On The Brutal, Senseless Murder of Charlie Kirk

Apparently I need to explain why I'm against shooting your political opponents in the neck

TL;DR: The normalisation or excusing of political violence — like in reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination — is an existential threat to free speech and democratic life.

I.

Charlie Kirk is dead. Before you have any further information, it should be obvious to you that something very sad happened. This is because life is good, and it is almost always bad when it is cut short. If you think there are exceptions like old age or infirmity, they didn’t apply. He was 31 years old, and is survived by his wife Erika Kirk, a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son.

Some additional context: Kirk was a political activist, co-founder of Turning Point USA, a “nonprofit organisation that advocates for conservative politics on high school, college, and university campuses”¹. He had a close relationship with the Trump family² and Vice President J.D. Vance³, and was well-known to many senior Republicans. A survey of TikTok users found that he was the most trusted individual among Trump voters under 30⁴; his videos attracted millions of views⁵, and many profiles credit him with building the MAGA youth movement⁶. Even had he died in a freak accident, his death would have been a notable event.

But he did not die in a freak accident, and the manner of his death made it especially conspicuous and horrifying, meriting wall-to-wall news coverage. He was doing a public debate at a university, a regular fixture of his career as a commentator. As part of his American Comeback Tour, students of Utah Valley University could approach his “Prove Me Wrong Table”, and engage him on any topic they wished. Twenty minutes into the event, as he spoke with the second student⁷, a single gunshot was fired, and the bullet struck Kirk in the neck⁸. Video footage shows him recoil while speaking; eyewitnesses reported “blood pouring out everywhere”⁹. There were 3000 people in attendance¹⁰, including his family. He was pronounced dead two hours later¹¹.

II.

This is extraordinarily chilling. This murder is the first time in modern history that a commentator has been assassinated in America¹². Kirk was not a President, not a Senator, not a Martin Luther King Jr. whose prominence made him an obvious target, but someone whose vocation was speaking, arguing, debating, and provoking. It is bad enough that our culture has come to “price in” that politicians will sometimes be targets of violence. This is even more dangerous territory: the elimination of someone whose only crime was having opinions and expressing them publicly. It should be clear that this is, among its other horrors, a major blow to freedom of speech.

Alfred Stearns writes in his reflections (titled, Assassinations Work): “Killing public figures intimidates others into silence […] a conservative considering a career in politics will now weigh the chances of bleeding to death in front of their family on the scales”. Except it’s not only conservatives, but anyone who would express unpopular or controversial views in a public forum. If we in any way normalise or excuse such violence, even obliquely, hunting around for caveats and half-justifications, we strike at the core of democratic life. Murdering people to silence opposing views is not a political issue. It is an unadulterated violation of the rules of the game, an affront to everything we hold dear, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

This seems broadly understood by public figures on the political left. Naturally, commentators who occupy similar roles¹³ to Kirk, like Dean Withers¹⁴ and Hasan Piker¹⁵, understood this point immediately. Democratic politicians immediately condemned the violence. Perhaps some of their statements were slightly perfunctory, but then they probably didn’t particularly know who Charlie Kirk was (Gavin Newsom, who had met him and recorded a podcast episode with him, made a more powerful statement than most). At least they said the right things.

However, among “ordinary people” — many students at my university, for instance — there was more excuse-making and deflection. This includes the President-elect of the Oxford Union, who despite having debated Kirk before, reacted to the shooting with ebullient celebration on a group chat. There is something uniquely evil and twisted about reacting this way to a man’s death given he had shaken his hand and stood across the despatch box from him. But even for those who knew him only from TikTok and YouTube, it is grotesque to greet the killing as some sort of karmic retribution.

III.

Karma, for a political activist, may involve one’s side losing an election. For a commentator, losing a debate. Kirk’s preferred candidate (deservedly) lost the 2020 election; and in my view, he came off worse in plenty of his debates. That, not a bullet puncturing his carotid artery¹⁶, is what accountability, or “karma”, looks like in a democracy. Indeed, it is praiseworthy that he let himself in for it so often, making a career out of engaging young people’s arguments and making the case for his beliefs. As Ezra Klein noted in his New York Times piece¹⁷:

Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. […]

I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project.

Klein received some criticism for this, for instance from Jeremiah Johnson, who argues that “his goal was not respectful two-way conversations”, but to “farm clips he could use on social media to make his opponents look ridiculous”, thus contributing to an environment of polarisation. But as far as I can tell, Klein is correct. Sure, his titles often have this clickbait character, but then so too do Christopher Hitchens¹⁸ or Ricky Gervais¹⁹ clips. Watching Kirk’s college debates now (which I hardly did when he was alive, except when The Algorithm thought fit to serve them up to me) it does seem like he basically conducted himself respectfully towards respectful students, and was mostly disrespectful to disrespectful students.

That’s not to say he was some paragon of truth-seeking. He was a propagandist²⁰ for the Trump campaigns and administrations, certainly, but that’s just to say that he found his views well-represented by an existing political vehicle, and sought to persuade others to see things the same way. This meant he was often wrong, and the just deserts for that fault is for the wrongness to be exposed in debate. Instead what has happened is that the very possibility of his getting what he deserved is gone. He was murdered beneath one of his Prove Me Wrong signs, and now he can never be proven wrong again, because he no longer exists except as a cold body in a coffin²¹, and that fact should sicken us all.

It is vitally important that violence never be treated as an option in politics, or a consequence that might befall people for their views. Violence is humanity’s oldest method of settling disputes; it took millennia of cultural evolution to build the fragile architecture that allows us to do otherwise. Navigating our disagreements peacefully is the central problem of human co-existence; constitutions, parliaments, liberalism, democracy — the set of social technologies that we together call “civilisation” — are our answer to it. That some still give in to the atavistic impulse is easy to understand. What deserves our outrage is the willingness to surrender to barbarism, and the reckless readiness to discard what civilisation has so painstakingly secured.

IV.

This includes many reactions to Kirk’s shooting on the Republican side who needlessly raised the stakes and poured fuel on the fire: the unthinking ease with which Trump blamed “the radical left”²², before anything was known about the shooter; Elon Musk’s declaration that “Either we fight back or they will kill us”²³; a general attempt to blame trans people²⁴. Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah (where the shooting happened), seems to have mostly been an honourable exception here.

It also includes, as I suggested, normal people²⁵ who greeted the murder with laughter or rationalisation. A university student celebrating murder may not be as bad as the President of the United States indulging reckless blame-casting, but both chip away at the same fragile boundary. (Also, one is more likely to read this piece than the other). While I have no intention of seeking to cancel such people, as many on the right have sought to do, it is worth examining their excuses.

There are the cowardly responses, the ones that won’t quite endorse the slaughter, but who will say things like “Well, I disagree with murdering him, but perhaps that’s just what happens sometimes if you’re too provocative”. They don’t say exactly that Kirk had done something plausibly deserving of capital punishment, but hint sweetly that his rhetoric meant he was perhaps ever so slightly asking for it. Include in this category Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, who bizarrely tweeted that “Charlie Kirk died by the code that he lived by”²⁶, adding just that she objects to the code.

This makes sense only if you believe that being polarising and argumentatively combative is a form of living by the sword, somehow comparable to dying by the sword of assassination. This is absurd. It is not some balanced middle-ground position, a careful balance between the extremes of “excusing murder outright” and “condemning it unequivocally”. It is simply a genteel way of flirting with the former while outwardly doing the latter, a grotesque category error that confuses words with violence and lowers murder to the level of debate.

I am quite sure that Sarkar would see this obscene equivocation for what it is if someone had suggested of George Floyd — who five years ago was also senselessly murdered on video — that on account of his criminal background, he “died by the code that he lived by”. If this view were applied consistently, then one would have to say that if Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens or Hasan Piker were killed tomorrow, there would be “good” and “bad” sides to that too. Such an attitude — suggesting in the face of violence that there’s “fault on both sides” — is incompatible with the basic norms of a civilised society.

These deflections often rely on combing through the thousands of hours of Kirk’s video content to single out his most egregious remarks. A handful of these are genuinely bad, such as his glib reaction to the attack on Paul Pelosi²⁷. But most rest on dubious claims of racism, by stripping his attacks on affirmative action of context; or of homophobia, by twisting his views on Christianity. Thus Karen Attiah was fired from the Washington Post for misquoting Kirk as having said that black women in general “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously”²⁸; and both Alastair Campbell²⁹ and Stephen King³⁰ ended up apologising after sharing a false claim that he’d called for the stoning of gay people³¹.

V.

An especially common deflection is to note Kirk’s stance on gun policy and the Second Amendment. Since he maintained that Americans should retain a right to own guns, it is suggested, he was essentially partly responsible for his own death, and there is little point feeling sorry for him. One person told me quite explicitly that “ironically he’s been killed by the exact thing he supported” and so I “look stupid feeling bad for that”³². They bring up the following statement Kirk made on this subject; it is worth quoting at length³³, though usually the bolded part is quoted in isolation:

The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — “wow, that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that” — well, then you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. […]

Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price: 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

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 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. […]

So then how do you reduce? Very simple. […] How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?

I should preface my remarks by noting that I’m British, and don’t understand America well enough to be confident on what optimal gun policy is for them. The British status quo seems to me broadly satisfactory, and I would not want to move in their direction. But it’s obviously naïve to suppose that simply copying our “common sense” gun laws would solve their problem³⁴. As Kirk indicates, Americans have a unique cultural attachment to guns and the Second Amendment given their history; given this, just banning them would probably be as ineffective as Prohibition was³⁵.

It’s reasonable to disagree with the position Kirk advocated. But as the full quote should make clear, it is not reasonable to say (as I have seen many people³⁶ say), that “I don't support what happened to Charlie, but Charlie supported what happened to Charlie”. It seems almost libellous to suggest that because Kirk favoured the Second Amendment, he was pro-murder. Evidently, he had his own views about how to deal with gun violence and gun culture, namely more security and harsher sentencing for violent criminals. If there are flaws in this position, they should be critiqued on their own terms, not adduced in support of schadenfreude one feels at his murder.

Indeed, his last tweets were about the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a man with 14 prior arrests³⁷. Of course, every time we let a violent criminal out of prison, it’s because we think it’s worth a cost of some potential lives they may take. Every time we insist on a fair trial in which the guilty may go free, we think the same. And Kirk is right that in allowing cars, we also to some degree trade lives off against convenience³⁸. I can do no better than to agree fully with Matthew Adelstein’s remark³⁹: “I’m irritated that […] Kirk seriously acknowledging tradeoffs [sic] is treated as a gotcha by people who are happy about his death”.

VI.

There has also been peculiar, alarmingly widespread response that essentially goes, “It’s fine/irrelevant that he died, because of what’s happening in Gaza”⁴⁰. I suppose the psychology here is that it is obviously wrong to feel indifference or pleasure at a man’s public assassination, so they link it to a cause that feels sufficiently grave to override the normal moral intuitions. Why waste pity on one dead American, when thousands of Palestinians are being killed?

Clearly, this is a moral non-sequitur. Suffering is not zero-sum; there is no competition between the two tragedies. It amounts to little more than an attempt to change the subject, a sleight of hand to shame people for caring about the “wrong” atrocity. Did you catch the part in Andy Masley’s optics lecture where he leans into the camera and says, “By the way, when an ally is committing war crimes, literally any physical violence from anyone for any reason is a-okay”⁴¹? People who make this move repeat the same dehumanising gesture they decry in others, sorting deaths into those that matter and those that don’t.

This nihilistic attitude cannot stand. Kirk’s murder is the third occasion, in a very short span of time, that I’ve observed this strange disposition. The first was on October 8th, 2023, in the aftermath of Hamas’ attacks on Israel. On that day, “Warwick Action for Palestine” posted a “Statement on the Palestinian Resistance”, declaring in bold that the massacre was “the response of the colonised” and signing off with “Long live the revolution!”⁴². The second was the generally positive reaction to the homicide of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson⁴³. All three reveal a terrifying indifference to the value of human life.

It is the peak of stupidity to imagine that violence is justified against innocent Israelis because of Gaza, or against health insurance executives because of capitalism, or against political activists because they are right-wing. Charlie Kirk’s murderer thought that he was “full of hate and spreading hate”⁴⁴, apparently blind to the irony of his own act. All excuses of this kind are only different costumes for the same intellectual emptiness, the surrender to the idea that people are reducible to symbols of the systems you despise. Innocent people are not mere abstractions or proxies for a cause. They are people, and that’s why it’s tragic when they die.

Political violence is not only bad because it begets more violence, though it does. It’s bad in itself. If there is any line worth defending absolutely, without compromise, it is this one. To embrace political violence is to throw away the project of civilisation, and with it, the very idea that disputes can be fought with words, ballots, and arguments rather than with fists and bullets. To justify it, even obliquely, is to spit on the possibility of persuasion, to deny that opponents are fellow human beings, and to reduce politics to war. That way lies only ruin, and the triumph of barbarism.

Prove me wrong.

1. Turning Point USA - Wikipedia

2. See ABC News

3. See The Atlantic

4. According to The Times and The Economist

5. Charlie Kirk - Wikipedia

6. See the previous footnotes! Also Wikipedia:

[…] Kirk was one of the most prominent figures in the MAGA movement and often called the face of the movement.^[84][83][85]

7. He was in the middle of the following exchange with UVU student Hunter Kozak:

Kozak: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?
Kirk: Too many.
Kozak: I just want to point out there's not a lot of empirical evidence there—[crowd cheers]—it's five, okay. Now, five is a lot, right? I'm gonna give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?
Kirk: Counting or not counting gang violence?
Kozak: Great—

8. See The Guardian

9. See CBS News

10. Per Reuters

11. See CBS News

12. Though GPT-5 suggests Alan Berg.

13. I don’t think there’s actually a great analogue on the contemporary scene, because of his closeness with the Republican establishment.

14. See The Economic Times

15. See his piece in the New York Times

16. Per the Los Angeles Times

17. Opinion | Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way - The New York Times

18. Christopher Hitchens Destroys - YouTube

19. Ricky Gervais Destroys - YouTube

20. Though he did have some splits from them, most notably over Epstein; see Axios

21. Kirk was of course a Christian, and would disagree with this. Such a view is not available to me.

22. See CNN Politics

23. Twice! See here and here

24. Stop blaming them - Marginal REVOLUTION

25. I am not alone in this judgement: https://x.com/SarahTheHaider/status/1967655538864644347

26. x.com/AyoCaesar/status/1966094695773110475

27. Attack on Paul Pelosi - Wikipedia

28. See Power Line; amazingly, she continues to insist on the false quote in her Substack piece on her firing, calling it “his own words on record“, then showing a screenshot of her own tweet.

29. https://x.com/campbellclaret/status/1967141350194790833

30. https://x.com/StephenKing/status/1966484038648021264

31. It is notable how easily they believed this claim! I enjoyed Kirk’s response here to an actual homophobe: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1967671619108901137

32. https://x.com/_AashishReddy/status/1966124673688650062

33. Full video and quote at Media Matters for America

34. I don’t know anything about guns, but Kirk was shot with a .30-06 Mauser M 98 bolt action rifle; it is not clear to me whether “common sense gun laws”, as they exist in various other countries, would have been sufficient to prevent his shooting. If someone could help me clarify this, I would be much obliged!

35. Prohibition in the United States - Wikipedia

36. "I don’t support what happened to Charlie" - Google Search

37. CBS Austin

38. Both Andy Masley and myself landed on the same analogy, I think both unaware of each other’s and of Kirk’s own allusion to the same.

39. https://x.com/Benthamsbulldog/status/1965950278706016423; also see his Substack.

40. See https://x.com/_AashishReddy/status/1966213127948701840

41. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1966251876338512009; also see his Substack.

42. See Instagram; Warwick “Anti-Racism Society” commented, “From the river to the sea🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸”

43. There was a similar reaction on Twitter to the shooting — not targeted — of Wesley LePatner, CEO of a real estate investment trust launched by Blackstone. However, I do not include it because I am concerned here only with the reaction of people I know in real life, and not just anything said by crazy people on the Internet. But if interested, see the quote tweets here.

44. See Sky News; I also understand that there is misinformation suggesting Robinson was of the political right, and killed Kirk for not being right-wing enough. Not that it would matter for my thesis — the people I describe still reacted as they did — but it isn’t true, see Axios.