Welcome to the American Years of Lead, or possibly just business as usual.
Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on Wednesday at a speaking engagement on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Graphic close-up footage that circulated shortly afterwards showed Kirk seated beneath a marquee advertising The American Comeback Tour with a banner that read, “PROVE ME WRONG.”
Kirk’s eyes closed, his face taking on an almost meditative expression, as a hole opened in his neck. His head cocked to the left, and blood gushed forth from his wound, soaking his white t-shirt emblazoned with the word “FREEDOM,” which many least-favourite grandchildren likely found to be poignant symbolism.
An account was later produced of Kirk’s final words. An audience member had asked him if he knew how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters over the last ten years. “Too many,” Kirk said. After being informed the number was five, he was then asked how many mass shootings there had been in total in the US during that period. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” he replied just before the bullet hit.
If nothing else, he died as he lived: stoking the culture war with snappy one-liners.
Thoughts and prayers came quickly from world leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu and a surprising number of Knesset members, despite the lateness of the hour in Israel, jumpstarting the conspiracy machine.
Twitter exploded, predictably, with raucous jokes which were met with tut-tutting by the usual Very Sensible People, reminding everyone that this was a father and husband.
Eventually, President Trump was the one to announce that Kirk had died. Numerous hyper-online rightwing figures began calling for war and retribution. Twitter owner Elon Musk stated, “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die.” Self-professed free-speech warriors began a campaign of contacting the employers of individuals who had not been deferential enough to the deceased podcaster.
Endless eulogies were produced that felt entirely divorced from the man who lived, painting him as a master of the Socratic method and not someone whose career was built on baiting college students for clicks. The past decade of op-eds opining the rise of the alt-right and polarising discourse evaporated.
Abundance author Ezra Klein penned an opinion piece for The New York Times that perfectly encapsulated the failures of liberalism in our current moment, claiming that the white nationalist was practising politics the right way.” Klein, claiming to be envious of the media enterprise Kirk built, managed to place Kirk’s assassination in a constellation of political violence that included the 2022 attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband without mentioning Kirk’s own comments at the time.
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The consensus across the political spectrum was that one must feel something about this event: glee that he was silenced; outrage at the poisonous liberals who caused this; sympathy for the surviving family; fear of the coming storm.
Personally, I struggled to feel much of anything at all. To celebrate was obviously detrimental to my own soul, but to shed a tear seemed like dishonouring his memory.
After all, this was a man who both winkingly endorsed violence against people like myself and helped to popularise the term, “suicidal empathy.” The tragedy, insofar as there is one to be found, appeared to be that Kirk, despite great success in bending the direction of our current discourse, was crushed by the animus he helped to unleash on the nation.
While the shooter was still at large, the demand for an emotional response was largely an exercise in controlling the narrative. Despite a complete lack of understanding of the motive, Kirk’s ecosystem wanted the message to be that anything short of public mourning was contributing to the vicious liberal ideology that killed him.
It occurred to me that the public might not be so numb in the face of political violence had it not been told for nearly two years that two million people needed to be sacrificed in the name of realpolitik or messianic prophecy, depending on who you asked. Most of us have seen the bodies of countless fathers and husbands burned beyond recognition or blown into a multitude of pieces.
But the genocide in Gaza is the one issue with cross-party consensus, and so Western media works to sap the deaths of Arabs of any traces of the political or personal. One need not feel anything about these deaths, they tell us, because there is nothing aberrant in their suffering. That is simply the “reality” of living in that part of the world.
As if to make the point explicit, earlier on the same day Kirk was killed, Novara Media published a report on the BBC’s coverage of another father and husband who was recently assassinated, Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif. Al-Sharif was killed over a month ago alongside five other media professionals when Israel struck their press tent following yet another smear campaign claiming the journalist was a Hamas operative.
Novara Media state that an internal email from Global Journalism, which sits within the BBC global news team, requested an “essential amendment and correction” on a piece of BBC News reporting about Al-Sharif that went unheeded. The line in question stated that, “The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war.” Despite Global Journalism’s insistence that the claim was without evidence in the leak, the BBC stand by the piece.
While the confluence of factors surrounding Kirk’s assassination are difficult to parse, the causal forces in Al-Sharif’s murder are rather straightforward: Israel created a paper-thin excuse, the Western media repeated it, and Israel killed him.
The role of our journalist class when it comes to Arab death is not to demand emotional response, but to subdue it. Massacres are flattened into numbers. Where pathos is expressed, it is to reinforce that these deaths are unavoidable tragedies, as though caused by a force of nature.
It is doubtful that Kirk would have minded the double standard. For all of the claims he was facing threats over recent criticisms of Israel in his final days, he was far from the language of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Candace Owens, and certainly was no friend to the Palestinians. Another contrast may have bothered him, however:
The day after Al-Sharif was martyred, throngs of men carried his body to be laid to rest, his press jacket draped over his shroud. Mourners knelt next to his body, their hands cradling his face in disbelief, while children inspected the bombed-out tent, their eyes hollow and jaws slack.
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s shooting, a man who identified himself as “Eldertiktok” filmed a selfie video documenting the chaos and promoting his account. He then rushed the marquee, grabbing blood-soaked merch to sell online. He later apologised, saying of Kirk, “He taught me things about Jesus that I didn’t know myself.”
Erika Kirk, the widow, posted a speech that wildly vacillated in tone from grieving to vindictive, positioning herself to take up the Turning Point USA mantle. By Sunday, her name and image were being attached to SMS and email solicitations on behalf of the organisation.
Meanwhile, if Kirk’s murder had evoked any strong emotions in the president to whom he devoted so much of his project, he did well to mask it. Trump was spotted at a Yankees game only a day later, joking with the players in the locker room and fist pumping rhythmically from the stands along to one of his favourites, Village People classic, “YMCA.”
Alex Foley is a researcher and painter living in Brighton, UK. They have a background in molecular biology of health and disease. They are the co-founder of the Accountability Archive, a web tool preserving fragile digital evidence of pro-genocidal rhetoric from power holders.
Follow them on X: @foleywoley
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.