Death can never be justified, especially one as brutal as an execution by a gunshot to the neck. At 12:23 p.m. on Wednesday, September 10th, the outspoken pro-republican and conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The initial reactions to the harrowing video were visceral; stomachs churned, hearts plummeted. However, it did not take long for fingers to be pointed. Even before any formal investigation commenced, conservatives had already enshrined Kirk as a symbol of retribution against liberals who had demonized him, now elevating him to the status of a martyr. His death exacerbated the already volatile tensions between conservatives and liberals on social media with conservatives mourning, blaming liberals, and lamenting the lack of empathy among those who celebrated his demise; liberals meanwhile relentlessly highlighted his incendiary and divisive rhetoric that made his death seem like it wasn’t as unforeseen as we make it out to be.
In honor of his death, let us be reminded of Kirk’s career. A man who compared abortion to the holocaust, a genocide in which there were 11 million victims, 6 million of which were jews who were systematically exterminated through gas chambers, and were starved, tortured, and worked to death. Charlie Kirk would then shockingly assert that it was worse. “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage”, “If I see a black pilot, boy I hope he’s qualified.”, “I don’t think the place exists” (referring to Palestine), and if his 10 year old daughter were to be raped, he said he would insist she carries the pregnancy to term and give birth, no matter the risk. These alone are the infamous words, or more inherently, the incitements of hatred made by Charlie Kirk that essentially drove his career.
Despite his numerous infamous words, one statement stands out above all: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have our Second Amendment rights.” The bitter irony of his own violent death, inflicted by gunfire, is stark. A man who vehemently opposed gun control and downplayed daily gun violence has now become part of that statistic, claimed by the very culture of violence he championed. We can further point out the irony in the selective empathy that people cherry pick and feel for a man like Charlie Kirk. Many express disbelief that people are killed for holding divergent beliefs, yet rarely exhibit the same outrage for those violently harassed let alone murdered for being gay, for being transgender, for being Black, for being immigrants, or for being followers of different faiths. “It was really brutal seeing him get shot, no one deserves to die that way”, yet what happened to Charlie Kirk happens to children, mothers, fathers, families in Gaza every single waking moment; a genocide that has been live streamed infront of our faces for the past 3 years, and that was what Charlie Kirk cheered for, stood for, the killings of Palestinian families and children whom he labeled as “savage animals.”