By Arlen Grossman

MSNBC, like all corporate media these days, wants to please Donald Trump and his loyalists. They were quick to apologize for one of their reporters after the Charlie Kirk shooting. Just to be safe they fired veteran political analyst Matthew Dowd, apparently for not being deferential enough to satisfy the president and his right-wing base.

What disrespectful things did Dowd say that led to his dismissal? They were offensive enough that MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler would call his remarks “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.” Did Dowd condemn the assassinated right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk? Did he call Kirk a racist or a provocateur? Not at all.

During the interview with MSNBC correspondent Katy Tur, Dowd wondered if the incident could have been a Kirk supporter “shooting their gun off in celebration.” He added, “Remember, Kirk is a diehard advocate of the 2nd amendment.”

“You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place,” Dowd said.

He said Kirk had been “one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups.”

“And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said. “And I think that is the environment we are in.” 

All very reasonable, non-hateful commentary. That Kirk was assassinated while presenting his views to a university audience was tragic. Violence caused by political beliefs should have no place in this country and the world. All of us should agree on that.

 But Dowd was correct, when, after his firing, he said that MSNBC bent its knee to a “right wing media mob.”

“The Right Wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob,” Dowd wrote in a a Friday Substack post. “Even though most at MSNBC knew my words were being misconstrued, the timing of my words forgotten (remember I said this before anyone knew Kirk was a target), and that I apologized for any miscommunication on my part, I was terminated by the end of the day.”

Contrast that with the shocking statement on “Fox and Friends” by host Brian Kilmeade. In a discussion about homelessness, co-host Lawrence Jones said “You can’t give ’em a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re going to give you, or you decide that you gotta be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.” That’s when Kilmeade suggested a more extreme option. “Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something, Just kill ’em.”

Last I looked, Kilmeade was back on the air at Fox News and Dowd was out of a job.

Despite the hero-worship gushing out from friendly right-wing allies that tried to make Kirk appear like he was the second coming of Christ, he was in many ways not much different than the typical MAGA supporter.

Kirk had charisma, most of the time was reasonable, and was friends with powerful people, among them the Trump family. Still, he is on record for saying a number of racist and bigoted things.

Kirk did say that it was a “huge mistake” to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”  He  called civil rights leader Martin Luther King “awful” and “not a good person,” 

A few days later, Kirk released an 82-minute podcast episode titled, “The Myth of MLK,” which in part discusses “how the ‘MLK Myth’ keeps America shackled to destructive 1960s laws that have replaced the original U.S. Constitution,” according to the summary description on the podcast’s website.

Later that year, Kirk echoed similar sentiments about the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin, and prohibited segregation.  

The legislation, he said on his podcast in April 2024, “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon.”

Weeks after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023, Kirk argued in an Oct. 26 episode of his podcast that Jews had funded antisemitism in the U.S. by supporting liberal causes.

“Jewish donors have a lot of explaining to do. A lot of decoupling to do,” he said. “Because Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open border neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews. And now it’s coming for Jews, and they’re like, ‘What on Earth happened?’ And it’s not just the colleges. It’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

Regarding guns, Kirk said: “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”

“And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk asked about the attacker of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul,  who suffered a skull fracture after being hit in the head with a hammer.

“By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail’s like 30[,000] or 40,000 bucks. Bail him out, and then go ask him some questions.” https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/viral-claims-about-charlie-kirks-words/

“It is a growing consensus in the pro-life world that abortion is never medically necessary,” he told one female student, who then asked, if someone raped his hypothetical 10-year-old daughter, would he want the child to be born.”

“The answer is, yes, the baby would be delivered,” he said. He said having an abortion in that situation would be pandering to evil.

Charles Kirk is not ready to be carved onto Mt. Rushmore. His life and influence indicate someone with considerable talent, but like many other people, also had a lot of hatred in his heart. He should never have been killed for speaking his views, but it would be wrong to whitewash his imperfections and bigotry.

Charlie Kirk was not a good guy or a hero. He is less than perfect. And that needs to be recognized.