I was taught to write obituaries in college
Right-wing commentator and provocateur Charlie Kirk died on September 10th. In the midst of a screed about inner city gang violence and pushing a blatantly false narrative about transgender individuals becoming mass shooters, his speech was halted when a sniper struck his neck and sent his blood gushing out over the campus of Utah Valley University. Pfft! Just like that.
At nearly the same time, violence rang out on another school ground, not far away in Colorado. Here, a high school student wielded a revolver to injure three other students and themselves. Was it the 47th school shooting of 2025, or just the 46th? Hard to tell. Charlie Kirk was asked about mass shootings right before he died, and he dismissively responded with: "counting or not counting gang violence?"
In previous shootings, Charlie Kirk was first on the battle lines to politicize these tragedies, without pause for grief, respect or nicety. It was acceptable, to Kirk, that children were torn to shreds by hollow point bullets, that parents had to bury their offspring, because it meant the Second Amendment was still enshrined and that was far more important than any loss of life. Whatever mourning you had was secondary to some distant, imperceptible commitment to weapons that spit death, and their continued sale and use by a country of 300 million.
Kirk's death eclipsed the news of Colorado. In the rapid first draft obituaries of social media, there was untold ink spilled over how he was able to debate his ideas, and it was all bereft of what exactly those ideas were.
The incident is more than a tragedy and a farce. The moment blood gushed from his neck was a Borges aleph; you could see whatever you wanted from it, wherever and at any time. Calls for violence against the left, the loss of decency in America, petitions for respect, or maybe your next big social media post that would go viral with a joke or whipping your followers into a frenzy.
Kirk was a circus clown, dancing for an incredibly lucrative ecosystem that arose at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Since the end of the second World War, every electoral defeat by the Republican Party fostered a new wave of fear, panic and soul-searching, with the soul revealing they needed to get more nasty, more vicious and more violent; lurching forever rightward through the lineages of Goldwater and Reagan, Buchanan and Gingrich. With the routing of the neoconservatives and the ascension of Barack Obama, that fever hit its highest pitch yet - but more than that, it found an unspeakable amount of wealth from conservative and libertarian donors willing to enrich and empower arsonists against American civil tranquility.
It was in this ecosystem that Kirk founded Turning Point USA, flush with money from Foster Friess, a Wyoming billionaire who flooded right-wing and extreme Christian groups with material support - far more than any liberal project could ever hope to receive. TPUSA started as an organization to advocate for Republican politicians and gin up support for its policies. In practice, this meant doing Kirk’s favorite thing: stride into college campuses, find kids who were minding their own business and turn them into caricatures for the camera.
Contrary to common refrain, Charlie Kirk was not interested in a civil conversation. Most of his "debates" were harassing people who had no idea what to do with a belligerent harpy-man berating them as they were walking to and from classes. To the idea that he was simply trying to change people's minds, this was always a disrespectful one way street: Kirk was never in the business of having his own mind changed, which one would think is a critical part of any open debate. His own idea of changing people's minds, as we see, always came with a threat of retribution to parties for not towing the conservative line.
Colleges are places where young adults are working out nearly every aspect of their own lives. For many it is the first time they are thinking deeply about their philosophical, political and social outlooks on life. They are exposed to so many new individuals that their outlooks are expanded at imperceptible speeds. Sometimes those are religious conversations too; and more too many are freed to question more freely their sexual and gender identities.
It is these questions in the hearts of people that has made campuses the target for conservative provocation for a generation. Men like Friess were investing in boys like Charlie Kirk to do the work of tearing down these spaces, tossing out anyone who might question their lives in favor of the American conservative dogma: heteronormative supremacy, Christian supremacy, Manifest Destiny and unflinching apologia for the political history of America - and, seeping just underneath it, apologia for Atlantic fascism.
Kirk played his grotesque role admirably. Having left college very early, he was poisoned to believe this was where men were emasculated, conservatives targeted and ideas like repealing the Civil Rights Act were mysteriously seen as odious. Kirk would go in with his goons, armed with microphones and smartphones and demand someone in Philosophy 102 rapidly and suddenly defend their stance of why they aren’t speaking up about black-on-black crime.
Kirk approached this as something of a demented Peter Pan. He refused to grow up. Although he had dropped out for ideological and business reasons, there was clearly a longing to remain there on campus, to walk the quads and keep debating kids far younger than him. He aged out but he refused to leave; like a disheveled dude in a letterman jacket or football hoodie, still jonesing for the days he rushed frat, this was the place where his imagination remained.
TPUSA pushed and pushed hard. Campuses were offered free pizza to listen to these debates; sympathetic professors offered extra credit to attend. Local campus chapters were established, and then given a new task: making lists of left-leaning faculty and singled them out for harassment. These educators, with their own God-given worldviews, were deemed to be enemies of conservatism. And to them, anything was on the table to use against an ideological enemy.
Appealing to a warped vision of objective truth that is in vogue with American commentariat, Kirk’s cohort made a business to stalk, harass and target anyone who did not tow the line with their dogma. Thought crime was the order of the day; talking about gender, Islam or social reform were grounds to be put on a list, harassed for their views, sent death threats and made targets for appeals to administrations for termination. The free speech that TPUSA advocated was not a two-way street. Get out of line, and you were on the list.
Now in the world of America in 2025, these views are enshrined and championed by the right dominant and supreme. At Texas A&M the week of Kirk’s death, a dean was forced to resign when an undercover snitch recorded themselves informing the professor that their views on gender went against the new policies of the Texas state that such teachings were illegal. The comparisons to 1930s Germany, where children were encouraged to expose and report on parents and teachers who expressed any modicum of reservation about the Nazi party’s policies, were easy to find.
This is the world Charlie Kirk created - one of fear, paranoia and distrust. He made himself fabulously rich in doing so. TPUSA’s revenue jumped to $39.8 million by 2020, born off the back of advocating for Donald Trump and his Republican Party.
But enough about action. Charlie Kirk was a man of words, and he spoke a lot of words according to apologists. It’s worth seeing what some of those words were. Among the many things Kirk advocated for was a regression of rights for black Americans; he repeatedly called for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Kirk’s height came in the years between the murders of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, and Kirk repeatedly said both were responsible for their own deaths. Likewise he made countless, untold screeds against Muslims and people from the Middle East, following the right-wing orthodoxy that such people only existed as enemies of Western Civilization.
These were the things that, in his own words "nobody else wanted to talk about." In reality, they were common talking points. They had been the bread and wine of the conservative movement for the entire 21st century. Kirk's issue, and his mission, was overcoming a mainstream aversion to these beliefs. They had been defeated in polite circles of intelligentsia; but to the right, these were unacceptable losses and had to be cast in a different light, any different. What they latched onto was the idea that most people were too scared to say these things out loud - hoping for a revival of the Moral Majority, but for saying a black child deserved to be shot to death for mere suspicion of stealing a candy bar.
In the 2020s, Kirk started to ingratiate himself towards the old guard of Protestant extremism. Back in 2018, Kirk would speak now and then for the separation of church and state in public; after Trump’s defeat, he found the light of Jesus Christ and began advocating for the end of religious freedom and violence against gay and transgender individuals. One of his favorite lines was to talk about stoning gay people to death, which he described as “God’s perfect law.” Transgender people, who he referred to as “a middle finger towards God,” should be handled “like they did in the 50s and 60s.”
Maybe he found the odious form of faith that fuels the bloodlust of America; or maybe he saw which way the money was now blowing. Kirk’s time as the vanguard was done. The electoral defeat of Republicans had caused yet another metamorphosis into an even more cruel, more savage mutant. Campus provocateurs like Charlie Kirk were not enough; the blood-baying hounds needed stronger stuff. The fringe was brought in: the “groypers” of online, rat-poisoned dipshit nazi cosplayers got to have more and more of a say in things, to pave the way for a revanchist Republican presidency.
Kirk’s time as the vanguard was done: these rat children were to be the new frontline. Assholes like Nick Fuentes didn’t see Kirk as properly “nazi enough” and often treated him to calls for violence. This was a grand tradition in the art of the Republican party’s lurch: Kirk was to be the aged pro wrestler who put the younger face over. Not that the groypers ever understood the kayfabe, and they continued to make calls for Kirk’s death.
Maybe this was why Kirk busied rebranding himself as a Christian nationalist; the belief that America was founded by, and should exist primarily for white Protestants, with all other races and creeds extinct or subservient to them. It was in these years he made those comments about gay and transgender people, that religious freedom should be crushed. Facing the machine ready to devour him, Kirk didn’t find the road to Damascus: he looked himself in the mirror and decided he needed to get more vicious in his words, more violent in his rhetoric.
America’s elite are love with the idea that words are ultimately harmless, that there is a theoretical space where you can say anything you want and it won’t impact anyone. It won’t inspire anyone to violence, it won’t cause fear or distress. It is an ethos forged from years debating the societal role of cruel assholes like the Westboro Baptist Church and others who have spent decades harassing innocent parties with no rhyme or reason; it’s an ethos born from apologizing for provocateurs who have repeatedly called for violence against Americans, just so long as those violent calls came from the right. Some of those provocations have resulted in violence, but the ones who egged them on, they must be found innocent of any wrongdoing.
That project is a resounding success: the First Amendment, begun as a means to preserve journalistic independence and the right to assembly, is now the bastion of simply being an asshole, while marching in the street and protesting a genocide is criminalized without any second thoughts.
Charlie Kirk hated empathy. He called it a “new age idea” and said it was a recent phenomenon, not a part of the human condition. This felt as close to an axiom of his beliefs as there ever was. Anything else could have been true, or just part of his elaborate trolling act, an outcropping of America’s turn against earnestness and towards cynicism. But to do the things he did, to spearhead a vanguard of true believers in hatred and disenfranchisement, it requires at least this much to operate.
We all live in Charlie's world now. Don't you dare say anything mean about him.
- C