“I would have killed him myself.” That’s what one person said at Charlie Kirk’s vigil in Seattle, Washington, on Wednesday night. The assassin, he said, “did us a favor.”
At a vigil in Idaho, you would have seen a man on a scooter drive through the crowd screaming, “Fuck Charlie Kirk!”
If you were at The University of Texas at Austin, you would have heard a student say, “Someone had to do it.” Another student said: “He was a disgusting person with disgusting beliefs. . . . I think things happen for a purpose. And if that’s how his life was ended, then that’s how it was ended.”
At Oxford University, George Abaraonye, the incoming president of the Oxford Union—one of the most prestigious debate societies in the world that has hosted leaders like Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan—wrote to his friends that “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s fucking go.” In May, Abaraonye himself debated Kirk at Oxford, standing five feet away while discussing politics.
After Abaraonye’s comment became public, he said that he had “reacted impulsively” and that “nobody deserves to be the victim of political violence.”
In the hours after Kirk’s assassination, young people flooded the internet with hateful rhetoric justifying an innocent man’s death. “Lol” and the fire emoji trended on Bluesky. A TikTok user posted a video of himself dancing in the streets with a megaphone and singing, “We got Charlie in the neck.”
Another smiled earnestly into the camera and said that “the best part” is that Kirk is not “martyr material.” “His death will mean nothing. It will activate no one, it will impact few. It’s just great.”
