On the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

I mourn his murder, but I do not mourn the way he practiced politics.

Like millions of other people, I saw the video of Charlie Kirk’s assasination accidentally. I was under the weather, had just woken up from a nap, and opened Instagram, where the video was the first in my feed.

Like other acts of political violence, my body took this one personally. My stomach roiled. My skin ached. I sweat.

Like most public figures, I thought “that could have been me.”

I’ve been lucky to have never experienced physical violence, though I have been violently threatened, doxxed, and stalked. I vehemently disagreed with Kirk on every issue, but he had a right to express his views and engage in politics without threat. Kirk should be alive today. His assassination should not have happened. Full stop. Those who use violence to achieve political ends—and those who celebrate its use—do not understand or seek to further the democratic project. Anyone who has been threatened for speaking out, no matter their political stripes, should tell you that.

But I woke up agitated the morning after Kirk’s death. Ezra Klein had published a piece asserting Kirk had “practiced politics the right way.” Gavin Newsom had posted about “continu[ing] his work.” I went to a local coffee shop to try to get off my phone. Next to me, two middle-aged men valorized Kirk. They argued—as had Klein and Newsom and countless others—that Kirk had simply been about good old fashioned debate. One of them said, “when the words stop, the violence starts.” They went on to talk about an app one of them was developing as if it was any other day.

I, on the other hand, had given a fake name when I ordered my coffee and was reaching out to speaking clients to inquire about security for upcoming events. I felt anxious the rest of the day. I still do.

I also felt gaslit and abandoned by this revisionism, because Charlie Kirk and his massive platform played a role in the violent rhetoric that has endangered me and my family since April 2022. He platformed and amplified liars —Jack Posobiec, who originated the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and led to a man shooting up a DC pizza parlor; Mike Benz, who built a career lying about the work of disinformation researchers; and Tucker Carlson, who needs no introduction—who made up stories that gleefully encouraged millions of my fellow Americans to believe I committed treason against my country. Treason, as my harassers often remind me, is punishable by death.

Kirk also brought me up on his show more than a year after I resigned my role at DHS and had recently appeared as an expert on a cable news panel. When I deigned to use my right to free speech, which Kirk’s hagiographers allege he defended for all, he demonized me in a transphobic screed:

Nina Jankowicz, who's looking like Dylan Mulvaney lately...Nina Jankowicz is like transitioning in front of our very eyes. She's got the whole, like, ‘I'm going to become a social media influencer’ man thing, like kind of looking awfully. You could call her disinformation queen. She might soon become the disinformation king. Got a very masculine kind of presentation there, and so she's like sitting there and I think she's suing everybody, whatever. Okay, so you have here this issue where you call everyone that you don't like and stories that you can't confront ‘conspiracy theorists.’ Thought terminating cliché is part of an all-out war on speech.

Charlie Kirk had every right to make these comments. But they certainly aren’t emblematic of a type of politics that should be emulated or tearfully eulogized. They play into an old trope that women who move in traditionally male spaces (politics, media, sports, or for Kirk, basically anywhere outside of the home) or exhibit characteristics viewed as masculine (expressing opinions, not always being pliant or pleasant, being both seen and heard) are secretly transgender, transitioning, or perhaps have just been men all along. Charlie Kirk knew I am a woman. But I wasn’t performing his preferred, closemouthed, pretty version of femininity, so he lumped me in with a minority that he lusted to exterminate. It is ironic that he accused me of engaging in “thought terminating cliché” and an “all-out war on speech” while using lies to attempt to drive me out of public life.

I was far from alone on Kirk’s target list, and far from the only person he attempted to silence. His right-wing youth organization, Turning Point USA, maintained watchlists of professors and school board members for over a decade. As 404Media reported, Turning Point wrote of these projects:

From sexualized material in textbooks to teaching CRT and implementing the 1619 Project doctrine, the radical leftist agenda will not stop … The School Board Watch List exposes school districts that host drag queen story hour, teach courses on transgenderism, and implement unsafe gender neutral bathroom policies. The Professor Watch List uncovers the most radical left-wing professors from universities that are known to suppress conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.

Through these lists and harassment online, Kirk and his organization attempted to force those with opinions they disagreed with out of their careers and out of public life. As Dr Stacey Patton wrote, her inclusion on the “Professor Watchlist” spurred hate and threats:

For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: “bitch,” “c*nt,” “n****r.” They threatened all manner of violence. They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that I be fired. The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer me an escort, because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do me harm.

Kirk may have feigned being open to debate, a defender of free speech. “Prove me wrong” was the tagline festooned around his events, including the one where he was tragically murdered. But his performances weren’t about constructive disagreement. They weren’t about discussion. They weren’t about learning. They were about winning, no matter the cost.

Clichés like “when the words stop, violence starts” whitewash Kirk’s legacy and the history of political violence in America. I hope Kirk’s many targets remind Ezra Klein, Gavin Newsom, and the men in coffee shops and bars writing a revisionist history of Charlie Kirk that words, especially words like Kirk’s, are not value neutral. They can be kinetic, and they can inspire others to act. That act might look like a hateful tweet, a threatening phone call, doxxing a target, harassing their family, or worse. That is not debate. That is the active silencing of it.

Today, and moving forward, we do not need more empty statements about toning down violent rhetoric followed by finger pointing. We need politicians, influencers, and media personalities to recognize the gravity of their words and the impact they have. Influencers and politicians can’t fully control their audience’s reactions to their speech, but in a country where we’ve had multiple high-level acts of political violence and assassinations this year alone, they must recognize that dehumanizing, demonizing rhetoric will continue this cycle unless they disengage, call it out, and excise it from our discourse. It already seems like that is a pipe dream.

I mourn Charlie Kirk’s murder, but I do not mourn the way he practiced politics.