Paul Ellertson, online publishing coordinator

There’s a lot I could say about far-right wing influencer, Charlie Kirk. I will start by saying it’s okay to not grieve his death. Whether or not you feel anything is okay and normal. During his life, he said a lot of nasty things about immigrants, women, BIPOC, the LGBTQIA+ community, and the list goes on. He is responsible for spreading a lot of hatred that probably led to many of suicides and homicides in and against the marginalized communities he hated. He was also notorious for not caring about mental health and expressing hate for empathy, which is why I’m convinced he had none. 

During his life, Kirk advocated for the Second Amendment, which is the same thing he was arguing when he became another victim of that very amendment; the irony is screaming! He just so happened to be debating guns while going after the very few transgender shooters in U.S. history, numbers of which are almost non-existent, very low decimals there. Not sure why you’d waste your breath on that, but that was another choice he made as a cis white man. 

He often argued that it’s people that hurt people, not guns that hurt people. That’s interesting because technically it’s people who use guns to hurt and kill other people, which is why background checks seem like a basic requirement and a common-sense thing. This is another thing Charlie argued against, ironically. Maybe Charlie should have asked his good friend Trump for some bulletproof glass to hide behind because Utah has some very questionable gun laws that include open carry, meaning you can prance around with a gun on you for everybody to see. 

Guns aside, his death itself was quite brutal, and seeing it online was crazy, so I can’t really imagine what it was like to actually be there in front of Charlie when it happened. My sympathy goes to his children. They didn’t ask for their father to be killed in front of them. They also didn’t ask him to be their father. Charlie probably would have been a terrible father anyway. I suspect he would have told them that education is a waste of money, and he would have tried to marry his daughter off as soon as he thought she was old enough. 

“If she were raped, the baby would be born.” Kirk said this about his very young daughter. That’s a messed-up thing for anyone to say. It almost feels like another kind of horrible, that her own father said it. 

He was also notorious for saying things like “Empathy is a sin,” “If I walk on a plane and see that the pilot is Black… I sure hope he’s qualified,” as well as “Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” The last quote could have been another one of Kirk’s rants about how he hated DEI. Otherwise, I have no idea what it means because it makes no sense. Most of us are smarter than him by leaps and bounds, so it could have just been a mindless white supremacist thing, and it was very much that. 

Charlie was ultimately a poor excuse for a human being, which is why much of the world probably won’t miss him all that much. If you miss him, then you miss him, although it’s hard to understand why, but if you don’t, then you don’t.