Charlie Kirk was not a hero. He was little more than a dimebag demagogue who thought of nobody other than himself. He was a vile and meretricious purveyor of lies, conspiracy theories, Christian nationalism, bigotry, and white supremacy. He was an unremarkable mouthbreather who was about as intellectual as a nocturnal loris staying motionless in the trees to evade predators. Should he have been assassinated? Absolutely not. On the other hand, the world is a lot better without him. Much like Rush Limbaugh before him, there will come a time not long from now in which nobody will evoke his name.
To all the right-wing recidivist basement dwellers with prognathous jaws who will call my position here “disrespectful” and who spent much of last night hitting me with nine death threats on social media (“I will find out where you live and end you” read one such unsolicited DM sent to me), I feel compelled to remind you hopelessly feckless fuckheads that it was Charlie Kirk who, shortly after Paul Pelosi was attacked, spread baseless conspiracy theories that Pelosi was involved with a sex worker and who called for some “amazing patriot” to bail out Pelosi’s attacker. Thus, any sentiments I have to tender here are clearly mild by comparison.
Because Charlie Kirk was not a hero. He was a disgusting blot on the political landscape. And instead of responding to his assassination with peace, grace, and reflection, the alt-right chowderheads have instead brayed for leftist blood to flow in the streets. Even towards people like me who oppose violence and who have never fired a gun in their lives.
Charlie Kirk was a useless, baleful, and now quite dead alt-right gasbag who adopted the loris’s lazy and facile temperament as he publicly inveighed against trans people not long before his last ugly gasps. Yesterday, he permanently collapsed on a Utah Valley University stage, shot in the carotid by an expert marksman perched two hundred yards away who remained at large as of this morning.
And yet people, even those who claim to be on the left, have falsely declared that Charie Kirk was a hero, when he was certainly not. Noted antitrans and antithomeless neoliberal grifter Gavin Newsom performed an odious and obsequious rim job in the immediate wake that seemed unthinkable for any Democratic lawmaker only last year. And because Newsom’s agile felching of a prominent and extremely malevolent bigot has inexplicably become a form of “reaching across the aisle” for the dopiest of registered Democrats to celebrate, it has become necessary for me to reiterate quite strongly that Charlie Kirk was not a hero.
Charlie Kirk was not a hero because he died doing exactly what he loved: spreading hate, fear, and intolerance to a dull and unthinking audience of highly gullible hayseeds looking to blame and detest marginalized people because this hateful horde lacks the ability to take control or responsibility of their miserable lives.
In the end, Charlie Kirk’s hatemongering survival strategy didn’t work out for him or the wife and two children that he leaves behind. But don’t worry too much about his widow Erika Frantze. I am certain that the next guy she hitches her saddle with will be a far more “loving husband and father” than Charlie Kirk ever could be. After all, Kirk once asserted that women over thirty “aren’t attractive in the dating pool.” Kirk himself was not immune from the consequences of his hideous rhetoric. His stunningly sociopathic statement from April 3, 2025 had him declaring that “some gun deaths” were necessary to protect “God-given rights.” This is merely another case of Charlie Kirk inviting the myth of American exceptionalism to rear its ugly head.
Charlie Kirk’s hideous political positions made him the very embodiment of MAGA: a depraved and dangerous cult of selfish and illiterate sociopaths who have singlehandledly pooled their hateful resources to abdicate their humanity and deracinate the remaining dregs of American democracy. And none of this made him a hero. To declare Charlie Kirk a “hero” is akin to suggesting that Hitler’s lust for eugenics and genocide could be overlooked because he was fond of dogs. Heroes are the people who selflessly rush to the aid of others. A hero offers the shirt off his back to a starving man who has just lost everything and who does not seek public validation for being a decent human being. Heroes recognize others who are struggling and who are in need of dignity and they usually stop everything to ensure that the bedraggled have a little fortitude to fight another day.
Charlie Kirk never did anything like that. He was constitutionally incapable of kindness and he went out of his way to oppose basic human decency. On an October 22, 2022 episode of his show, he claimed that empathy was a “made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.” Never mind that the word “empathy” has its roots in the German word Einfühlung, which originated from the Greek word empatheia. It was an American psychologist by the name of Edward Bradford Titchener who first used “empathy” in English in 1908. (The term “New Age,” as we know it today, was popularized in the 1970s, although a case can be made that “New Age” originated with the journal edited by Alfred Orange and Holbrook Jackson. All this had nothing to do with Titchener.)
Kirk had neither intelligence nor compassion. He described universities hoping to bolster both noble qualities in young minds as “islands of totalitarianism.” He spread lies on social media about COVID vaccines and human trafficking, often inventing statistics from his diseased and ornery-fueled mind. He regularly demeaned and disrespected Black people, whether they were pilots with unimpeachable flight records or noble figures in history books. He falsely claimed that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and he went out of his way to bus more than 80 “patriots” into DC the day before the January 6, 2021 insurrection. So this made Charlie Kirk a seditionist and an antidemocratic traitor on top of his prolific track record as a detestable hate merchant.
All this is is the “work” that Gavin Newsom wants us to “continue” with. This is the “great man” being propped up by bloodthirsty conservatives all across the nation. Yes, political violence is abhorrent and Charlie Kirk should not have been assassinated. Yes, Charlie Kirk was protected by the First Amendment and had every right to blather these repugnant and inhuman sentiments to every atavistic and inbred rube crawling with venomous voracity from their squalid caves. But to lionize or to martyr Charlie Kirk in any way is to operate on the same obscene level as the sniper.
For Charlie Kirk was not a hero. He was a scumbag unfit to stand with the rest of us. He used every spare moment to summon the worst qualities out of people. He should not have been killed. On the other hand, I’ll sleep much better knowing that Kirk is no longer around to spew his ugly enmity to permanently empty vessels. It is indeed possible for two things to be true at once.