Charlie Kirk’s death was avoidable and unjustifiable, though he might not have seen it that way.
“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our God-Given rights”
Charlie Kirk, 2023
Now, tragically, his own name has joined that ledger of “acceptable” deaths.
Kirk was the figure most associated with Donald Trump’s youth movement, spearheading perhaps its most fervent wing and aiding Republicans in both federal and local elections. He was a critic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, abortion rights, and gun control. Kirk defended authoritarian leaders abroad, supported the overthrowing of democracy at home, and actively spread conspiracies about demographic “replacement.” Kirk’s comfort with violence was not abstract. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was bludgeoned in his own home, Kirk urged supporters to donate to the attacker’s bail.
Yet he was also a husband, a father to two children, and an American citizen possessing the same right to life as any other. You can feel for his family without pretending his politics had nothing to do with the weapon that killed him.
This is the danger: Kirk’s assassination isn’t just one man’s death. It is another name in America’s ledger of political bloodshed; each killing is both the result of past violence and the spark for the next. These increasingly frequent acts of direct political violence are but one symptom of the nation’s accelerating descent into authoritarianism.
We have seen this in real time. Trump used the murder not to calm but to inflame — proof that even the reaction becomes part of the cycle. He claimed that this death is “the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree”, the direct result of the “radical left comparing wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals”. The irony of such a response is hard to miss, given Trump’s singularly adversarial and vitriolic style of politics. He once said of illegal immigrants that “[i]n some cases they’re not people”.
Joe Biden, for all his faults, called for unity and calm after the assassination attempt on Trump. The latter has chosen to stoke the fire of division and hatred. This is the ultimate difference between the kind of politician that America needs today more than ever, and Donald J. Trump: between a leader that defuses and a leader that provokes – America needs a leader who is willing to say that brute strength is not the same as courage.
We too though must not ignore the hypocrisy of many American progressives, where, particularly online, there is a deluge of relief and even mocking satisfaction. One cannot credibly call for gun control, then celebrate when the same weapon murders your political opponent. One cannot claim the mantle of moral superiority while also cheering an act which leaves two young children without a father.
If progressives indulge in the same Trump-esque dehumanising rhetoric they claim fuels violence, they are playing his game. It reveals that moral coherence is easily thrown aside for the fleeting satisfaction of “vengeance” and “karmic justice”. Any moral “high ground” ceases to exist if murder becomes acceptable so long as the person in the crosshairs is deemed “bad” enough.
Many have pointed out the contrast in reactions with other acts of political violence that plague America today. Two poignant examples spring to mind: the murder of the Democrat lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the school shooting which happened the very same day as Kirk’s assassination. Trump’s declaration that all flags in the USA would be flown at half-mast is a touching tribute. One cannot help simultaneously asking, though, why innocent schoolchildren do not receive the same honour?
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was not the first and will almost certainly not be the last in the cycle of violence plaguing the United States of America.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
George Santanya
Written by Oliver Walsh and Jack Forshew
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