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!”

  1. Keep hiding behind your mental illness. That’s the safe space for you. You would never say it in person….at any time….to any of us. You are a coward and that is all you will ever be.

  3. These comments are … wild.

    You’re clearly celebrating his lack of existence, not his assassination, and there’s a gargantuan difference.

    Humanity’s actually cooked.

  5. Yay he is dead, I don’t know who he is but he sounds like a bad person who should be dead!

    Anyway, trump is using his death as a ‘warning’ to all who ever want trump dead and say it. It’s like a test dummy, trump knows he’s going the way of charlie kirk and the ‘backlash’ of kirk’s death (government making people loose jobs, tightening of censorship in media etc) is just his excuse to implement preventive measures that will shut americans up.

    Honest to goodness he deserved to die: terrible politicians have grown fat on the evil they do behind the safety of civility, they need to fear the people’s wrath once more and know that being a politician doesn’t mean you can’t be killed for the evils you do.

  8. I think you are totaly right – but for the negative comments i have a retorical question: why don’t you care about the genocide happening in Gazah? Why aren’t you standing strong for women and men that die every single day in the genocide? They have kids too!

  10. Because he held beliefs different from yours.
    Because you don’t know, or refuse to investigate (are you a journalist?) the totality of Charlie Kirk’s views.
    Because you have taken what Charlie Kirk has said, out of context, or at least documented only part of the story.
    Because you have such hatred in your heart.
    You write this article.
    What you don’t realize, is that the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk has sparked the spirit of the Lord to enter into the hearts of millions.
    A light is growing. One that is not bigoted, or hateful. It’s not racist, transphobic, or any of the other terms people love to throw at Conservatives.
    It’s a light that lets us see and discern right from wrong, good from evil, and health from sickness.
    You see, many of “Us”, whom you slap with labels because we don’t espouse your choices, see the trans community as lost souls, and we will continue to pray for your mental, physical, and spiritual well being; ESPECIALLY the children.

    Sincerely,
    Al Pan

    • Why are you focused on peoples’ sexual body parts and who they love?

      Why do you do that in the name of Christ?

    • You can see people as lost souls without attempting to legislate their ability to live freely and make their own choices. That’s the problem; evangelicals have decided they no longer want to live in a free and just country with equal protection under the law for all its citizens. They want to seize the reigns of power and convert our country into a theocracy, where all are forced to live within the narrow confines of a radically conservative interpretation of Christianity.

      What exactly would be the context where these would be ok?

      “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

      Or maybe

      “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”

      Please, do explain how the context of the comments make these non-racist, non-misogynist, non-bigoted things to say?

      When Christians get back to spending 1/10th as much time doing the things Christ commands hundreds of times in the bible (spoiler: it’s not subjugating women or killing gay people), the rest of us will start contemplating the idea of taking your “convictions” seriously. Until then, I’m going to call them what are – a flimsy justification to impose your preferred social order. One where you’re firmly on top.

  12. You are totally immature… at 47. Sad. What if it was your child. And then you backpedde. What comes around goes around…… let’s see..

    • What happened to Charlie was terrible, but I will NOT bullied or harrassed into worshipping the man like he is some god. I feel like you have to walk on eggshells in this country.

    • What happened to Charlie was terrible, but I will NOT be bullied or harrassed into worshipping the man like he is some god. I feel like you have to walk on eggshells in this country. You can easily lose your life and job if you say one bad thing about Trump and Kirk. Funny no one shed a tear when 4 democrats were shot in their homes. Why is this podcaster more important than the poor young school shooting victims that perished on the same day?

    • Tell me your full name, Gary, and I’ll be sure to set a google alert for your obituary so that I can celebrate when you die. I’ll probably be the only one who notices.

    • It is the current GOP, MAGAmerica and evangelicals who are immature—hyperfocused and obsessed with OPP. Other Peoples’ Privates.

      The racist, felonious child rapist in chief is the karmic deliverance.

    • If it was his child actively propagandizing and funding racism, misogyny, bigotry, and hatred of the LGBTQ+ community to the youth of America, hopefully he would have the good grace to be deeply ashamed.

      I assume you experience the same empathy for the death of every terrorist, soldier of any national affiliation, murderer, pedophile, etc? As they are all also someone’s child, and thus deserving of equal empathy and mourning even if their stated goal was your eradication or subjugation.

      What’s immature is attempting to deny someone the right to be relieved that someone is dead who posed an active threat to their ability to live freely, peacefully, or potentially to live at all.

      As a woman, I’m not sorry that Charlie Kirk is no longer telling young women that their sole value is as breeders, that they are incompetent and ineffectual, that they don’t deserve equal rights, equal protection under the law, and sovereignty over their own bodies.

      If you had offered me potential solutions to the situation, I would never have chosen death; I would have chosen a change of heart. But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy there’s one less man trying to usher in Gilead, however it came to pass.

  18. I find it comforting that charlie thought he was a christian, because that means he believed in hell. Which is exactly where he is burning if it exists.

    • No, what is disgusting is thinking about other people’s private parts and using the bully pulpit weekly, tithing hate.

  20. Between his racism, his attacks on the LGBTQI+ community, and denying climate change… I certainly am happy he is dead. I didn’t know about him before a few hours ago and read about what he thought and who he was – an absolute piece of fucking white trash (and I am as white as it gets). So yeah, he was the sort of people who infects societies and there’s never a positive outcome from their actions. He is better dead, and those like him are the reason why abortion is a necessity. Rot in hell, you fucking ass.

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