CLARE STEPHENS: 'Charlie Kirk, and the one thing we should all be able to agree on.'

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This article originally appeared on Clare Stephens' Substack, NQR. Sign up here.

It's just after noon, and Charlie Kirk sits under a white tent speaking into a microphone at Utah Valley University. The words, 'The American Comeback Tour' and 'PROVE ME WRONG' are printed on the tent in the colours of the American flag.

He's in front of an audience of thousands, and somewhere among them, there's a line of people waiting to ask him a question. Many of them want to debate him — a spectacle that's gone viral online in recent years. He's a fast talker, and speaks with absolute conviction. It's infuriating to his opponents.

Kirk is asked how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years. "Too many," he responds, without hesitation. The audience member challenges that claim, and Kirk starts to speak again, when there's a loud, unexpected bang.

By now, it's likely that millions of people all over the world have watched the moment Kirk was killed. He was shot in the neck. The sheer amount of blood meant that many witnesses, including one who spoke to ABC News, "immediately knew he was going to die."

One witness told the New York Times that for a split-second, he'd thought the shooting was part of an act.

"That lasted only about a second before I realised it was something very serious going on," he said.

The crowd erupted into panic, with some crouching for cover and others instinctively running from the scene. There's footage everywhere. Various angles of the stage, of Kirk during what we now know were the final moments of his life.

It was President Donald Trump who announced Kirk's death. On Truth Social, he posted: "The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!"

Twenty minutes later, he ordered "all American Flags throughout the United States lowered to Half Mast until Sunday evening at 6 P.M," and the flags outside the White House were lowered. This was followed by a video address, condemning this "dark moment for America". The President spoke of "shock and horror," and the danger of "demonising those with whom you disagree."

Donald Trump has ordered all American flags be lowered to half-mast until Sunday night. Image: Getty.

For those of us watching on, it's a deeply complex cultural moment.

As a left-leaning woman, I watched Charlie Kirk's videos with despair. I found his tone arrogant. I disliked the way he seemed to mistake the speed of a person's speech with their conviction or their accuracy. I disagreed with almost everything I ever heard him say.

It would be impossible to summarise his views here, but for those unacquainted, he was anti-gun control, and said it was worth the cost of some gun deaths every year to protect the Second Amendment. He condemned LGBTQI+ education and relentlessly used the trans community as a political football. He believed women should prioritise motherhood over their careers, and said young men "order their lives correctly" by putting family and kids first, whereas young women want "careerism, consumerism and loneliness".

He thought white privilege wasn't real. He called the civil rights movement a mistake. He denied the existence of Palestine. He was a staunch supporter of Israel's war in Gaza.

He was, in my opinion, and the opinion of many others, ideologically dangerous. His arguments, I thought, fundamentally lacked empathy.

"He was, in my opinion…ideologically dangerous. He still did not deserve to die." Image: Getty.

He still did not deserve to die.

He was 31. He had two young children, which is not to say that a person's life is worth more if they're a parent, but is just to say that — as is always the case — he is not the only victim of his death. There were parts of him that were unknowable. Parts of him that were loved. Parts of him, I'm sure, that were compassionate and selfless.

Perhaps he didn't extend that empathy to others, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't extend that empathy to him.

With that said, there are two responses to Charlie Kirk's death — at either end of the political spectrum — that scare me.

On the one hand, I'm uncomfortable with the glee. Almost immediately, there was a race to point out the irony of it. That Kirk — someone who advocated against gun laws, and was indifferent to the incidental casualties of gun violence — had been shot dead.

"I'm not saying he deserved it but he deserved it," read one viral post on X. I scrolled past an excited gif alongside the caption, "me liking every tweet making fun of Charlie Kirk." Comments like, "I have no sympathy." "Karma." "Bullet: your body, my choice."

There were jokes and hot takes and memes, all of which erase the violence of what just happened and what it means. What it means for democracy. I've written extensively about dehumanisation and contempt online, about how we paint people as irredeemable, about how we're unable to respectfully disagree. This is the logical consequence of it.

When everyone becomes an avatar, an ideologue, killing them is the ultimate political statement. But of course, you're not killing an ideology. You're killing a man whose blood is the same colour as yours.

On the other hand, the way Kirk's death has already made him a martyr feels chilling. In his video address, the President of the United States condemned the political violence of the "radical left," when a) nothing is known about the shooter or their motives, and b) just three months ago, Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and her husband, were shot and killed in their home.

The media coverage and outpouring of grief that will go towards one man, and not towards school children killed by gun violence, or the victims of international atrocities funded by the United States, is also deeply unsettling. Who decides whose death is worth publicly mourning? Why are victims of state-sanctioned violence less deserving of our grief?

Empathy, however, is not a finite resource. And it is the very idea that people are not people, that they can be flattened into an ideology, that they're the means to a political end, that leads to violence, to war. A life is a life is a life.

When we see a man sitting behind a microphone, shot dead in front of thousands of people, our instinct has to be that it is wrong.

That we are better than this.

That killing is not the answer.

And if we can't acknowledge that truth without expressing some contempt for him, without finding some way to justify it, we are doomed. Because then, it seems, we agree on nothing.

Clare Stephens is the author of The Worst I've Ever Done, which you can pre-order here. Sign up to Clare Stephens' Substack, NQR.

Feature image: Getty.