The Charlie Kirk assassination, and its accompanying hysteria

Yesterday’s assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the public reaction to it, feels unreal. It’s unnerving to log into Facebook and be presented with posts - not from people I know, because Facebook is less a social network than it is an algorithmic ragebait generator these days - gleefully making jokes about Kirk’s death, and justifying his murder based on things he said in the past, particularly about how some gun deaths are an acceptable price to pay for retaining the right to bear arms. The fact that there was video of the moment he was shot, and that people were laughing and cheering this literal snuff movie, was especially unsettling. The memes they made in response are terrible because, as we all know, The Left Can’t Meme:

A lot of people who would consider themselves on the left of US politics (which is to say Democrat-voting liberals, not based communists like the American Communist Party) have really started letting their inner sociopaths out whenever news breaks about bad things happening to people on the opposite side of the aisle in the US’s kayfabe bourgeois democracy. The Trump assassination attempt last July gave these people a chance to fantasise about him being killed, which they did openly, and with no apparent sympathy for the two bystanders who actually were killed. Because they were Trump supporters so it’s OK, see?

Attempting to assassinate a politician is nothing new, and assassins justify their actions by the fact that decisions a politican made had real-life consequences for people. Whether or not you agree that a politican deserves to die for their actions is another question, but the politician does at least have some power. Charlie Kirk was not a politician but a new-media figure, an influencer in common parlance. His Turning Point USA ‘non-profit’ organisation (with which he amassed a net worth of $12m) was very successful at uniting those on the right of US bourgeois politics, especially at college campuses. He was a vocal supporter of Trump in 2016, and although he later criticised Trump, he was also a loud voice in support of Israel in its massacre of Palestinians since Oct 7th 2023. He might have convinced a lot of people to vote for Trump, but he never held political office himself.

The fact that he didn’t hold office has been reduced to barely an afterthought in the diatribes launched against him; his opinions were his unforgivable crime. I didn’t agree with much of what I heard him say, but I never paid him much attention either. It’s not uncommon to see him referred to as a ‘fascist’, without any explanation of what it was that made him a fascist besides his political conservatism. Facebook users ask rhetorical questions like “Kirk wanted my sister dead because she’s gay, so why should I care that he’s dead?” and dozens of people agree with them, without ever questioning whether Kirk actually wanted gay people dead, let alone the poster’s sister, or why someone’s assumed opinion makes them fair play for an assassin. This kind of attitude towards a real-life murder raises questions about who else is and is not deserving of assassination, and who gets to decide.

It is also significant that the shooting occurred at Utah Valley University campus, because of the hostility that those on the right have faced at college campuses. In his tribute to Kirk, Andy Ngo describes his own experience of trying to organise events at college campuses and having them shut down due to threats of violence. Kirk’s shooting apparently came without a warning and has the hallmarks of a professional assassination, given the distance over which the shooter had to take the shot, and the pinpoint accuracy with which he was shot in the neck. It doesn’t fit with the usual image of rowdy masked ‘antifa’ activists threatening to break stuff, drown out the speaker or plant a homemade bomb, and so conspiracy theories are already forming about the identity and motivation of the assassin, since this will undoubtedly lead to much tighter restrictions on protests at campus events. There is even video of the shooter taking up position on the roof of the building from where he shot Kirk, drawing obvious parallels with the videos that circulated of supposed would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks last year.

The Charlie Kirk shooting came not long after a very different political assassination, that of Andriy Parubiy in Ukraine on August 30th. This killing was captured on video by CCTV cameras, and a suspect was apprehended within days. Unlike with Kirk, who had done little besides expressing opinions that enraged the ‘woke left’, Parubiy had been active in Ukrainian politics since the fall of the USSR, founding the far-right Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991, playing an integral role in the Maidan coup of 2013/14 as Commandant of the Maidan self-defense forces (who have been deemed to be responsible for the murder of Maidan protesters, which was blamed on police at the time and used as justification for the coup) and even being responsible for the Odessa Trades Union House massacre. In 2018, he praised Hitler as history’s greatest exponent of “direct democracy”.

If there was any celebration on Facebook amongst online libs that an actual proud fascist had been killed in Ukraine, I didn’t see it. It’s unlikely any of them were even aware of it, but if they were then they would have probably got the impression that his assassin had ties to Russia (and was therefore Bad), an allegation that was repeated frequently after his arrest despite having no basis in reality.

The man who killed him stated in his interrogation that he had acted against Parubiy in revenge for his son, who had died in the disastrous Bakhmut offensive of 2023. He said that he did not target Parubiy specifically, but only chose him because he realised he had the opportunity to get close to him, and Parubiy was part of the corrupt Ukrainian state machinery that had led to the conflict that ultimately killed his son. Far from having ties to Russia, he was a lone wolf driven to violence by the senseless loss of a child in an unnecessary war. If a political assassination could ever be justified, this would be it.

RIP Charlie Kirk, I may not have known or agreed with you but I bet you were more fun to be around than any of the ghouls who are celebrating your death.