Charlie Kirk is Dead. Here’s Why I’m Celebrating!

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Most Mondays, Assigned Media runs the news aggregation column Leading Off. With the news dominated by the death of far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk, and amidst widespread fears of violence from the far right, we chose to feature this opinion column by our founder Evan Urquhart this week instead.

We’re not supposed to say it. It is terribly taboo. According to Reuters, at least 15 people have already been fired for saying it (reporting by NBC suggests it may be many more). And yet, and yet… there’s a stirring deep inside, a wild joy lifting our hearts, an impish gleam in our eyes as we say Charlie Kirk is dead.

How could anyone be sorry? How could anyone be mournful? A man who  kept a watchlist of professors whose views he disagreed with (one that spurred endless death and rape threats), is now dead! A man who supported the January 6 rioters that chanted calls to hang our vice president is dead! A man who called for his supporters to bail out the attempted murderer of one of his political rivals is dead! A vicious and committed racist is dead!

He claimed a passage in Leviticus said gay men should be stoned to death, calling this “God’s perfect law”*—and now he’s dead! In part, I am celebrating the fact that, however much evil remains in the world, at least nothing can ever bring him back. But mostly, I’m celebrating because he’s dead and I am still alive.

In normal times, I’d work to keep my schadenfreude at the death of a terrible person under wraps. The man has children, after all, and it would be a terrible thing if they were to learn how joyful their father’s death has made the people who he hurt. That’s why, in the first 24 hours after Kirk’s death, I kept decorum. I refrained from saying anything celebratory or even negative about this awful man. (Most people on the left did the same.)

These, however, are not normal times. These are times when the right to say something the far right finds offensive is under threat. It’s  under threat by the US government and by individuals in the far right who seek revenge. If they’re compiling a list of everyone who refuses to fellate the memory of the horrid, evil, violent, moon-faced turd then it’s a list I’d rather be on than off.

I am nothing if not a free speech absolutist. Freedom of expression is central to the ability of trans people to live our lives openly, freely, and with pride. And that’s why, however tasteless, however much I’d hesitate to say it in any normal circumstance, today I am determined to join the celebrants with my full chest.

All that said, let’s take a minute to be clear: There was no hotbed of violent transgender leftism that resulted in Kirk’s murder. Our community has always been peaceful, and only recently even begun considering the need for self-defense. Even if the young, white, male scion of a deep red state had a transgender partner (a claim that remains unverified by any reliable news organization), that is as irrelevant as the fact that his parents were Republicans. Attempts to blame the trans community on this pretext would be funny—if they weren’t putting us all in deadly peril.

For my part, I certainly never wanted Kirk to be shot—honestly I didn’t think about him much, except as one of a cadre of interchangeable dead-eyed far right toads. You know, the ones embracing Nazi analogies for the modern day US that casts them as the Nazis and trans people (and Jewish people, and immigrants, and Black Americans) as the Jews?

“This is our Reichstag fire!” they cried, as Kirk lay dead. Yes, you fucking freaks, we know.

I do not want and have never wanted any of them dead. I want them to chill out and be normal for the first time in their lives.

I know that some people who would usually be on my side may look askance at my strong words. But I have concluded that strong words are the only ones suited for this day. In the first months of Trump’s second term we’ve had far too many people tempering their tones, hoping to avoid the ire of the victorious far right. Each on our own we’ve been keeping our heads down, afraid to say the wrong thing, hoping things get better or, if they get worse (which we pretend not to expect), that we’ll be able to survive. As we cower we are losing the core freedoms that we learned in school made ours a country worthy of our love. We must be brave. We must not shrink.

That’s why I’ve chosen to depart from my normally measured tone. I have always believed in an American right to free speech which includes a right to be offensive. It’s not a right I’ve often exercised myself, but it is one I value highly, nonetheless. Today, this hallowed right is teetering on the brink. I think I’ll use it while I still have it, thank you very much.

Fuck Charlie Kirk, and fuck you, if you don’t like me saying fuck him. I’m not afraid to say I’m glad I’m still alive at 47 while he is dead at 31.

While I still can, I feel like celebrating.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that Leviticus calls for gay men to be stoned to death. While it calls for gay men to be executed, the Bible does not specify a method. Kirk was misquoting the Bible when he stated his beliefs about gay men.

Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.

273 thoughts on “Charlie Kirk is Dead. Here’s Why I’m Celebrating!”

  4. It feels like every news paper, government official, place of work, loved a nazi who wanted to kill people and hated any queer person and wanted to genocide them every day

  5. Thank you!!!!

    Why should I be sad at someone dying who actively committed to making my gender subservient, ie subhuman.

  8. yes, its absolutely a mark of shame for anyone to have kind words for Charles Kirk. Its outrageous that companies fire anyone for that. Fire people for being a nazi, not for opposing them. A nazi is the worst thing a person can be, and disqualifies you from any job where you might have any power over other people. We need the union movement

  9. A husband and father of two young children is assassinated because he rigorously upheld the reality of biology and the trans community celebrates . No empathy. No morals. No humanity. Pure evil.

    • A hateful demagogue who stoked violence against his political opponents and vulnerable groups and profited from the division he caused has faced the direct, predictable, and inevitable result of the culture of fear, hatred, and paranoia he worked so tirelessly to create.

      He said that anybody who disagreed with him was a radical left terrorist who wanted to put conservatives in gulags, spread "white genocide" shit, said that gays should be stoned, said the civil rights act was a mistake, said that "black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously, you have to go steal a white person’s slot" said that transgender people should be beaten up "like the 50s and 60s" said that black and brown people are inherently violent, and inherently criminal, also himself mocked George Floyd after his murder, said that women should be subserviant to their husbands said that you should be able to shoot and use whips against foreigners that are coming into the country.

      So kindly go away, and take your persecution complex with you.

    • You think he got smoked by a rival biologist? Hot take, Joe!

      Don’t worry though, I can tell by the way you casually refer to a whole community of people as "pure evil" that you’re here to carry on his legacy of bad-faith "debate." As long as there are people out there promoting hate and division for their own gain, his legacy is safe.

    • Nutting raw in a woman’s pussy is a pretty low bar to clear. Considering the content of his character, his kids are probably better of without him.

      • Much as I’m not sad that a man who caused so much evil is dead, I genuinely cannot say anything so cruel as that those two kids are better off without their father. I feel terrible for them both, because not only will they have to reckon with their father’s legacy of hatred, but they’ll have to do it without him there to give them any of the normal fatherly affection or comforts. If Charlie hadn’t helped build a hateful, violent, might-makes-rights society obsessed with the gun as the implement of "freedom", he might still be here for those poor kids, but he hated the children of strangers more than he loved his own children, and that kind of needless, heedless aggression stokes more violence in response. I don’t know if that man knew how to love anything, but society should have stopped him before he made himself so odious, and our society failed his kids by letting their father become such a monster. They deserved the empathy that their father mocked.

  11. [“This is our Reichstag fire!” they cried, as Kirk lay dead. Yes, you fucking freaks, we know.]

    fucking KILLER. what a good piece

  13. I find the hypocrisy of the “we shouldn’t celebrate anyone’s death” crowd to be absolutely laughable in this moment. To all of those who say Evan has ‘no right’ to write this, you can GTFOH and go hang out with your brownshirt brethren. I abhor political violence, but this gaslighting that “the left” are the ones perpetrating is makes me want to punch a n@zi. Kindly fuck right off with your BS. I stand with Evan, and the full trans community, with my whole cis, white woman chest when I say Trans Rights Are Human Rights and we will not rest or be quiet until the hate and violence for the community stops.

    • Exactly, these same "violence is never right" people supported the January 6th looters when they beat up cops. MAGA preaching peace is like Mao Zedong preaching sharecropping.

  16. I wrote on Bluesky that we should not celebrate the fact that Kirk was murdered, because violence breeds violence, etc. I added, "but there’s nothing wrong with celebrating the fact that *Kirk is dead."

    Bluesky wrote me a sternly-worded email saying they had deleted my post and telling me to watch it in the future.

    • "It’s terrible he was murdered, but it’s not terrible he’s dead" is exactly what I have been so desperately trying to put to words. I didn’t want him murdered, I don’t like living in a society where hate spews unchecked from a man’s mouth until a bullet tears him from this mortal coil. Even so, he’s quiet now. His lies and bile are over for good, and I get to go on with them in the past. That is hopeful, peaceful, relieving.

      • Sadly, others have picked up the torch. His lies and bile may no longer come from him. But did you hear his vile, disturbed and crazed wife, Erika? "You have NO IDEA what you’ve unleashed!" That’s a threat. And evil never dies.

    • Discussion policing has gotten out of hand on basically all of big social media. I predict it will create a resurgence of small grassroots websites like this one. The web was very decentralized in the early 2000s and I for one loved the web before Reddit and Twitter. The era of personal websites was nothing like today’s web. It would be great if we returned to that.

  17. We need to push back hard. Anyone saying we shouldn’t celebrate the Death of an Enemy of the country needs to take stock of their reaction when Bin Laden was killed. By the way Bin Laden was a Father of more children then Kirk. Like being a father is an excuse for hate and violence. Kirk was a fascist. He was a leader of the American Taliban. He made it clear he was fine with sacrificing children for his own empowerment. The United States is Anti-Fascist, at least we were in the last great war. All those who say we don’t want a war, need to play the tape of J6, what we want is inconsequential, where WE ARE is what matters now.

  19. It’s not cool to celebrate someone’s death when it’s my favourite fascist and not a 16 year old trans girl again

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