No, Virginia, Charlie Kirk was not "practising politics the right way"

In a breathtakingly dumb op-ed (which, these days — boy howdy is that saying something) from The New York Times and published on September 11th, Ezra Klein (paywall) makes a wet-spaghetti argument that Charlie Kirk was a mere orator who was sadly "assassinated" for his political opinions And We Don't Do That In America™ — absent all the other times exactly that has happened in the US throughout history, I guess.

Let's get one thing out of the way upfront — Charlie Kirk was a white supremacist with Nazi-adjacent (and often outright Nazi) beliefs who used the platform that made him a multi-millionaire to terrorise and destroy the lives of people he disagreed with politically. When this inevitably led to violence — either indirectly as a result of the climate he contributed to or directly from his "professor hit lists" and other encouragement of bad behaviour — he wiped his hands of accountability or said the victims in some way had merited it. As has done the rounds many times since then, he said that gun violence was the price to be paid so conservatives with gun fetishes can misunderstand the Second Amendment. As the kids say these days, fuck around and find out.

BuzzFeed has a 101 primer of some of the odious shit this awful person said before his murder, but let's not pretend he simply had political views out of alignment with others. He advocated for violence against those he disagreed with and gleefully cheered when it happened. He was literally spouting hate up to the last moments of his life.

Do I think he deserved this? No, shooting people is not really a solution I advocate for in most instances. Am I surprised that someone who was fine with violence against those he disagreed with ideologically found himself the victim of it? Not in the slightest. Am I going to mourn a racist bigot no longer being on the planet? No — dying doesn't make you less of an asshole in life, and I'm more fearful for how this action is going to be co-opted to turn him into a martyr than I am sad at his loss.

Because, indeed, even before anything was known about the shooter it had already been decided that this was the action of "the left," Democrats, queer folks, academics, etc etc. Ignoring the fact that violence is generally the purview of conservatives/the militant right and murdering Charlie Kirk does nothing to advance leftist causes in any capacity, up until earlier today there was zero indication about the politics or motives of the shooter. Now that there's a suspect in custody, people are trawling everything for evidence to confirm their knee-jerk suspicions. The Wall Street Journal bleated that "pro-trans messages" had been engraved on the bullets believed to have been involved in the murder only to quietly go oops presumably after someone explained to them that "TRN" related to the Turkish company, Turan, that likely manufactured them.

Other information about the suspect strikes me as general 4chan meme bullshittery that people who aren't terminally online won't understand; that's often the objective of 4chan on the whole, too — co-opt language and references to confuse people who don't understand them contextually so nobody knows what you're really affiliated with. While it's still early, all indications are pointing to the likelihood that the suspect was an adherent of the "Groypers," an even more horrible group of neo-Nazis started by Nick Fuentes who think that Republicans and MAGA aren't awful and racist enough.

The Free Speech Absolutists of the right have responded to all of this as you'd expect — violent calls for retaliation (paywall) against people who had nothing to do with it, targeted attacks and death threats (paywall) against women/queer/black folks who aren't self-flagellating themselves for not mourning Kirk's death sufficiently enough, and so, so much censorship (paywall).

I expect this sort of hypocrisy from conservatives because being ideologically consistent is never something to be relied upon with them, but it's obnoxious as all hell for theoretical-lefitsts like Klein who are rushing to get on a high horse as if Kirk's only crime was being a bit controversial.

He was an awful human being, and while I don't think that's enough to merit being murdered I'm not going to pretend that the world is a better place with viewpoints like his in it.

At about the same time as Kirk's murder, a sixteen year old opened fire at his high school and wounded two people before killing himself. This puts the tally at over three hundred mass shootings in 2025 (much higher depending on how "mass shooting" is defined). Thankfully no one was killed so far aside from the shooter, but law enforcement are saying that the teenager had been radicalised online.

The right is lamenting that there will never be another person like him again — we can only hope, but I'm not optimistic that someone worse isn't gearing up to take his place.