I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something that happened in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. Two people I knew online, one a good friend of mine and the other just an acquaintance through that friend, had a falling out over the whole thing. And honestly, I wasn’t surprised. Not because I wanted it to happen or because I enjoy drama—far from it. But I could just sense from the way they interacted that they were approaching things from two very different angles, and that eventually, a breaking point would come. Charlie Kirk’s death just happened to be the thing that pushed them apart.
What’s been on my mind, though, isn’t really their falling out. It’s what happened after. I had commented on both of their videos about Kirk, saying what I truly believe: that what happened to him was awful, but mocking or celebrating his death only ends up hurting victims of gun violence more. It doesn’t matter if you liked the man or despised him, if you thought his politics were toxic or dangerous—turning his death into a spectacle of mockery doesn’t just target him, it sends a message to every victim of gun violence that their suffering is fair game for jokes. That’s not a culture I want to feed into.
So when I found out that my comments ended up in a “stupid comments” channel on the acquaintance’s Discord server, I’ll be honest—it stung. People crapped all over my words, twisted them, and dismissed them. And the irony of it all? This is the same person who goes on about how they’re “empathetic” and “compassionate,” how they don’t want to glorify violence, how they’re not “extreme.” But if ridiculing someone’s call for compassion and seriousness toward victims of gun violence isn’t extreme, then what is? To me, that’s a contradiction they don’t want to face.
And here’s the other thing. So many people are getting completely hung up on who Charlie Kirk was. And sure—that matters. Of course it matters to understand the kind of influence he had, what he represented, the kind of damage he did in life. I’m not denying that. But when that’s all we focus on, we lose sight of the bigger, more important thing: that he was a victim of gun violence. That someone walked into a space with a gun and took his life. That’s what matters most. And yet it feels like nobody—liberals, leftists, conservatives—wants to talk about that part. Everyone just wants to run their own agendas off of his death.
The truth is, Charlie Kirk isn’t alive anymore. He’s not going to spread new ideas. Yes, his backlog of content will live on, and people who admired him will continue to circulate it, but that’s all the past. There will be no fresh takes, no new directions, no further evolution of his political influence. That chapter is closed. And while I’m not saying we should forget about him or the harm his words caused, I am saying that we need to recognize we can’t get stuck only looking backward. We have to keep moving forward, thinking about the present and the future, and figuring out how to build a healthier culture around violence and around politics in general.
That’s what bothers me most. We’ve lost the ability to separate our politics from the basic human tragedy of violence. We’ve lost the ability to talk about compassion without being called naïve or weak. And I guess I thought the people I engaged with, the ones who claim to care, might’ve understood that. But when I see my words thrown into a “stupid comments” channel, it just tells me how far we’ve fallen.