By Suchita Thepkanjana
Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
In the hours after Charlie Kirk was pronounced dead, the news was flooded with messages condemning political violence.
The bottom line? An individual should be entitled to life and basic human rights, even if they have different beliefs from you.
I agree. But Charlie Kirk himself evidently didn’t.
Although his debate sessions were (at least in theory) a noble attempt to start important discussions, let us not pretend that Kirk was an advocate for peace and tolerance. He championed political violence, lauded it, and encouraged it, but only when it wasn’t against people like him. This absolutely does not justify his assassination, but his actions arguably paved a raging, lawless path through American society that led to the events of September 10th.
This was a man who, after 254 school shootings in the US in the past year, stated that “it’s worth it to have a cost of some gun deaths” in exchange for bearing arms. He is now part of that “cost.”
This was a man who sent over 80 buses of rioters to join the January 6th attack on the Capitol, an insurrection against the Right’s political opponents that left 174 police officers injured.
This was a man who called for a “full military occupation” of American cities like Chicago and New York, who declared, “We got to go hard…We’re talking national guard, tanks — every street.”
This was a man who launched the Professor Watchlist, a database that named and shamed academics for promoting ‘leftist’ ideology, resulting in many of them receiving rape threats and death threats.
His past comments on people of a different religious or racial background regularly contained violent and extremist imagery. He tweeted “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit America’s throat” and labeled Muslims “some of the most disgusting people on the planet.”
He even went as far to say that the concept of empathy, the very thing that makes compassion and solidarity possible, is a “made up new age term that does a lot of damage.” The empathy so many people expressed over his death was exactly what he preached against.
Given what he so vehemently promoted, I do wonder if Kirk would be applauding this exact same event if the victim were instead a socialist, a Muslim, or a member of the opposing political party.
Evidently, Kirk’s assassination did not happen in a vacuum. He was not a saint martyred by a spontaneous act of division and violence. Division and violence was the language that he spoke.
He fought for his killer’s right to carry that gun onto that campus. He preached the same extremism and intolerance that his killer showed towards him. He taught that violence is what you use when someone disagrees with you, the way his killer disagreed with him.
Creating a hateful, intolerant America was his hill, and he died on it.
Let this be an illustration that in a society where difference — in religion, race, gender, or political stance — trumps humanity, where individuals do not respect each other’s right to existence, no one is truly safe. At the end of the day, your opposition is still your human equal.
