Lynx Friedman, Staff Writer
DISCLAIMER: The author has expressed that they are not celebrating a man’s death, despite disagreeing with his beliefs. The views delivered in this article are also not necessarily representative of that of the Trinity Times.
PEOPLE CARE more about dead things, and Charlie Kirk is not an exceptional case.
As I am certain that everyone is aware, Kirk died on September 10th, 2025 at the age of 31 in Utah. His final words were ironically about mass shootings.
As a result of his death, there was a sudden uprising of care for him. For instance, in an interview conducted with Ilhan Omar, the U.S. representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, she says that his death will end up in the “dustbin of history.” The implication at hand is that his death is forgettable and should be because he is just another dead terrible person. While I am neither agreeing or disagreeing with her statement, it is nonetheless important to note that even non-partisan news channels such as CNN seemed repulsed by her forwardness. This is evidence that his post-mortem lack of divisiveness is superficially and problematically beneficial to the far right. However, this is also an indication that this death could have been anyone’s and would have warranted the same response.
After all, Kirk spent his career as a figurehead of the MAGA movement and spokesperson for the pro-life, anti-intellectualism, anti-trans movement, among other things. Kirk’s stances significantly altered voting within younger audiences—predominantly cis-heteronormative men. He coalesced an audience within which critical thinking was hailed as simply the acceptance of anything he said. The inextricable attachment of his words to increased villainization of the left, marginalized communities, and women’s rights is indispensably not a result of the critical thinking faculties of his audience, but the silencing of those faculties. As such, he created an unsubstantiated set of truths by which he debated and targeted unassuming critical left-wing youth, whose openness to accepting truths on dialectical levels rendered them a perfect target to bully and establish in others his cultish truth. Inevitably, it is impossible to debate completely different things: the truth vs. whether it can exist at all.
He was by no means made for perfect elegy content, and the truth of that is one which still is haunting the narratives of his death. In fact, all the divisiveness that is no longer being projected on the man himself is being projected onto other faculties including, for instance, the motive of his murder. After the shooting which killed him, conspiracies circulated about his murderer, reinforcing partisan narratives, some claiming the shooter to be a far-right, white supremacist, “Groyper,” while others assumed that the shooting was related to trans rights. The actual motives of the shooter are not important to me, as they are not important to anyone speculating about the shooting.
However, the more pressing division is being used to both silence media fronts which tell a narrative in which Kirk’s death is hailed to be used schematically against the left, to bolster other narratives in which Kirk is being used as a pawn. In fact, the sheer onslaught of media regarding Kirk’s death included the notable “indefinite suspension” of comedian Jimmy Kimmel after he informed the left that Kirk’s death should not be celebrated, as it will be used to target the left, and the not-too-unrelated memorial service at which Trump hailed Kirk a “martyr.” The silencing and bolstering of these two opposing voices is only fascism under the guise of memorial sympathy. However, while Kirk’s death has been used to benefit the right on a practical level, it has also placed a certain tension and pressure on the GOP and its affiliates to behave cohesively, which they have largely been unable to do.
This may be a result of the logic which benefited Kirk. His anti-intellectual stance consciously or subconsciously belittled the significance of allowing dialectical facts. By that, I mean that he did not allow for actual conscious debate. Thus, his death marks the end of a certain certainty, and leaves thousands without a constant re-iteration and re-establishment of their prescribed understanding of the world and forcing them to scramble to find a new truth pitting the right against itself in a war for Kirk’s audience.
Thus, his death is dangerous for the right. Up until this point, characters, such as Kirk himself, enforced a reality. In the lack of this enforcement, the right is divided about the response to Charlie Kirk’s death, with some hailing him as a “martyr“ and others, including Tucker Carlson, speaking out against the attack on “free speech” as it corresponded with Kimmel’s suspension. This division over Kirk’s death has only furthered the tension already manifesting on the right, particularly regarding Trump’s grossly positive relationship to Israel and Epstein. Candace Owens, a right-wing commentator who has previously worked for the Daily Wire—a network headed by Ben Shapiro—has targeted Trump for his Israeli support, and now alleges Israeli involvement in the shooting which killed Kirk. This is an accusation for which there is no proof. The divisions at hand were already present prior to Kirk’s death. However, his death threatens this tension and pressures it to unfold further, and possibly divide the entire party.
This danger for the right does not negate the danger for the left in ways which are clear: a person who has lost a source of truth is an angry person who will look to the clearest opposer to resolve that dissonance. Evidently, however, even narratives pinning the left to this murder are not cohesive. Prosecutors claimed that “Robinson [the shooter] accused Kirk of spreading hate” in a recent conversation with his parents, limiting his shooting to a seeming individual decision based on Robinson’s sudden left-wing “indoctrination” and his relationship with a trans woman—furthering an anti-left, anti-trans movement. Others claim this to be an internal setup, as a result of alleged hand signaling on the part of his bodyguard. Others, namely Trump, are martyring him signaling a sacrifice of sorts. The death itself is not up for debate, but the meaning of it is.
Though tensions like this exist on the left, it is my opinion that the left is able to hold several truths at once, for instance, Kirk being terrible and his death being as bad. The right however, has been trained to follow a figurehead and many of his ill-founded opinions quite thoughtlessly, as they have very literally been turned to oppose any understanding of critical analysis the left holds to be true. Thus, as they portray a particular propagation of the left and its response to his death, they are also ruining their own reputability as an, at the very least, cohesive front.
While I am particularly critical of the right (as I should be), I do not want to celebrate the centrist, even leftist, collective sympathy for this man. His death was not warranted, but it does not mean that we should participate in increasing its resonance. I believe the response to his death on both sides is completely unrelated to him as a person, and more so related to the concept of death itself. If any conservative figurehead had died in this public way, it would have rallied the same response. Charlie Kirk is not special in any way, only his death was exceptional.
