Posted on September 27, 2025.
DISCLAIMER: This text is NOT a call to action for or an endorsement of any kind of violence. It's a mix of personal reflection and analysis.
Charlie Kirk has been assassinated. Haven't we seen many people mourn his death? Accordingly, he was also a human being, he had two children, he only had different political views, political violence is nevertheless evil, he didn't deserve to die no matter what, and it's insane to celebrate his death.
I admire the defense of peace at all costs and recognize that violence is a displeasing, cruel act. However, such an attitude remains ineffective when we consider the damage Kirk and activists like him have caused. Sincerely, Kirk was an oppressor, and he incited violence himself. With his death, the continuity of many people's suffering was interrupted to an extent. It's essential we understand what the deal with him is and what his debates and the reception of his death reveal to us.
In many of our local scopes, there are many misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, racists, and fascists. Although Kirk has likewise advocated for these oppressive beliefs, his influence and deliberate efforts for such distinguished him. He was a propagandist that instilled hateful ideas and radicalized people into adopting bigotry, and that alone gave him a position of power.
How can we ignore that misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism are upheld systemically, on a regular basis, causing intense harm to millions? Driven by these ideas, institutions and people together pose us a list of never-ending acts of violence. For instance, they kill the queer youth by destroying their mental health, criminalize sex workers and stigmatize them as immoral, obstruct the way for rape survivors to find justice, trap all types of people into dying under poverty, and normalize hate crimes. Discriminative beliefs justify and motivate real harm that targets real people. We can't disregard them as mere differences in political views.
While Kirk might not be the first-hand perpetrator of such scenarios, some blood still drips off his hands. He strengthened the basis of related oppressive structures, he promoted sympathy toward injustice, and he negatively influenced those with more privilege or less awareness about their conditions. Implicitly, he was complicit in the abuse against marginalized groups of people, he made life harder for all people with less power, and he opened the door for more violence, murder, and rape.
With everything Kirk has done and resulted in mind, can we really say that he died an innocent person?
Charlie Kirk puts his male privilege well into practice with the support of the US State and media operators on his back. Debates are the perfect type of content that aligns with their interests. They are eye-catching, expose new perspectives, spark curiosity, feed the existing ideals of competition, and elicit much excitement. One person wins, the other loses, and we watch how debaters pass off and on their takes.
A political debate with two polarized sides, like those of Kirk's, tends to favor the most right-leaning view. Because such a view implies domination by itself, it paves the way for the success of the side that defends. To counter it, you need to identify and challenge its presumptions, address nuances, and with most difficulty, defend a moral statement: opposing oppression. You also don't have much time and are immediately put on defense. If you fail, it's given the message that your views are incorrect and that their beliefs are incapable of contradiction. Each time, the right-wing audience nourishes their attachment to their politics.
The essence of Kirk's debates would never stop here. He embodied an overconfident, uncivil persona. He insisted on shutting you up in the middle of your argument, silenced you, shifted the blame, accused you of lying, and denied your lived experiences. He could never resist his masculine cravings of dominance. Under the patriarchy, he was a male role model. He succeeded in instilling toxic masculinity on the next generations of men.
We see the lingering topics of his debates that lead us to another revelation. He puts into question whether women should have autonomy over their bodies or not, whether race predicts crime or not, whether minorities should sustain happy lives or not. What's both very absurd and not absurd at all is that he never discusses men's autonomy and white people's rights. If you aren't a cisgender, white, straight man, then you're never fully guaranteed to live with justice, with your most human wills accepted, without coercion interrupting your comfort.
There seems to be conflicting information on what kind of intentions Charlie Kirk's shooter had [1]. He could've been another fascist, a left-aligned liberation seeker, or neither of these. Many have presumed the latter motive and spoken in a negative light about it, as though the choice of violence was unacceptable no matter the target. Just to confront this reception, this section also accepts the latter motive as true.
A common critical sentiment goes that the State has a monopoly on legitimate violence, that is the State's justified right to attack a civilian, who has less power, while the target cannot defend themselves in the same way. When we personify this institution in the most simplified way, it usually refers to police and military officers.
The scope of those who are allowed violence actually extends further from the police and military. Both the State and other power relations in societies, despite the legal status of interpersonal violence, highly condone and motivate violence between civilians. For instance, rape culture appears in cultural beliefs, language, tradition, how the State prioritizes the treatment of rapists in prisons and courts, and even Kirk's talking points. Finally, rape culture produces male violence, and surely, we can't ignore that violence is also the perpetrator's choice of domination.
So how can one disturb a position of power that inevitably necessitates violence against those with less power? Making kind demands from oppressors is unlikely to disrupt their authority. After all, silence and passivity keep the status quo alive. To stop the continuity of abuse, to regain our autonomy and happiness, to evoke somewhat fear and threat, the violence against oppressors shines as self-defense.
When the State criminalizes protestors, imprisons survivors who fight back against their rapists, and punishes people trying to cope with poverty and homelessness, it's the ordinary state of affairs. Only when a civilian kills a fascist, do they stab the "political violence" label.
The assasination, however, comes with its own downsides. Conservatives now have a martyr to boast about and an excuse to quicken their ongoing regulation against the marginalized. An assasination is not enough on its own. More than ever, it's a sheer necessity to support immediate victims of systemic cruelty, like transgender people and people of color.
Following Charlie Kirk's assasination, the only people who deserve sympathy are his children and those he was complicit in the abuse of. Some people pinpointed the existence of his children as a reason to condemn the violence against him and mourn his death. This both reflects and propagates certain ideas about the nuclear family.
Many children with both parents alive have undergone childhood abuse, and they grew up hating their parents. Likewise, many children with single parents have thrived to differing extents. On the other hand, some children struggled with their parents unable to provide for them, and some had to witness their father abusing their mother. Indeed, what affects children's life satisfaction is not whether their parents are alive or not but how their caregivers take care of them and the societal structures they inhabit. Nevertheless, we can still see some people, who claim to care about kids, preach the patriarchy and capitalism that greatly threaten children.
When we consider Kirk's beliefs, it's unlikely that he would respect the autonomy, identity, and personal boundaries of his children - what are essential for a healthy childhood. He would instead fixate on maintaining a parental authority over them. When the alarm rings at "He was a father of two!" and not "He was a fascist," the developmental conditions of children, affected by Kirk's fatherhood, are largely ignored.
The role of the father is necessary to maintain the subordination of the mother and the conditioning of children into conformance to gender norms, justified ideas of competition and ownership, and general obedience to authority. To those who mourn his death, does it matter to you whether Kirk would make a healthy parent or not, or is it the mere existence of a father to set up another oppressive unit?
Of course, it's undeniable that Kirk's children can grieve his death as much as they desire. The connection between parents and children, probably due to many parents being the first ever caregivers, stands out in particular and endures a long way. Why can't the hostility against Kirk and the sympathy for his children coexist in the same heart? After all, the children never made the wish to have such a father.
Charlie Kirk's shooter was identified to be a white, cisgender man. They're working day and night to relate him to a transgender person [2]. Apparently, he had a transgender girlfriend that radicalized him, or maybe he had spoken to a transgender person beforehand. It's not Kirk's children or political violence, what they have in mind. Their goal is to sustain the existing system of injustice, so they shift the focus on minorities.
Death is tragic news, children are vulnerable subjects, and mourning is a relatably touching state of mind. It's safe to say that Kirk's death was nothing but a new chance to push for the nuclear family, to demonize minorities, to paint leftists as brutally seeking war, and to accelerate people's suffering.
To those who mourn, Kirk was perhaps a heroic figure who would force his 10-year-old daughter to give birth if she was raped [3]. In panic, they realized it was the time to make his assasination about transgender people so bad. To their luck, there are more and more Kirks out there - no lives were lost!