I wish I was one of those people who woke up last Thursday morning and greeted the wall-to-wall media coverage of Charlie Kirk’s murder with a quizzical: Who the fuck is Charlie Kirk?
Really.
Charlie Kirk, as a public figure, doesn’t deserve to be remembered. Aside from the fact that he was just another victim of America’s endemic gun violence. Gun violence normalized by the late Charlie Kirk. “We need to be very clear that you’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen,” Kirk said in 2023. “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.”
Even that lends too much, I don’t know, tragic irony, to a death that deserves no such nobility.
Charlie Kirk was a white nationalist, a white Christian nationalist, who demonized everyone who did not look like him or did not think like he did. His virulent hatred made him a rich man. Made him a confidant of powerful, malevolent men including the President of the United States of America. Charlie Kirk was an enemy to the truth, to history, to democracy itself.
Charlie Kirk was a man of his time.
A time of rising racism.
A time of rising misogyny and homophobia.
A time where J.K. Rowling is better known for her transphobia than she is for the children’s books she wrote.
A time of rampant intolerance.
An intolerance Charlie Kirk rode a wave to prominence on.
If he had, Charlie Kirk would’ve been a nobody. Just another fringe figure whose only asset was an utter shamelessness and glaring lack of empathy. “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually,” he said on his show. “I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.” Without the amplification technology of social media, Charlie Kirk would’ve been left yelling his nonsense into the void.
But those are not the times we live in.
So, Charlie Kirk is now elevated to an elegiac martyr status he didn’t earn or deserve.
Does this mean I am celebrating his murder?
No.
But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been rolling a little bit in a clover bed of schadenfreude.
Charlie Kirk should not have died the way he did, when he did. Murder is murder, and every life ended by violence diminishes us all a little bit. There’s no justifying his killing. No condoning it. Even understanding it a little bit is a stretch. But we certainly shouldn’t be surprised by it. Hate, malice, bigoted animus is a toxic mix that will never, ever result in any sort of positive outcome. It is the foul pool in which Charlie Kirk swam, joyously, and prospered from, and may well have been a victim of.
I will not say the world is a better place now that he’s no longer part of it.
But I do contend that we’d all be a lot better off if we’d never heard of Charlie Kirk in the first place.