Charlie Kirk and Alan Berg: 2 murders, 41 years apart, show the painful perils of polarization

A man mourns Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk outside of the Turning Point USA headquarters in Phoenix, Ariz. after Kirk was shot and killed on Sept. 10. Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman September 11, 2025

When I heard about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I thought of Alan Berg.

We don’t yet know who shot and killed Kirk, the conservative pundit and founder of the influential conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, during a speaking engagement in Utah on Wednesday.

But the single gunshot that struck him down echoed the 1984 assassination of Berg — and, like Berg’s death, should serve as a warning to us all about what more violence may come.

Berg was a Denver-based radio shock jock whose liberal views provoked conservatives. When white supremacists called into his show, he proudly proclaimed his Jewishness.

One of those supremacists ambushed Berg and shot him dead in June 1984.

His radio producer later said that Berg had particularly enraged his assassins by challenging their belief that Jews were descended from demons.

If it turns out that, like Berg, Kirk was murdered for who he was and what he said, it will be one more sign that in the United States, the First Amendment’s right to free expression is too often checked by the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

I didn’t agree with Kirk most of the time. He peddled falsehoods about the 2020 elections, whipping his listeners into a false conviction that the presidency was stolen from President Donald Trump. That frenzy may have helped fuel the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, at least according to one of the organizers.

As Kirk’s influence grew, so did his extremism. He demonized transgender people and Muslims and promoted Christian nationalism. Like many on the right, he was a staunch defender of the current Israeli government. Upon his death, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Kirk a “lion-hearted friend of Israel.” But on this side of the Atlantic, Kirk trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric. “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” he said in 2023.

There’s a danger, to say the least, in using the crucial American right to free speech to elevate the kinds of extremism that have informed some of America’s worst contemporary political violence.

Kirk amplified the voices of many people who made clear they wanted to suppress not only the voices they disagreed with, but also the fundamental rights of others. That doesn’t justify or excuse the awful violence that took his life. His assassination was a horrifying moment, one that has rightly stopped many in their tracks; he leaves behind a grieving wife, and two young children who will now grow up without their father.

It does point to the dangerous changes in society that have taken place in the four decades since Berg was killed for exercising his right to say who he was and what he believed, sending a shockwave through the country.

The biggest change: The U.S. has become far more polarized. The number of people who hold a “highly negative view” of the opposing political party has doubled since 1994, according to the Pew Research Center. These are people who believe their political opposites “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”

In other words, they don’t see themselves and those on the other side of the aisle as merely opponents. They are enemies.

And moderates? What moderates? The percentage of Americans identifying as moderate has declined from an average of 43% in 1992 to 34% in 2024. Last year, the percentage of Republicans who identify as moderate fell below 20% for the first time. Among Democrats, the share identifying as liberal — no center in sight— also reached record highs.

That polarization is happening in many countries, but it’s happened faster, and with more violence, in the U.S., according to a 2020 Brown University study.

One contributing cause is social media. Today, anyone with an iPhone can reach an audience the size of Alan Berg’s, and do so in a silo: you never have to encounter anyone who may have an opposing point of view. Social media has monetized our delight in outrage, and our predilection to form tribes. Our major political parties have become almost synonymous with specific ideologies and religious or racial identities.

That desire to belong, to identify with a group, is a significant driver of polarization, according to the Brown study.

“So when you identify with a certain party and you’re looking across the aisle,” Jesse Shapiro, one of the study’s authors, wrote, “the people you’re looking at are more different from you than they were a few decades ago.”

Kirk exemplified much about the contemporary identity politics that now shape our body politic. The overheated rhetoric; the portrayal of those opposed to your aims as villainous; the constant sense of apocalyptic doom if the other side gets its way, or, God forbid, is compromised with — these tactics made him popular and successful.

They should by no means have led to his violent death. These tactics are not good for the U.S., though, and maybe the descent from political polarization to political violence is inevitable, or maybe that too, is particularly American. (Israel, to name one country, has its fair share too).

Somehow, don’t ask me how, we need to get back to what Alan Berg himself, for all his flaws, saw as the ideal: Disagreement for the sake of democracy. Disagreement should be just more data, a starting point for discussion, not a reason to shut it down.

“The worst call I’ve ever received is when someone says, ‘I agree with everything you say,’” Berg said. “I don’t always agree with myself, so how can they?”

The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.