Over a month after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a speaking event in Utah, it feels like he is still haunting America.
During his life, Kirk had enormous impact on the political landscape of the U.S. through his affiliations with alt-right talking heads and his financial and social support for Nazis. After his death, it feels like his influence has been magnified even further. Discourse surrounding the shooting has dominated the news cycle for weeks, crowding out practically every other story, including a shooting at a Denver high school allegedly carried out by a 16-year-old neo-Nazi and dozens of other mass shootings since.
The polite thing to say would be that I don’t believe anyone should be killed for any reason, including for their beliefs. Regardless of my personal views on political violence, however, the reality is that Kirk did condone violence of all kinds throughout his long history of harassing college students and pulling teenagers into the alt-right pipeline.
Famously, Kirk was a staunch supporter of the second amendment, and of the inevitable deaths that come with legalizing gun ownership on a wide scale. He said in 2023, “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. … 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.”
Kirk was also a proponent of capital punishment. He once suggested that the government should execute “some of these savages” at events like the Super Bowl, saying, “And, you know what, I want to watch that execution, that’ll make my day better. I want to see him on a public block and get him be publicly executed, and I think that would be justice.”
It’s impossible to overstate the number of racist dogwhistles Kirk constantly slipped into his speeches, to the point where I feel like a conspiracy theorist pointing out how constantly arguing about IQ and fatherless homes and marijuana is not benign. After a far-right conspiracy theorist attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022, Kirk criticized the attacker being held without bail. “Why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?” he added. It is no coincidence that Kirk chose cities with significant African American populations like Chicago and Detroit to make his arguments. His disdain for Black people was palpable in the way he said that Black women who benefited from affirmative action “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” or that America “made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act,” or that George Floyd was a criminal and a “scumbag.”
Kirk’s catalogue of awful quotes is never-ending, but more important than that is the measurable impact he and Turning Point USA have had on minorities in America. Increasingly, I can see that my community feels less and less safe on UMass Boston campus: our own “police incident” happened just a day after Kirk was shot, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one who still feels a little on edge. At the same time, TPUSA ads have been on every TV screen across campus: another constant reminder that other people on my campus devalue members of their own community. Kirk’s biggest contribution in his life was fostering fear and division on American universities and pushing our government to new heights of fascism.
So, no, I will not mourn Charlie Kirk. He would not have mourned my death — as a transgender person, he would have labelled me as another “gay schizophrenic nudist,” a dangerous transsexual activist and a threat to the safety of American children nationwide. He did not mourn the deaths of school shooting victims and decided they were a necessary cost of keeping guns around. He certainly did not mourn the Black and Brown victims of police violence, whom he viewed as irredeemable criminals and dumb animals. Why should I grant him the respect in death that he wouldn’t have afforded me in life?
