced to do the same. Esperanza notes that despite what strangers think, those who live on Mango Street "aren't afraid" of their neighbors because they know "the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby's brother, and the tall one next to him in the straw brim, that's Rosa's Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he's Fat Boy, though he's not fat anymore nor a boy."

Cisneros implies that fear is mostly based on ignorance and the fact that we live in an increasingly segregated society. The social and racial divides in our country are exploited by people like Kirk, who use racist rhetoric to advance their white Christian nationalist agenda. Kirk claimed on his May 19, 2023 podcast that "all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that's a fact. It's happening more and more." He continued by making unsubstantiated claims that "[m]ore than six hundred white women a year are murdered by Black men. Six hundred white women a year. Did you know that? By Blacks." He then gave an example of one such murder in his home state of Arizona: "One just happened, well he was a Hispanic, he might have been half-Black, doesn't really matter, here in Scottsdale. Young, twenty-nine-year-old girl, walking on a hiking trail, and a trans-Hispanic comes and stabs her to death."

By using such racist, inflammatory rhetoric, Kirk wanted to create an emotional and psychic distance between his audience and those he aimed to vilify. One way to confront and debunk these racist stereotypes is by reading novels like The House on Mango Street. Keith Oatley, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto, argues that literature allows readers to "practice empathy" by enabling us to connect with "the emotions of other people, transcending the limits of our own experiences and perspective." Oatley claims that literature gives us an opportunity to "feel for people very different from ourselves, and begin to understand such people in ways we may have never thought possible." In short, "reading books or watching movies or plays actually can help train us in the art of being human. These effects derive from our cognitive capacity for empathy, and there are indications that they can help shape our relationships with friends, family, and fellow citizens."

The transformative power of empathy, however, is seen as a threat for people like Charlie Kirk. He claimed on his October 12, 2022 podcast that empathy was "a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.” Even though Kirk did not elaborate on what he meant by "damage," his stance echoed other right-wing commentators like Elon Musk , who stated on Joe Rogan's February 28, 2025 podcast that the "fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy" because trusting our subjective feelings leads to poor decision-making that will ultimately cause "civilizational suicide." Musk's ideas are derived from Gad Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University and the author of Parasitic Mind, who warns that Western civilization has been "taken over by an emotional parasite called suicidal empathy." We have been conditioned by "political correctness," Saad argues, to "sacrifice everything" in order to appear "kind, compassionate, and empathetic—especially to those hellbent on eradicating you."

Evangelical Christians have also embraced this war on empathy. In her book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, Allie Beth Stuckey argues that empathy is "not in itself a virtue. It is not in itself something that we should aspire to." Her critique is that empathy makes us identify and defend the sinful behavior of others and "justify what they are doing" based on our personal feelings for them. Pastor Joe Rigney makes a similar claim in his book The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, which argues that even though "the Scriptures command us to have sympathy and a tender heart," empathy becomes sinful when one has "an excess of compassion, when our identification with and sharing the emotions of others overwhelms our minds and sweeps us off our feet." While Stuckey and Rigney focus their arguments on not becoming "untethered" from biblical teachings, their position is similar to Musk's in that an "excess of compassion" overwhelms our ability to think rationally.

The idea that empathy impedes our rationality stems from the work of Yale professor Paul Bloom, a secular psychologist who wrote Against Empathy: A Case for Rational Compassion in 2016. Bloom argues that with its focus on emotion and identifying with others, empathy is a "poor guide to social policy" and that "our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside." He claims that the focus of empathy is "narrow" in that it "connects us to particular individuals, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data." If we step back and look at the bigger picture, we will come to the objective, rational conclusion that "a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life of a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction."

When Cisneros introduces the reader to the story of an illegal immigrant in the vignette "Geraldo No Last Name," she makes us empathize with his situation after he dies in a hit-and-run accident. Esperanza's friend Marin met Geraldo at a local dance earlier in the night, and since Geraldo had no identifying information in his pockets, Marin spends "hours and hours" talking to the police and the people at the hospital since she was "the last one to see him alive." Marin says she "can't explain why it mattered" since Geraldo was "somebody she didn't even know," but it is clear that she is devastated by his death—as is Esperanza. Marin and Esperanza's response is contrasted with those who think his death is ultimately insignificant: "But what difference does it make? He wasn't anything to her. He wasn't her boyfriend or anything like that. Just another brazer who didn't speak English. Just another wetback. You know the kind."

Cisneros does not identify who uses these racial slurs, but it is implied that it reflects the callous attitude of the authorities Marin talks to at the hospital—and perhaps to white America as well. The question is whether we as readers will share their indifference. Even though Marin cannot explain why Geraldo's death "mattered" so much, Esperanza tries to convey its significance:

What does it matter?

They never saw the kitchenettes. They never knew about the two-room

flats and sleeping rooms he rented, the weekly money orders sent home, the

currency exchange. How could they?

His name was Geraldo. And his home is in another country. The ones

he left behind are far away, will wonder, shrug, remember. Geraldo—he went

north . . . we never heard from him again.

Cisneros makes us consider the circumstances that brought Geraldo to this country, the life he lived within it, and the tragedy that his death will be for his family back home. What Cisneros does is humanize a situation that is seen by most people in America as only an abstract concept. Who are the illegal immigrants in our country? Cisneros reminds us that they are not just statistical entities, but human beings—just like the rest of us.

When Charlie Kirk claimed on his September 27, 2024 podcast that illegal immigrants were "roaming free on the interior of the United States," he used language that intentionally dehumanized them, suggesting they were no more than wild animals. When he said that illegal immigrants were "raping your women and hunting you down at night," he wanted his audience to see them as violent criminals who would be "coming for your daughter next." Rather than appeal to logic and rationality, Kirk used inflammatory language to provide emotional justification for supporting racist, inhumane policies. Susan Lanzoni, a historian of science at Harvard University and the author of Empathy: A History, claims that the current argument against empathy is part of "a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community. To me, this disparagement marks a step in the destruction of our multicultural democracy, and provides a path from the verbal dehumanization of others to open discrimination and maltreatment.”

As we consider complex issues such as immigration, we need to remember that values such as empathy allow us to understand the experience of others and see perspectives beyond our own limited, often biased worldview. Jamil Zaki, professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of The War for Kindness, observes that modern society has made Americans more "urban, isolated, and anonymous to each other. We meet irregularly, often in online spaces that privilege outrage and leave cruelty unpunished. We are increasingly tribal, and sometimes view outsiders not as human beings but as symbols of ideas and groups we fear and hate." Rather than honor Charlie Kirk's willingness to debate, we should consider the impact of rhetorical strategies that attempt to inflame and divide us. For those who still believe in a pluralistic society where all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, the solution is not less empathy, but more.