12 September 2025

Charlie Kirk and America’s Age of Lead

As violence mounts across the country, no one is safe – or innocent.

The killing at a Utah university of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, a hard-right political activist and the father of two young children, was a shocking abomination. Such cruelty and malevolence simply cannot be tolerated. Kirk’s murder now ensures that the cycles of retributive violence in America will intensify and accelerate.

The man himself was undeniably shocking. Now being celebrated for his “civility” and commitment to “free speech”, Kirk was the voice – in soft, civilised tones – of radical sentiments that, until Donald Trump, had not been a part of mainstream American values. He thought that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which finally gave black Americans the same legal protections afforded to white Americans, should never have been passed. He said that Martin Luther King Jr, a true American saint and martyr, was “awful” and “not a good person”. He said “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”, and he made the incendiary claim, similar to the libel in the classic anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that Jews control “not just the colleges; it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it”. These are not, in the modern context, in the American context, normative things to say. They strike at the foundation of American comity.

That Kirk was murdered for publicly expressing such sentiments is an obscenity (the motives for his shooting are unclear but the Wall Street Journal reports that ammunition recovered from the scene featured pro-trans and anti-fascist slogans). He did not deserve to be brutally cut down. He did deserve to be soundly and publicly rebutted by liberals who, instead, as liberals do, flattered themselves by meeting Kirk’s “civility” head on, preening their egos by outdoing it, even as Kirk’s soft tones conveyed the hardest sentiments. Watch the California governor Gavin Newsom’s queasy-making dialogue with Kirk on the former’s podcast, during Newsom’s short-lived phase of suddenly tacking right, before he suddenly reversed himself and tacked left.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum – unless someone has risen above the sea level of ordinary mortal life into the whirling currents where history is made. “The eyes of other people,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “are the eyes that ruin us.” That is to say, you can get away with just about anything in America if it conforms to the appearance of virtue. Under the cover of being a warrior for “free speech”, Kirk trafficked in highly specialised language. His “debates” at the various campuses he visited are spectacles of lopsided power, as he bullies outmatched students with practised and polished lines of attack delivered in a rapid blur. His hostility to black people, Jews and LGBTQ people put members in those groups into zones of peril that they had not found themselves in for generations. Money doesn’t talk, it swears, Dylan wrote. But power that has crossed the threshold of rationality and order speaks all the more softly and politely the more terrible its capacity to do harm. Indecencies half-whispered with a smile to the initiated are barely “speech” – by definition a precious quality held in common – at all. But Kirk shrewdly presented himself as the embodiment of the liberal sacred cow of free expression, thereby reducing eye-conscious liberals, in Franklin’s sense, to playing Kirk’s game.

It is sickening to watch the video of Kirk being shot. The official response to the shooting was appalling. At a press conference hastily called not long after the shooting, the FBI special agent in charge offered his condolences to Kirk’s family and spoke of the “traumatic” nature of Kirk’s murder. Those were fine and noble sentiments but utterly out of bounds for the FBI, which always remains neutral in its public response to any criminal act. The Utah governor, Spencer Cox, a Republican, declared that Kirk’s killing was a “political assassination”, a shocking thing for such a high official to say since the killer has not been found and the motive not yet confirmed. The murderer could, for all anyone knows, be one of the increasing numbers of deranged Americans who kill for no apparent reason, political or otherwise, even when, in their delusional state, they believe they are acting politically. Trump himself appeared a few hours later in a taped address from the Oval Office, fuming against the “radical left” he claimed was responsible for the shooting, saying nothing about the murder and wounding of Minnesota Democratic state lawmakers over the summer. He ordered American flags to be flown at half-mast, an honour reserved for statesmen and beloved national figures. The message from America’s Godfather was clear. Charlie Kirk was family. And we will settle the family’s business our way.

Leaving aside the responses from the lunatic fringe on either side – on the right: this means war; on the left: this is what you get – the general response was what the general response always is. Political violence is on the rise. But this misses the point, as it always does. Violence exists in manifold forms; it only becomes political when it has become normalised in the rest of life. Even as Trump apparently gave the order to slaughter the people on a Venezuelan boat suspected of smuggling illicit drugs into America as the boat was said to be in retreat, CNN broadcasts the words “shit” and “asshole” on air in an obtained threatening voicemail. Shortly before Kirk was killed, Trump refused to comment on Russian drones invading Polish air space, an incredible escalation of the war in Europe. Just two hours before the shooting in Utah, two students at a Colorado high school were shot. Barely a word appeared about it in the national media. Why should it? The students weren’t killed, you see, merely injured, one critically. And permeating it all, but now, for Trump, conveniently pushed to the side, is the incredible abuse perpetrated by the powerful elites in Jeffrey Epstein’s circles.

Violence in America is not simply being normalised by its rising prevalence (Kirk in April 2023: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”). It is being normalised by the new American regime’s indifference to it. Trump is as silent about Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as he is about Russian atrocities in Ukraine. And Trump’s violent rhetoric (April 2024: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath…”) and his violent gestures, such as his AI-created video of Obama being handcuffed and pushed to the floor of the Oval Office by federal agents, exist on the same plane of remorselessness as Kirk’s murder.

There seems to be no safe space. “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face,” the treasury secretary Scott Bessent shouted at Bill Pulte, a top housing official, at a private dinner some days ago. On CNN, the former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty said that he had come up with several reasons for America’s increasing violence, a chief one being the “dehumanising” rhetorical atmosphere. Pawlenty went on to explain that he had come upon this notion of the perils of dehumanisation using… AI. Rage, stupidity, intellectual emptiness, herd conformity. That is a type of violence that lays down the red carpet for real violence.

What does Kirk’s murder portend? More violence, certainly. It could also well be that the taking of Kirk’s life was not the goal at all. It could be that the shooting was a message to everyone on the right: you’re next. The fact that the killer remains at large, might imply, even after they are caught, a sinister expertise, and that could be a way of presenting the possibility of some sort of formidable resistance to this government, a resistance operating in the shadows. Given the engravings reported to have been found on the rifle’s ammunition, if the shooter happens to die before they are questioned, conspiracy theories on the left will reach critical mass.

Whatever happens, the killing has fallen into the hands of an administration using American violence – street crime, immigrant crime – as a pretext to flood American places with federal agents and troops unlike anything that has ever occurred on American soil before. The vicious murder of a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, preceded Kirk’s murder; at a recent press conference enlarged pictures of her, fair and blue-eyed, and her murderer, a black man with dreadlocks, appeared side by side behind the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Lines are being ever more tightly and explicitly drawn. Kirk’s murder has drawn them deeper. America is headed for a hard place. Elections declared invalid in 2026? Such an edict enforced by federal troops? It is inconceivable that such a crisis would occur in the American republic. But that it could happen when a family’s honour and power and control are being contested is, in one form or another, becoming all but certain by the day – and the American right has been seething and plotting since 1932, when they felt FDR stole the country from them. Until that tragic day, the bullets will keep flying. Trump promised America an Age of Gold. Instead he has ushered the country into an Age of Lead.