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

We live in incredibly violent times and yet the one violent act that will go on to define this year is the murder of Charlie Kirk. In the days, weeks and months prior, Israel carried out multiple political assassinations including Hamas leadership in Qatar, over 200 journalists in Gaza and an airstrike on Sanaa in Yemen killing 35 people. But only Charlie Kirk was gifted a memorial that drew in tens of thousands of attendees, including almost the entire Trump administration, many of whom delivered sentimental speeches.

The event itself felt more like mourning the passing of a Soviet Era dictator than a so-called freedom loving MAGA podcaster. All the trappings were there, a line-up of influential speakers calling Kirk a hero, a martyr, and comparing him to no less than Jesus Christ himself.

There was a concert with choreographed worship blurring the line between memorial and creating a soundtrack for the messiah-hood of Kirk. Even the mourning widow was wheeled out to humanise her husband with anecdotes.

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 both cases their history of unchecked violence goes unnoticed, camouflaged into the backdrop of business as usual. So when their own violence eventually does re-visit them, it forces the so-called good-folk to sit up and reckon with it. Not only do they believe that perpetrators of white supremacy enabled violence aren’t perpetrators at all, they are perpetual victims.

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.

His white privilege emboldened him to take a rifle into an atmosphere that was highly charged and particularly sensitive to guns. The only difference is that Rittenhouse got away, as so many white folk do, whereas Kirk did not.

Other than that, the patterns are the same. Inflame community tensions and then stand with the side committing the violence. Rittenhouse got away because white America told him he could. Kirk thought the same rules applied, this was a rare circumstance where the shield of white privilege was penetrated. Which is why Kirk's murder is the act that’s shocking, not Rittenhouse’s acquittal. Not even the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice who was twelve and the many, many others.

Trayvon Martin was only seventeen when he was shot by Neighbourhood Watch Coordinator, George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was later, and to the surprise of no one, acquitted for Martin’s murder. Kirk defended Zimmerman, and argued that the case was rigorously examined and he was found innocent by a jury, thus proving the system works.

In the same breath though, he claimed that OJ Simpson was clearly guilty and there were procedural irregularities. He also claims that Karmelo Anthony is clearly guilty and was not acting in self-defence (unlike Zimmerman), despite the fact that Anthony has not been through trial.

Kirk’s position couldn’t be any more clear, violence is acceptable, praiseworthy in fact, but only in one direction. This is the synthesis of the entire right, wherever they are. Whether MAGA, Reform, Tommy Robinson or Zionists.

They can continue to pretend that Charlie Kirk was killed for exercising his freedom of speech. Just as they continued for years to believe every flimsy excuse that came out of the Israeli hasbara playbook. They aren’t even subtle about it. The slogans that accompany their violence are fantasies about patriotism, freedom and civilisation. All of these are based on exclusion by force. Not force if necessary, not force as last resort, force as a primary and preliminary tool.

Their slogans are not shields, they are the weapons themselves, used to sanctify exclusion and violence.

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.

Whiteness promises immunity, but only so long as the blood is not its own. The moment the violence it cultivates circles back, we are told to mourn the architect, not the victims. That is the lie, the price of the ticket. Until that ticket is torn up, until the slogans of patriotism and civilisation are exposed as weapons, the cycle will continue.

Kirk’s life was built on that violence, and his death is now being used to sanctify it. The task before us is to refuse the lie. To see clearly that what is sold as order is violence, what is sold as civilisation is brutality, and what is sold as grief is hierarchy. I will not mourn the architects of violence, my heart lies tattered with its victims.

Nadeem Dawud studied History at Oxford and King’s College London, where he completed a Master’s in World History and Cultures. His interests lie in decolonialism, anarchism, and building resilient communities. A long-time activist in the UK Muslim community, he now focuses on grassroots projects that speak locally but resonate globally, and he co-hosts the Boys in the Cave podcast.

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