The attempt to canonise Charlie Kirk began before his body was even cold. Camilla Tominey drapes him in the robes of free speech, calling him its “defender-in-chief.” It’s an absurd beatification. Kirk wasn’t a Socrates in sneakers, he was a political thug with a podcast. His career built on manufacturing resentment, hounding professors, sneering at trans kids, whipping up militias1, and treating universities as occupied territory. Now he is presented as a martyr for dialogue, gunned down for daring to speak.
Death as redemption, the oldest trick in the book.
Tominey says “words don’t kill, people do,” then blames the Left’s words for killing him.
She can’t resist the doublethink.
Trump bellows “fight like hell” before January 6th—that’s just rhetoric, nothing to do with the nooses erected outside the Capitol building.
A student calls Kirk a Nazi—that’s incitement to murder.
The hypocrisy is barefaced, obscene, and proud of itself.
What disappears in this performance is America itself. You know, the country of endless guns, militias, stand-your-ground fantasies, lynching traditions dressed up as patriotism. The corpse is not evidence of a culture armed to the teeth, it is proof that “progressives” are the true assassins. The men who plot kidnappings of governors, who march with tiki torches, who storm legislatures with AR-15s—these are rebranded as victims of Left “groupthink.” What they accuse others of is the only thing they know how to do.
Her vilification of students cheering Kirk’s death is another sleight of hand. Students cheer a lot of things. Sometimes unwisely, sometimes tastelessly. But the greater obscenity is not a few tweets or shouts on campus; it is the decades of right-wing violence and intimidation that Kirk himself fed on. Tominey wants to talk about Oxford boys clapping; she doesn’t want to talk about Kyle Rittenhouse with a rifle, or Proud Boys “standing back and standing by.”
Then comes the grimmest theft: “I can’t breathe” becomes “I can’t speak.” The last words of a Black man murdered by police repurposed as the motto of a white conservative movement that has never shut up a day in its life. You want cynicism? It’s right there, written in permanent marker.
This isn’t grief for civility, it’s a weapon. Kirk is folded into an abstraction called Free Speech, the abstraction made holy, and from that holiness comes the demand for silence. A grifter is polished into a saint, his blood smeared as proof that the Left are savages. The Right always needs its martyrs (its Horst Wessels, its Ashli Babbitts) death repurposed as propaganda, tragedy refashioned into a rallying cry. Kirk is simply the latest body on that altar
The Daily Mail couldn’t resist getting in on the act: a student who laughed at Kirk’s death is dragged through the press with more zeal than Kirk himself was ever scrutinised in life. ABB grades at A-level are paraded like a criminal record, his societies listed as if they were offences, his WhatsApp message inflated into a national scandal. It isn’t reporting, it’s a public shaming ritual. The point is not the words but the spectacle, the reminder of who owns the narrative.
Look at the priorities. An American far-right agitator is shot, and the Mail’s lens swivels not to Trump’s militias or the normalisation of political violence, but to a 20-year-old Black student in Oxford. His grades, his extracurriculars, his slang, his jokes become evidence in the case against “the Left.” It’s gutter journalism doing what it always does: punching down, turning tragedy into a morality play about unruly youth and ungrateful minorities, while leaving power untouched.
What’s laughable is the Telegraph and the Mail peddling the fantasy that the Left controls it all: schools, corporations, media, parliaments. It’s fantasy. The Left hasn’t governed Britain in any meaningful sense since the 1970s. What we have are Labour managers who genuflect to capital, Democrats who deregulate Wall Street, social democrats who bomb the Middle East. The institutions Tominey names (business, universities, NGOs) are not radical fiefdoms, they are the bureaucracies of neoliberalism. They take the knee for a photo-op and then get back to sacking workers, raising tuition fees, deporting migrants, and funding wars.
The real control?
The Right has it.
They own the mediaspace, they bankroll the parties, they write the immigration laws, they gut the power of the unions, they shape the courts. They run the oil firms, the arms dealers, the landlords’ associations, the hedge funds. They capture the police and the prisons, they stack the think tanks, they bankroll the politicians who preach about “free speech” while tightening the gag.
Kirk was not outside this architecture, he was its eager functionary. A loyal vassal to Trump, a recruiter for the MAGA youth machine, a man whose whole career was to make violence not only acceptable but glamorous. He is no martyr. To mourn him as the silenced conscience of free expression is not just dishonest. It is grotesque. Fascists don’t deserve your tears.
FOOTNOTES
- While Kirk never issued a direct order to “form militias,” his rhetoric consistently blurred the line between political activism and paramilitary mobilisation. He normalised gun deaths as “worth it” for liberty, cast immigration as a “great replacement strategy” threatening white America, and urged supporters to act in ways that valorised aggression — for example suggesting Paul Pelosi’s attacker be bailed out as a “patriot.” Turning Point USA also funded buses for Trump’s January 6 rally, in which many of the attendees went on to storm the Capitol. In the climate of US gun politics, these statements functioned less as commentary than as permission. ↩︎
