Charlie Kirk's mourners think only the White Man can be a martyr

Truthfully, it wasn’t just the memorial; the weeks since Kirk’s assassination have felt like the death of Comrade MAGA. Multiple people have been punished for benign remarks about Kirk. Matthew Dowd was fired and Jimmy Kimmel was suspended until recently.

The parallels between Israel's and Kirk’s violence run deep. Those who are shocked have conveniently ignored the violent rhetoric Kirk sowed. The same way that the world falsely problematised the occupation of Palestine by Israel, by labelling it the ‘Palestine-Israel conflict’. They believed and acted as if they were immune to the violence that they cultivated. They believed this because they believed that their white privilege would shield them, underwritten by white supremacy.

In the immediate aftermath centrists and those trying to maintain a pretence of decency, which is really just cowardice, remind us that Kirk had a family. Two daughters and a wife. We are supposed to be shocked that he has loved ones who will have to deal with the fall out of his murder. Perhaps in a world before Israel’s genocide in Gaza that would have been shocking. But almost two years of seeing young girls and boys carrying the eviscerated bodies of their last remaining family in plastic bags has shifted the spectrum of what is considered tragic, significantly.

It just goes to show that the hierarchy of victims is still embedded deeply into our society’s subconscious. We are supposed to feel sorry for Kirk, his kids and his wife in that order. Palestinian children, who are now growing up without any family and country, who are experiencing trauma so complicated it won’t be healed for multiple generations, don’t feature, they don’t get our sympathy.

Kirk was chief amongst those who pushed for no sympathy for Palestinians, saying Palestine doesn’t really exist.

This is how Kirk’s violence was allowed to fester and how his death is being used as perhaps the greatest tool to whitewash him. The narrative that is being established is that Kirk died because he dared to speak ‘his truth’, that he was exercising his freedom of speech. Sounds woke. His views on black folk, Muslims, immigrants, Palestinians were well known and undeniably violent.

Perhaps most emblematic of this is Kirk’s support of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot dead two people and injured a third. To refresh your memory, in August 2020 Rittenhouse travelled from Illinois to Wisconsin with an AR-15 rifle, ostensibly to defend businesses and provide medical aid. He was seventeen at the time. He was later acquitted, the jury deciding that his argument that he was defending himself was somehow believable.

The riots in Kenosha began because the Police shot black man, Jacob Blake, seven times leaving him paralysed from the waist down. George Floyd was murdered by police only a few months earlier and community tensions were already high. So when Blake was shot, people of conscience who were sick of police brutality took to the streets in protest.

The Rittenhouse case almost perfectly encapsulates the violence Kirk propagates. A black man is shot by the police, a systemic problem that has existed in America for as long as it's been a country. Protestors take to the streets to push for change. A white man who has nothing to do with the protests and who lives over four hours away decides that he needs to go and defend businesses. Not the people being victimised by police brutality. Businesses. Charlie Kirk’s death, like Israel’s massacres, like Rittenhouse’s acquittal, like Zimmerman’s exoneration, is not an aberration. It is the system working exactly as designed; a world where white supremacy blesses violence when it flows downward, and treats its enforcers as martyrs when it rebounds upward.

2025-09-26 | Unfiltered | English |