Witnessing Charlie Kirk

To hear Charlie Kirk speak is like hearing the deepest thoughts of extreme conservatism, spackled over with the veneer of plausible deniability and innocence: no statement, no matter how vile, outrageous, untrue, or cruel, is anything more than debate.

Charlie Kirk made a prolific career out of reactionary, inflammatory content. He has said things such as:

“We don’t have enough people in prison in America. We need a lot more prisoners.”

“Marriage and motherhood make women happier, because of course they do.”

“Importing millions of Muslims is civilizational suicide.”

“Muslims plan to conquer Europe by demographic replacement.”

“The evil perpetrated on young people by the trans medical industry is something future generations will look upon with horror.”

“If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically ‘change your sex,’ you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.”

“[Executions] should be public, it should be quick, and it should be televised.”

“You’re not gonna do drag queen story hour…for kids, we’re gonna arrest you, we’re gonna put you in prison, publicly perp-walk you in that drag queen stuff.”

“...Democracy…is not an American value. It never has been and never should be.”

“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…”

Kirk’s brand of politicking functioned to bring extremist views into the mainstream by way of making them appear less sinister than they truly are. Race replacement theory is not a middle-of-the-aisle position. Neither is the subjugation of women, nor is the belief that transgender people are mentally ill and inclined to violence and murder. Turning real people’s lives into pseudo-intellectual exercises is, itself, a type of violence; it renders human beings in the abstract, making their lives and realities abstract, making the violence they face abstract – making it, in a sense, not real.

In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, there came a wave of shockingly hypocritical statements from the American Right: that no one deserves to die “because of their opinions,” followed swiftly by calls for retributive violence against the American Left. This, despite the fact that a suspect has not even been apprehended, and without a suspect there can be no discernable motive.

Charlie Kirk, and other conservative talking heads, made a career out of speaking from both sides of his mouth. On the one hand Kirk was a Second Amendment absolutist, demanding there be absolutely zero action taken to mitigate gun violence in this country; on the other, he was more than happy to demand the government restrict and outright deny the Second Amendment rights of transgender Americans based on the bunk science that they are all mentally ill. To avoid directly advocating the same for people of color, he instead painted them all to be criminals, with the implications being clear. The Second Amendment, to Kirk, was a liberty reserved for white, heterosexual, cisgender people.

Gun reform is such a particularly touchy subject in America, a hot-button issue that Kirk was ready and willing to press, especially in regards to deaths he could politicize for his own gain. I put so much emphasis on his stance regarding guns in America because of the horribly ironic way in which he died: shot to death on a college campus while peddling the lie that transgender people are overwhelmingly responsible for mass shootings (they aren’t) and that “gang violence” is a major contributing factor to firearm-realted deaths in this country (it isn’t: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heath reports that suicide by gun makes up 58% of total gun deaths yearly). To Kirk, gun violence only exists because of queer people and people of color.

To be a member of a demographic group that Charlie Kirk made a career out of villainizing makes the response to his death…awkward. Droves of people are expressing their grief and lamentation over his death and expecting that grief to be shared – and when it is not, those who are not weeping are scorned for “celebrating” his death, even when, in actuality, they just do not feel some personal affinity for him, or else they struggle to empathize with his death because Kirk refused to empathize with their lives.

As a transgender American, and having been out and transitioning long before the American Right took such vitriolic notice of trans people, Charlie Kirk’s death, for me, is particularly…awkward. I, like many others, was shocked and appalled at the graphic footage that has widely circulated of his death (for what it’s worth, I find the practice of sharing such videos to be dehumanizing and inappropriate in the extreme, but I digress). To watch a man be shot in the neck and die almost instantly, exsanguinating in seconds, is not an image you do not react to if you have any sense of human decency. That manner of death – so horrific, extreme, and public – is not one that I would wish on anyone.

But I cannot say with any degree of certainty that Charlie Kirk would say the same if it were me, or any number of Black Americans who are killed by police violence, or any number of school-aged children who die in equally, if not more, horrific ways in school shootings each year. In fact, Charlie Kirk believed those deaths are necessary to uphold the rights enumerated in the Second Amendment.

Here is the rub: when you believe an edict is an altar – one that demands here and there a sacrificial lamb – you allow for the possibility that you will become that sacrificial lamb. And when you sow discord in your wake and deny the humanity of those you deem lesser, you create many enemies who are all too willing to lay your corpse at the altar you worship. It is sheer hubris to prophesy dark days and think yourself immune from darkness, or otherwise put hatred into the world and expect that hatred will not land on your own doorstep. The Greek tragedy of it all is that Charlie Kirk became a victim of the violent world that was, in part, his creation. He was killed by a violence that he never once thought would affect him, but that he openly advocated be used against other people. A violence he saw as necessary, a violence he saw as the pillar upholding his own liberty. The same liberty he did not want infringed upon but would gladly accept for others. Charlie Kirk's death was the direct result of a violence he made a career of rendering unreal when it happened to other people. Abstract, unimportant, debatable, necessary, deserved.

The immediate and likely enduring response to Kirk’s death is that no one deserves to be killed for their opinions, and that violence is not an appropriate response to a difference of opinion. I would believe the sincerity of the people who make this claim were they not, as Charlie Kirk so often did, speaking from both sides of their mouths: you cannot state such an unequivocal fact and follow it up with a call for vengeance. You cannot demand minority people's deaths not be politicized, then turn around and (without a shred of evidence) lay the blame for his death on your political opponents, the people you do not like, the people you do not see as people.

Charlie Kirk routinely talked about trans people as if they are all deranged individuals who not only wanted to but eventually would mass-murder school-children. That rhetoric goes beyond the realm of "political opinion” and into the realm of belief – a belief that was espoused for the express purpose of disenfranchising and causing harm to trans people like myself.

It is my BELIEF that no one deserves to be shot to death. It is my OPINION that Charlie Kirk’s death is not worth my outrage. And it is my enduring belief that people who are subject to the violence of rhetoric should never be expected to mourn those who espouse that violent rhetoric.

It is true that Charlie Kirk leaves the legacy of being a man of faith, a husband, and a father. It is also true that Charlie Kirk leaves a legacy of hatred and vitriol dressed up as intellectual exercise – an exercise that had real and devastating consequences for human beings whose lives are not debatable, whose experiences with violence are not abstract, unimportant, necessary, or deserved.