The assassination of Charlie Kirk and the conditionality of empathy

On the eve of 9/11, at the Utah Valley University, American political activist Charlie Kirk was doing what he always did best. He was seated under a white tent emblazoned with “prove me wrong” when a student pressed him on the subject of mass shootings. “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years?” the student asked. “Too many,” Kirk snapped, to applause. Seconds later, a bullet struck his neck. One of the most recognisable faces of Trump’s youth movement, collapsed before a crowd of thousands.

The assassination may have stunned the campus into shock, but the rhetoric that has followed in its aftermath has been unsurprisingly divisive. For a decade, Kirk had thrived on political spectacle by staging it, amplifying it, and profiting from it. That it all ended in the middle of one was, if not predictable, then at least consistent with the world he helped create.

The 31-year-old, was the founder of Turning Point USA, a tireless pro-Trump activist, and a maestro of the debate-me-bro circuit. From his teenage years, he cultivated a career out of stoking resentments on college campuses, styling himself as the plucky underdog who dared to spar with the liberal elite. He was, as Donald Trump eulogised him, “legendary.” But the legend was built on a steady diet of vitriol, including but not limited to racist dog whistles, misogynistic tirades, anti-queer invective, and conspiracies about migrants, Muslims, and vaccines. The assassination has spurred a peculiar spectacle of watching the internet wrestle with the problem of whether one ought to feel empathy for a man who disdained the very idea of empathy. As Kirk himself once said, “I can’t stand the word empathy. I think it’s a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage”.

Perhaps nothing encapsulates Kirk’s worldview more than his take on mass shootings. He spent his career insisting that gun deaths were a necessary price of liberty. “It’s worth it,” he declared in 2023 after yet another school massacre, “to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”. The irony of course, is so blunt it hardly needs stating, and to call it poetic justice would be too generous. It is simply the logic of his own argument carried to its conclusion.

A career in vitriol

Kirk’s genius, if you can call it that, was in knowing that cruelty makes better content than civility and that sense of disdain ran through his all his work.

He derided affirmative action by claiming Black leaders “stole a white person’s spot.” He suggested Black pilots might not be qualified, described Black women in customer service as “moronic,” and recycled every tired trope about absent Black fathers and criminality. He compared Black Lives Matter to malevolent forces, called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and the Civil Rights Movement a “huge mistake.” He trafficked in the great replacement theory, warning that migrants would “eliminate” white Americans and that Haitians were “infested with demonic voodoo”.

For women, his message was just as cruel: stay home, remain fertile, and forget careers. College, he recently told a fourteen-year-old girl, was worthwhile only as a means to snag a husband. Birth control, he claimed, made women “angry and bitter.” On an episode of Jubilee, he once implied that he would force his 10-year-old daughter to carry a pregnancy to term if she was raped.

Charlie Kirk appears at a Utah Valley University speaking event in Orem, Utah, U.S. September 10, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
REUTERS

To queer folk, he offered only contempt, branding them “groomers,” celebrating Supreme Court rulings that legalised discrimination, and calling for “Nuremberg-style trials” for doctors providing gender-affirming care. He also famously cited Levitucus: 18 from the Bible, implying the gay community should be, “stoned to death”.

For Palestinians, his sympathy was simply nonexistent, because Palestine itself “does not exist”. According to him, the thousands upon thousands of children dead was apparently a fault of their own making, just as Japan had brought atomic devastation upon itself.

The catalogue of ugliness is long, but the themes of delegitimisation, dehumanisation, and division were consistent. Rather than simply disagreeing with people or their beliefs, Kirk periodically marked them as suspect by their race, gender, faith, and sexuality.  The list could go on, but the cumulative effect was clear that Kirk specialised in stripping others of their sense of self, and what he sold to his loyalists was the permission to feel that cruelty was righteous.

The fascist boomerang

The American right has long dabbled in fascist aesthetics, with the cult of the leader and mythic nationalism. Kirk was an eager apprentice in this tradition, blending Trumpian bluster with an evangelical zeal. He embraced the Seven Mountains Mandate, envisioning Christian dominion over every sphere of life. The deeper irony is that Kirk was undone not just by one bullet, but by the political culture he helped fertilise. He thrived on talk of enemies, traitors, grooming, invasion, decline and replacement. This is what happens when a culture soaks itself in the language of violence. These are the tools of fascism.

But violence is never loyal. What fascism never admits is that the tools of terror it hones can be turned back upon its wielders, and the gun that Kirk defended as liberty’s price was, in the end, pointed at him. The United States has been edging toward this kind of collapse for years, with Trump nearly shot in Butler, Steve Scalise wounded at baseball practice, and Paul Pelosi bludgeoned in his own home.

Charlie Kirk speaks while wearing a shirt with a picture taken during Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempted assassination on Day 3 of the Republican National Convention (RNC), at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 17, 2024
| Photo Credit:
REUTERS

What comes next may be even darker. Trump has already dubbed Kirk “a great warrior.” The right has a talent for transmuting its fallen into martyrs, with each one proof of the left’s perfidy and fuel for the bonfire of grievance. The danger is not only that Kirk’s legacy will be laundered in death, but that his assassination will be used to justify even harsher crackdowns, and potentially even more authoritarian muscle in the name of security. And the irony of this happening on the eve of an anniversary that once furnished the pretext for wars in West Asia and the deaths of millions, is not lost.

This is the fascist boomerang at full spin. The violence you normalise becomes the violence you suffer, and then the violence you suffer becomes the violence you justify. Kirk did not just live by the sword, rather built an entire brand around sharpening it. Now the same blade will likely be wielded by others, in his name.

Manufactured empathy

And now comes the awkward reckoning. In the wake of his death, the air is thick with calls for empathy. Politicians who eagerly shared his podium now urge decency, restraint and a pause in the partisan wars. The liberal reflex is to insist that “every human life is sacred,” and that empathy must be extended universally, even toward those who never reciprocated it. But what does empathy mean when the man in question not only denied it but declared it toxic? Is sorrow for Kirk a moral obligation, or merely the performance of one?

The truth is that empathy, like compassion, has limits. It flows more easily to those who nurtured it in life. When someone devotes their life to compassion, we mourn. When someone devotes their life to hatred, the well of sorrow runs dry. This of course does not mean cheering the bullet that killed him. It means recognising that not every death demands the same response. To decline to manufacture empathy for a man who abhorred is not apathy, but coherence.

Should Kirk have been assassinated? No. Should we mourn him? Not necessarily. The more urgent mourning is reserved for his victims — the trans kids driven to despair by his rhetoric, the Black people he belittled, the migrants he caricatured as animals, the women demeaned, and the Palestinians whose deaths he shrugged off. They deserve empathy. Kirk, who sneered at the very word, is harder to mourn without feeling complicit in hypocrisy.

So how should one respond? Perhaps the clearest path is to divorce empathy for Kirk from empathy for the world that produced him. It is possible to feel sorrow for his family without sanctifying his life’s work. It is possible to lament the climate of violence without pretending its latest victim was innocent of creating it.

Empathy is not unconditional. It is conditional on how we live, what we give, and whom we harm. Charlie Kirk lived without it. He leaves the world no poorer for its absence.