Why Charlie Kirk's assassination matters for all of us
Flashpoint or turning point? You decide.
Years ago, I wrote a thesis on how what the world needs now is love, specifically in the form of good faith engagement built on non-judgemental listening.
Open debate with genuine interest in each others’ experiences and perspectives, and earnest efforts to persuade each other in good faith - this is the antidote to the increasingly polarised, hostile and violent state of our public discourse, I argued.
Yesterday, one of the rare public figures who embodied my pipe dream was executed with one fell shot to the jugular on a public stage, and I’m left wondering if I’ve been hopelessly naive.
I’m used to seeing American violence in my social media feed, especially in the past week with the fatal stabbing of a Ukranian refugee in Charlotte, but this one felt heavy in a different way.
I never paid close attention to Charlie Kirk. His politics didn’t map onto mine, and I don’t particularly enjoy or very often consume the kind of political sparring content he produced.
However, you couldn’t be online in the past few years and not know who Kirk was and what he did. The conservative activist and founder of political advocacy non-profit Turning Point USA rose to prominence touring US university campuses with his ‘Prove Me Wrong’ open debates, spawning viral videoed exchanges that proliferated across the internet.
Young people showed up in increasingly large numbers to pose questions and hash out ideas. Some people changed their minds, some didn’t, but the important thing was that Kirk set a (mostly, as far as I can tell) respectful tone and allowed everyone and every topic at the table.
Partisans loved or hated him for his political views and influence (the 31-year-old father of two was credited with pulling in a significant portion of the youth vote for Trump in 2024). I respected him from afar for putting into action what I could only theorise about.
Now, Kirk is dead, and we will contemplate for the coming days the fact that some people cannot be reached by civil debate. Some people would actually kill to silence views they don’t want aired. They don’t want a hearing. They don’t want an exchange. They just prefer to hate.
Fatal violence is the end-point of this attitude, but upstream is culture fuelled by articles like Jezebel’s now-viral abomination ‘We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk’ and the unending avalanche of Literally Hitler content casting Trump and his allies as the second coming.
This beast was fed by millions, even if only one did the deed.
There is a Shakespearean level of irony in the fact that Kirk once called the trade-off of “some gun deaths every single year” as the cost of Second Amendment gun-ownership rights a “prudent deal” that was “worth it” to maintain a bulwark against tyrannical government. Could he ever have imagined that his own life would be counted in that trade-off?
As an Australian who has grown up in a mostly gun-free society, I find this hard to get my head around, but I hope that the loss of Kirk’s life will “work for good,” as the Bible promises (Romans 8:28). A devout Christian, Kirk would certainly have wished the same.
Commentators are already calling Kirk’s death a flashpoint for political violence in the US.
If people are willing to reflect honestly, it can become a turning point.
And I mean for all of us. The politicians who inflame public discourse with divisive rhetoric, the journalists who write fear porn trash for clicks, audiences who love to rage.
I know I am being idealistic. Politicians are incentivised to do the expedient thing, not the right thing. Media outlets will keep chasing clicks.
But surely we, the people at the bottom of the food chain, can start turning the ship. We can stop clicking through, stop with the trash talking. We can take Charlie Kirk’s ethos of respectful, open debate into our online and offline lives and refuse to be part of the problem.
Yes, it should start from the top. No, we shouldn’t have to take the lead. But it won’t, and we do.
I do worry I’m being naive, but I hope to be proven wrong.
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It could be someone who disagreed with him ideologically. Or it could have been facilitated/orchestrated, by powerful interests. Cui bono? The partisan divide deepens, more and more people fight each other, the 'other side', at the expense of looking up.
As one starts paying more attention to the world, and recognising patterns, strong skepticism seems both sensible and necessary...
Kirk was definitely one of the good guys. I watched quite a few of his debates, from the Oxford Union to the campus stuff. He never belittled anyone and was always respectful.
Contrast that with the absolute deluge of invective pouring out of Reddit and Blue Sky by the deranged leftists.
The WEF aligned governments like ours always talk about 'right wing extremists' (and unsurprisingly that's how MSM has painted Kirk), but it's clear that those on the left are the true Fascists and danger to civil society.