The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Political Violence Doesn't Stay Contained. It Cascades - and Democracy Pays the Price

Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah yesterday afternoon.

The news started coming in as I was settling down for the evening, and it instantly felt surreal. Even typing this feels somewhat surreal. The BBC update that pinged on my phone felt like yet another line in an increasingly dystopian novel.

He was shot at a political event, in public and died from his injuries.

Something to say upfront - I thought Charlie Kirk’s views were abhorrent. His politics, his views on LGBTQ people, on women, on migrants - all of them were diametrically opposed and anathema to what I believe in. He is on record having stated that it was “worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so we can have the Second Amendment to protect our God-given rights.”

Those were his own words. Cold. Transactional. Comfortable with a level of human sacrifice that many, if not most, people would find completely unbearable.

His own life was claimed yesterday by the logic and argument he himself defended. I feel a deep temptation to call that ironic, or even karmic, but I just can’t bring myself to do that, because whatever else he was, Kirk was also a husband, father, son. His family lost him yesterday. His friends are left grieving. A political position, no matter how incredibly toxic, does not strip someone of their humanity. He didn’t deserve to be shot to death while voicing his views, no matter how abhorrent. No one does.

The murder of Charlie Kirk on its own was already shocking, but the aftermath of it is what has truly chilled me right down to my core. Within hours of his death, right-wing influencers started falling over each other to turn grief into a weapon.

Libs of TikTok screamed “THIS IS WAR” in all caps. Musk declared that “The choice is fight or die”. Joey Mannarino posted that the Democratic Party needs to be designated as a “domestic terror organisations”. People were throwing around the term “civil war” as though it was a desperate need, an advertisement of what must come next.

And this is exactly what political violence does - it accelerates. A man’s death doesn’t become a moment for pause, introspection or reflection, but proof of a siege. Incontrovertible evidence, according to some commentators, that the enemy really is out to kill you. Justification for whatever escalation comes next.

And then there are the reactions on the other side of this. The comments, memes and people who are openly gloating. Replies where people are celebrating his death, mocking his family, laughing openly about how it was “finally his turn.”

I understand hating his politics, honestly, I do. I found them to be incredibly dangerous. But celebrating his murder is grotesque. It’s the moment where you hand over your own humanity at the altar of political violence, and it is completely unacceptable.

The acceleration doesn’t sit or end with just one side or the other - it cascades. Radicalisation on either side of a disagreement almost always breeds radicalisation of the opposing force. Every new outrage or incident becomes both justification and fuel, while every violent act is answered with a further escalation in the inflamed rhetoric we’re seeing, which in turn further escalates and increases the chances of yet another violent act, which in turn fuels more rhetoric… it’s a feedback loop that will only spin faster and faster until it all explodes.

It’s worth saying as well that I come at this subject from a particular perspective. I’m not American. I don’t live in a country with 400 million guns. I don’t spend my days writing about the second amendment. I’m a guy with a MacBook who writes about politics in the United Kingdom.

But watching another democracy become so completely desensitised to political violence is a terrible thing to behold. Because if that sort of normalisation can happen in the United States, it can happen here.

We have had our own system shocking tragedies in the UK. Jo Cox was brutally murdered on the street in 2016 and David Amess was stabbed to death at a constituency surgery in 2021. Both of these events felt seismic and shook the nation to its core.

But in the United States?

In June Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota legislator and her husband were gunned down in their home. John Hoffman and his wife were shot earlier that day by the same gunman. Now Charlie Kirk.

Political violence at this scale and frequency should stop every single person in the United States dead in their tracks. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead the loudest voices are saying “THIS IS WAR!”.

The rhetoric we’ve seen come out is particularly dangerous because the US is already so combustible - when someone with millions of followers says something like “fight or die” or names their political counterpart “demonic” it doesn’t just remain as text on a screen - it seeps into people’s brains. And because guns are absolutely everywhere in the US, it doesn’t take very much for that seepage to turn into something much, much more deadly.

This is what terrifies me, and also where it comes back to the UK.

We don’t live in a country with a massive gun culture, yes, but we’ve imported so much of the language, paranoia and tribalism which we see in the US.

Ten years ago, if someone were to stand up in Parliament or on Question Time and declare that their political counterparts were “traitors” or “enemies of the people, it would have sounded completely absurd.

Now?

We’ve reached the point where it feels worryingly normalised. Tabloid headlines have in years past thrown around those words with a worrying casualness. Commentators launch those words into discourse on a nearly daily basis and social media has taken the habit of demonisation and given it a shot of steroids.

And no, I’m not saying (or even implying) that the danger is that we end up with AR-15s on every street corner in Surrey - the risk is that the cultural permission slip to use the language of war, of enemies and of existential battles, becomes the default way in which we discuss politics. We don’t need guns for it to be deadly, Jo Cox and David Amess have proven that already, and yet the culture-war lexicon continues to seep in from across the Atlantic, because rage, fear and betrayal are easier to communicate than nuance or compromise.

There’s a huge problem when people like Lucy Connolly who pled guilty and was jailed for inciting racial hatred get reframed as saints and martyrs for movements. Political parties are platforming her as a “political prisoner” by figures who should absolutely know better, because it’s a direct attempt to launder hate speech into legitimacy, and that’s exactly how you build the climate where violence becomes inevitable and this is exactly how fringe extremism gets normalised and mainstreamed.

We don’t have the US’s arsenal of weapons, and for that I am eternally grateful, but we are actively importing the language of demonisation and the sense that opponents aren’t just wrong, they’re enemies. That alone is more than enough to do real harm.

This has been an incredibly hard post and I’ve wrestled with many points while writing it. I don’t like writing about violence, it makes me uneasy. But writing this post, more than anything has forced me to ask myself whether, in my own small way, I’ve contributed to this febrile environment we’re moving into. My writing is sharp and sometimes caustic, and I’ve always justified it to myself as punching up, by launching my verbal assaults at the powers that be.

But. If words matter - and I believe they do - then I can’t delude myself that mine, as neutral as I want to believe they are, are somehow weightless, and this sits very heavily with me.

None of us get to be bystanders on this topic - not in the US, not in the UK, because permission slips we hand out with our words - when we call opponents “enemies of the people”, when we teach hate preachers as martyrs, when we revel in the deaths of people who we oppose - those slips are eventually cashed in, and what we get is what we saw in Utah yesterday.

I won’t celebrate Kirk’s death - I despised his politics, but if democracy has any meaning left at all, it has to mean ballots, not bullets. Disagreements, not assassinations. If that line can’t be held - if that line starts to be forgotten - then we’re all making ourselves complicit in building the dystopia that was felt when the news of Kirk’s shooting first broke.