by Autumn Johnstone
On Sept. 10, I was sitting in one of my journalism class lectures when another student gasped behind me. I turned around. The student looked mortified as he stared down at his phone. A video on Twitter of Charlie Kirk’s assassination played over and over again. I asked to see the video, completely unaware of how gruesome the video would be. Now, I wish I never saw it.
I’ve seen various responses to his killing. Some say it’s inhumane, some say it’s justified and some, like usual, “don’t want to get political.”
I personally believe that it’s hard to be empathetic for a man who didn’t believe in empathy in the first place. He was a man who died because of the very things he defended. He wasn’t a martyr; he was a zealot.
It was ironic that on the day Kirk was shot, I had just learned about a tweet posted by Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez in 2020.
Only about an hour after basketball legend Kobe Bryant’s death, Sonmez reposted a link to an old article about Bryant’s sexual assault case from 2003. Bryant was accused of rape and was charged with felony sexual assault during the 2003 allegation.
After Sonmez received over 10,000 emails and death threats because of the timing of her tweet, she said on Twitter, “Any public figure is worth remembering in their totality.” She was placed on administrative leave for two days for allegedly “violating the Post’s social media policy.”
I usually have empathy for all kinds of people — even the people who vote for me to not have rights. Brainwashed or not, people are allowed to have their own opinions. But, after reposting Instagram videos of Kirk’s various debates against students and professors with Turning Point USA, I had my own loved ones ask me why I am “justifying murder for a man who didn’t deserve it.”
I had only reposted Kirk’s own posts. No columns. No commentary. His own posts showed him antagonizing and belittling people while he claimed to be having a “fair debate.”
Something broke in me then. I stood up for myself and explained why Kirk should be remembered in his totality, even at the sake of his own hand. For the lives that he ruined, for the people who he instilled fear in and for the uneducated people that still remain supporters of a man who openly claimed the Civil Rights Act to be a “mistake.”
I have my own reasons for not supporting a man who supported racism and homophobia, and encouraged divide rather than unity. But what reasons are there to support such a thing? What more could Kirk have said to show that he was filled with malicious intent?
I encourage you to read up on Turning Point USA’s Instagram account, Kirk’s replies were not rebuttals. They were attacks on freedom of speech with blatant lies, crude jokes and hate speech.
Kirk’s debates fostered fear in those who disagreed with him — which in a true debate is not an ethical route to take. Using evidence against a claim is proven to work regardless of who is refuting it. You can’t just claim a dolphin fetus to be a human embryo and it magically becomes an embryo.
No logic and no empathy: two things that went hand in hand with this man. His supporters followed him and Trump blindly — picking and choosing things to ignore or acknowledge. There’s no critical analysis when it comes to the inconsistent character traits, criminal history or even cognitive skill of the people in power. There’s a reason Trump said he loves “the uneducated.”
This killing was not just an attack on free speech, but a major step in the wrong direction for the sake of our country. This dystopian level of fear has reduced the power of our democracy.
It is hard to believe our country was once founded on the free exchange of ideas, rule of law, civic virtue and protection of minority views. Political disagreement was to be settled by ethical arguments, and violence was abhorred. (This was, of course, not always followed, especially regarding Native Americans and the whole institution of slavery.) We have strayed so very far from the American dream that it has been convoluted into a deranged American nightmare.
For those who still look for hope, we can find it in ourselves and in small acts around us. Maybe in the small acts of kindness from strangers in passing streets, in the classrooms where children have gratitude for their education and even in newsrooms where journalists seek the truth, we can reinvent the American dream into something everyone can fight for.