On September 10th, 2025, conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while hosting a Turning Point USA event in Utah. He was struck while answering a question from a crowd member on how many recent mass shooters were transgender, to which he replied, “Too many”. In his last words, he was seeking clarification on a follow-up question of how many Americans have been killed in mass shootings this year: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”. A moment later, his neck was pierced by a bullet for all the world to see. Chaos erupted after the brazen assassination, and after some time in critical condition at the hospital, he was pronounced dead.

On social media, what followed the announcement of Kirk’s shooting was a sight to behold. A manic frenzy of reactions arose across social media platforms like X and Facebook, with condemnations from some and celebrations from others. Everyone rushed to share their opinions on Kirk's assassination. Some also rushed to remove the opinion they just posted, sobering up after the initial rush of excitement and realizing that it could be very dangerous to discuss this tense situation online. 

At the time of this writing, it’s been a few days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, so the dust has settled a bit. The immediate reactions have all been posted. Now, a renewed debate over civility and political violence has taken center stage in American political discourse. Americans are split between whether or not Charlie Kirk deserved to die and whether politics should ever “devolve” into violence. 

Why all the calls for civility, for peaceful politics and endless debate? Has the history of American politics ever been civil? Was it civil during the Boston Tea Party, the Revolutionary War, or the Three-Fifths Compromise? Was it civil when Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner into unconsciousness on the Senate floor? Was the Civil War really a “civil” war? What about the lynching mobs during Jim Crow, the internment camps during World War 2? Those measures were political, but were they civil? It is baffling to call for civility when we already have such a profound history of civil unrest, marked by labor strikes, sit-ins, marches, and other similar actions, none of which can be considered civil, given that they are, well, acts of unrest. And what about recent history? Occupy Wall Street, the Baltimore Uprisings, the Unite the Right Rally, the George Floyd protests, CHAZ, etc. These events were not civil. 

Besides the fact that these specific events were not peaceful, what is the deeper reason as to why these events lacked the civility and decorum that liberals and conservatives are defending with their cries for peaceful politics? It’s because politics is enforced by violence. Let the anarchists remind us that the state, the apparatus that governs the modern nation, has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and coercion, backed by a military. We don’t live in a society where everyone voluntarily regulates themselves, nor do we live in a society where everyone's under mass mind control that would allow for social cohesion without the threat of violence and the use of coercion. Instead, behind every concrete political decision, behind every objective “stamp” that says “These are the state of affairs, politically speaking”, there is an army ready to enforce that decision, soldiers prepared to give their lives to maintain the authority of the state. Does this mean that there is no room for peaceful disagreement and civil debate? Does this mean that every single political decision has to come about after a death struggle between two incommensurable forces? No, it simply means that conversation and debate alone (in a word, peace) can never be the only determining factor in politics.  

Civil conversations are not the end-all, be-all of American politics, and neither is violence and death. Yet, when political violence does erupt, suddenly everyone treats politics like a nice, quiet tea party. This is such a bizarre dissociation from reality, and it comes with frustrating performances of tears, prayers, and finger-wagging, in a word, endless moralizing. I can only blame one culprit: bourgeois morality. The capitalist ruling class dominates and orders the moral sentiments of American society. This class lives quite comfortably; they offset their violence by performing it at a distance, or forcing the lower classes to fight it on the ruling class’s behalf. The lower classes have to fight in the street or on the battlefield; the ruling class has to fight behind office desks and drone screens. With this action at a distance, the ruling class forgets just how awfully violent the world can get. Out of this collective amnesia, bourgeois society opts for an illusory political world, one grounded in civil debate and decorum alone. Hence, the traumatic shock from the death of Charlie Kirk.

This ruling class likes to believe the time for political violence is long gone. Liberal democracy takes itself as the most advanced and rational form of governance - it truly views itself as the end of a long, barbaric march of History. However, liberals have no illusions about violence as it exists in everyday life, only that any acts of political violence in this system are apparent deviations from what is supposed to be a peaceful process. But violence isn’t a deviation from liberal democracy because politics and violence are intertwined, which is why even in the most peaceful system, there are bursts of violence. Any call for civility misunderstands the role of violence in politics. 

While Americans mourn the death of Charlie Kirk, the Nepalese are revolting. The government tried to enact a social media ban to thwart anti-corruption protests, leading to a violent uprising, where politicians are being beaten and parliament buildings are being burnt down. This is the reality of politics forgotten in the civility-obsessed Western world. The Nepalese government simply could not resolve its internal contradictions - it could not quell the insurgency of the energetic yet frustrated Nepalese youth. Political assassinations are no different - Charlie Kirk was shot because America cannot resolve its own internal contradictions. 

So did Charlie Kirk deserve to die? The question, again, misunderstands the intertwinedness of politics and violence. “Deserve” is a karmic concept - politics and history are blind forces, bulldozing everything in their way. It transcends everyday morality just like the destructive powers of a hurricane: we don’t blame the hurricane for happening, we understand that it is a blind force, bulldozing everything in its way. This isn’t to say I don’t have a personal stance on the death of Charlie Kirk, that I’m “above it all”, that I don’t have subjective sentiments regarding the assassination. But frankly, I don’t think they’re worth entertaining. If we are to break with the illusory ways of bourgeois morality, we have to discard our personal feelings on the matter and get back to work on building the world we want to live in. We can’t get caught up in this regressive debate as to whether people deserve to die over politics - they will die no matter the level of moralizing or finger wagging. This is a fact of human history only recently obscured and misunderstood.

Violent death, especially death caught on camera, is disturbing. As human beings, our immediate reaction to the brutal loss of life is complete shock. In the very first moment of witnessing violent death, we forget about politics and history, and we simply think “Holy shit!” So on the level of sheer humanity, Charlie Kirk’s violent death was disturbing to watch indeed. Do you know what else is gut-wrenching but not in the immediate sense evoked by real-time political assassination? Laying the rhetorical foundations for the novel form of fascism that America, since its inception, is moving towards in perpetuity. Fascism’s rise isn’t all concentrated in a single day, at one Turning Point USA event. Instead, it develops behind the scenes, invisible to everyday life.

It is heartbreaking that Charlie Kirk spent his life spreading hate and stoking violence. He spewed ignorance and hatred everywhere he went. There was no civility in his speeches or debates, in his ideas or sentiments. It would be absurd to claim that Kirk has been totally innocent, that he was simply a man with an innocuous opinion, a wife, and children. We need to get a grip - he was a prominent right-wing provocateur, and so has very likely influenced some of the worst right-wing mass shooters of the past few years. Kirk wasn’t a hero or a martyr - he was a brutal agent in the chaotic march of world history, where political violence is the norm. I’ll end by describing Charlie Kirk the same way he and the right wing would describe people like George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and Freddie Gray. Charlie Kirk was no angel.