CHARLIE KIRK

In the recent weeks following the death of Charlie Kirk, social media has been a weird place. Flooded with people’s internal monologues justifying his death or characterising him as a martyr, beyond the grips of criticism or accountability now that he is dead. Whilst I wasn’t shocked at the way Republican figures used Kirk’s death as leverage against the left, I found myself disappointed at the glee shared and encouraged over a death of political violence. It goes without saying that Kirk’s views were often inherently hateful and harm-inducing but I found that a large number of people on social media completely missed the point. It’s not an expectation that you feel sad that Kirk, as the person he was, died. But rather this is about what your lauding of a life lost to political violence represents in the consistency of your own politics. 

 

My understanding of being on the left is that faced with a political issue, you show compassion. Not because you feel some obligation to do so but because that is who you are as a person. It’s why I condemn the murder of unarmed civilians in Gaza, it’s why I detest the blind rage of uninformed Tommy Robinson followers, it’s why I disagreed with everything Charlie Kirk said and represented and it’s why democracy is so important. 

 

As soon as people began declaring “Charlie Kirk didn’t care about Palestinians”, “he said deaths by gun violence are worth it for the second amendment, “he said empathy is a new age term that does a lot of damage” in order to absolve care about the way he died, you are completely doubling back on your political integrity. Just because he didn’t care about those things, it doesn’t mean that you thus make an exception to caring about death by lack of gun control, because you hated his rhetoric. It further worries me that people are blinded by their political agenda and thus cannot see how dangerously close to facism their views are bending. Our fight is for political freedom is it not? To be repulsed by how peaceful Palestinian activists are treated, to support the LGBTQ+ community in their freedom of expression in which they are so often denied, to fight against the treatment of Black people by hands of the police. In making an exception for his death I hold up a mirror to you, and I hope you can see the way you are mirroring the people who consistently silence us through violence. 

 

I don’t insist you mourn this man or feel any loss that he is dead, but I do insist that you remember what the enemy really is, rather than who. The mouthpiece of the right is something that you cannot kill through the taking of human life. To try and do so by valourising murder is virtue signalling warped into a monstrous competition of who can hate the Right the most. This attitude is unproductive and resistant to creating genuine change and winning elections. But what concerns me the most is that people cannot seem to see that the moral high ground they are standing on made out of leftist ideology is no more than a fascist molehill when the foundations of their politics disappear as soon as violence is pointed in the ‘right direction’. 

 

You are no better just because you lean to the left. Stay true to your morality and politics or risk contributing to our society’s fall into facism.