The shooting of Charlie Kirk is not a choice between celebration and condemnation
The algorithm wants you to choose, but we're asking the wrong question
“Gun violence answers when gun control is questioned.”
-Farida D. (@farida.d.author)
This morning, I woke to fourteen separate text messages informing me that Charlie Kirk had been shot while giving a talk at Utah Valley University. The conservative activist was at the first event of his speaking shows labelled the ‘American Comeback Tour’.
Opening my phone straight to Instagram, the first piece of content I was exposed to was a video of the bullet penetrating his neck. Sitting under a marquee surrounded by a huge crowd on the campus lawn, Kirk was answering a question related to mass shooting statistics as his killer pulled the trigger. Donald Trump confirmed his death via Truth Social.
There is nothing more 2025 than that paragraph.
If you hadn’t heard of Charlie Kirk until today, congratulations.
With eight million followers on Instagram alone, Kirk is one of the most successful young right-wing activists and commentators. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012, at the age of 18. TPUSA was created as a student organisation to propagate conservative views within progressive universities, high schools and on college campuses. Kirk was one of Donald Trump’s greatest social media assets and a huge ticket for increasing conservative youth voter turnout during all three of his presidential campaigns. You’ve probably watched Charlie debate university students around the world, he is a viral sensation for meeting intellect with pure hate. Kirk was pinned to be a future leader of the GOP.
Kirk has said Palestinians are “savage animals”. He compared wanting to abolish abortion to the abolition of slavery, calling it a “genocide of the unborn”. He said black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously” in a discussion around affirmative action. Recently, he said “empathy is a made up New Age term that has done a lot of damage”. Extremist is not an understatement.
The quotes you’ll hear most today from Kirk, though, are those related to his views on gun laws. In a 2023 interview now widely circulating, Kirk said of deaths caused by gun violence:
“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 right.”
You can’t ignore the irony.
When a person responsible for so much hate dies, progressive spaces respond immediately with debates of respectability politics. After multiple assassination attempts on Donald Trump and the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year - we know the conversation around ‘justified’ political violence is prominent.
Must we condemn every act of political violence? Should violent views be met with violence? What is the most moral approach and should we take the high road? How much empathy can you give someone who rejects that fundamental human notion? What chain of events does an assassination set off? What does our global response to Kirk’s death say about us?
While these important questions are asked, the right is mobilising to make a martyr of Kirk.
