Charlie Kirk: weaponising grief
Jimmy Kimmel and Charlie Kirk
I was in New York in April 1968 and remember the sense of threat hearing the police sirens going up to Haarlem after Martin Luther King was shot, and Bobby Kennedy’s killing just two months later. Assassinations lurk in America’s DNA like a rare mutant gene. It is hard to predict, or describe, their impact on a society.
Whatever anyone thinks of Charlie Kirk, patriot or pariah, he leaves a grieving wife, his mother and father, and a young son and a daughter who will grow up without their father. Along with thousands of other families in the USA, bereaved at least in part because of the easy accessibility of guns, they deserve sympathy for their loss. Kirk’s was a short but what might be called a “consequential” life.
How much the content of Kirk’s messages mattered, or was it simply his charismatic personality expressing a shared anger at the Washington elite, is hard to judge. Considering Trump’s electoral appeal in the 2024 campaign, exit polls suggest Kirk did draw in young men to vote for him. In the five previous Federal Presidential elections, the Democrats never won less than 60 per cent of young people’s vote. Kamala Harris held on to 60 per cent of young women’s votes, but Trump increased his share of young men’s vote by 8 per cent and won 57 per cent over the Democrats’ 40 per cent of the votes of young men lacking a college education.
What next? The immediate response to Kirk’s murder from his religious constituency has been to declare him a martyr. If he had died because of his religious beliefs, that might not be a total abuse of the term. But the political response from the White House — linking his death to a “vast domestic terrorist network” funded by liberal charities, worse, before any objective evidence emerged as to the motive of Kirk’s killing — is deeply worrying. The most hopeful interpretation is that much of the rhetoric coming out of the White House is performative. But increasingly much of it clearly isn’t.
This assassination has provided a pretext for harassing those putting critical comment about Kirk into social media. At Vice President J.D. Vance’s bidding, those openly celebrating his death are being denounced to their employers, with some losing their jobs. This is the same J.D. Vance who, on grounds of freedom of speech, “called out” the UK for prosecuting hate crime. In this world view, President Joe Biden and George Soros (the philanthropist and businessman who has given over $32 billion to his Open Society foundations dedicated to democracy and justice) were criminals who should be imprisoned.
The Kirk assassination has raised the already high level of coercive control exerted by the Trump administration over American society. It has revealed classic symptoms of authoritarian regimes: censorship adopted by compliant elements of civil society frightened of public reaction and government reprisals, plus self-censorship for personal safety. Non-compliance now has a price.
On Wednesday the Disney-owned ABC television network shut down the popular Jimmy Kimmel Live late-night show. Kimmel, a talented satirist, derided the response from the “MAGA gang” to Kirk’s death as “anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it”. But he had also described Trump’s extraordinary response to a routine question about how he was feeling about his friend’s death, a ramble about the new White House ballroom, as unlike an adult reaction to death but rather akin to “how a four-year old mourns a goldfish”. That, more likely, was the real casus belli. This makes Kimmel the second popular comedian to fall foul of the President. Next May CBS is ending Stephen Colbert’s late night show – brutally funny about Trump — for “financial reasons”.
What is no less notable about Kirk’s death are its widespread reverberations around the world. Kirk had been a passionate supporter of Israel, though recently more critical on moral grounds because of Gaza. Netanyahu immediately described him as a “lion-hearted friend of Israel” who “fought the lies and stood tall for Judaeo-Christian civilisation”. Within 24 hours a graffiti mural in his honour had gone up in Ashdod portraying him with angel wings. National Security adviser Itamar Ben-Gvir praised Charlie Kirk for recognizing the threat of “collusion between the global Left and Islam” which he described as “the greatest danger to humanity today”.
Illustrating a degree of networking, leaders of far-Right parties in Europe are singing from the same song-sheet. Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban attributed the assassination to “the international hate campaign waged by the progressive-liberal left”. This was echoed by Jordan Bardella, President of the French Rassemblement National, the likely successor to Marine Le Pen, and by the Vox Party in Spain. It is doubtful whether more than a tiny fraction of their members had even heard of Charlie Kirk before.
At his memorial service in Phoenix, Arizona, this Sunday, there will be abundant sympathy for Kirk’s bereaved family and lavish praise for his life, bordering on beatification. Condolence is an important expression of community and a shared humanity. But it should not be weaponised. In such a divided nation, the USA will be fortunate indeed if this man’s assassination heralds a shared understanding of patriotism, peace and unity.
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