On September 10, Charlie Kirk was shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. The 31 year old founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative powerhouse with deep ties to Donald Trump’s movement, died later that day from his injuries. His murder has sparked bipartisan outrage. Democrats and Republicans alike rushed to condemn political violence, offering prayers and condolences.
Gun violence is wrong. That must be said clearly and without hesitation. Assassinations often corrode democracy, turning flawed, even dangerous, men into martyrs. They can give fuel to those eager to paint themselves as victims while doing nothing to dismantle the systems of hate and disinformation they helped build.
Charlie Kirk was the epitome of hate, wielding his influence to target people like me, Black people, queer people, and trans people, with cruelty disguised as conviction. To remember him only as a “fallen leader” is to erase the harm he caused.
The irony is stark. When Kirk was struck by the fatal bullet, he was in the middle of a Q&A about mass shootings. An audience member asked him, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kirk smirked and replied, “Too many.” He was then asked how many mass shooters there had been in total. His last words before collapsing were, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
Moments later, the bullet hit.
The facts tell a different story. According to multiple gun violence databases, only about 0.11 percent of mass shootings over the past decade involved transgender individuals. The overwhelming majority of mass shooters have been cis-gender men, most of them white. Kirk’s answer wasn’t just wrong; it was part of a pattern of scapegoating trans people to deflect from the real crisis of gun violence in America. And when he added, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” it was a classic dog whistle — an attempt to shift the blame onto Black communities, reinforcing racist stereotypes instead of acknowledging the truth.
Kirk made his name by dismissing systemic racism as a myth and attacking racial justice movements. He repeatedly framed Black Lives Matter as dangerous and “anti-American,” and often invoked “law and order” politics to downplay police brutality while blaming communities of color for violence. In 2024, he went further and questioned the competence of Black professionals. He reportedly said, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.” In doing so, he reinforced the same racist stereotypes that have long been used to justify over-policing and mass incarceration. This is a hallmark of fascist rhetoric, presenting Black communities as threats so that state violence against them feels justified.
He then singled out Black women in particular, claiming that leaders like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sheila Jackson Lee had “stolen a white person’s slot” through affirmative action, and that they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously”. This wasn’t just racism — it was misogynoir, aimed at delegitimizing the success of Black women by presenting it as theft from white men. This is a hallmark of fascist rhetoric: presenting Black communities as threats so that state violence and exclusion feel justified.
During his 2021 “Exposing Critical Racism Tour” stop in Philadelphia, Kirk told audiences that George Floyd was a “scumbag” and “unworthy of the attention” his death generated. He even said Floyd should not be remembered at all. He presented Floyd not as a victim of police violence, but as someone undeserving of dignity or remembrance. Now that Kirk himself is gone, the same question hangs over his own legacy: does he deserve to be remembered at all?
I would argue that he does, but only to be remembered for the harm his words have caused and will continue to cause. Kirk made clear that in his America, Black lives were disposable. His attacks on Black people were only one part of a larger pattern.
For LGBTQ+ communities, his rhetoric was relentless and calculated. Kirk positioned himself as a defender of “traditional values” by attacking queer and trans people at every turn. He railed against marriage equality and condemned Pride celebrations, claiming they corrupted American culture. He labeled drag shows as predatory and worked to fuel panic about children being “groomed,” a baseless smear that has been used to justify censorship and violence against LGBTQ+ communities.
He misgendered trans people publicly and repeatedly, spread misinformation about gender-affirming care, and championed laws designed to erase their existence from schools, sports, and public life. His language was not just careless. It was strategic, tapping into the same talking points that far right lawmakers used to introduce bills banning health care for trans youth and restricting LGBTQ+ expression.
In one video, Kirk described trans people as “a throbbing middle finger to God” and “an abomination.” He singled out swimmer Lia Thomas, deadnaming her as he sneered, “you’re an abomination to God”. He also suggested that transgender people should be “taken care of” the way men supposedly did in the 1950s and 60s, language that implies violence as a solution to existence.
These were not slips of the tongue or isolated rants. They were part of a larger project to make queer and trans people into political scapegoats. By casting LGBTQ+ communities as dangerous and unnatural, Kirk helped normalize policies and rhetoric that put real lives at risk. This too is fascist rhetoric, turning queer and trans people into symbols of “degeneracy” in order to rally supporters around exclusion. When Kirk spoke, he made clear that his vision of America was one where the humanity of LGBTQ+ people was up for debate.
He did not stop there. Immigrants, too, became targets. Kirk repeatedly echoed Donald Trump’s rhetoric, calling undocumented immigrants criminals and suggesting they were “invading” the United States. He pushed the false narrative that migrants were stealing jobs and resources from “real Americans,” while ignoring the economic realities that show immigrant labor sustains industries across the country.
On his podcast and at TPUSA events, Kirk has described immigration as a “national security crisis” and backed harsh enforcement measures, including mass deportations and the construction of border walls. He claimed Democrats only support immigration to “import new voters,” a conspiracy theory that plays into the white nationalist “replacement theory” myth.
By framing immigrants as criminals and invaders, Kirk mainstreamed talking points that have been linked directly to acts of violence. This is another feature of fascist rhetoric: stoking fear of “invasion” and trafficking in replacement conspiracies to justify harsh enforcement and exclusion. Kirk made clear that in his America, immigrants were never meant to belong.
Taken together, his words made clear that scapegoating marginalized groups was not incidental to his politics. It was the foundation.
That is the legacy he leaves behind. It is not petty or uncharitable to say so. It is honest.
The days after a political assassination are always filled with calls for unity, for lowering the temperature, for finding common ground. I agree that we must resist violence, but unity cannot come at the price of truth. We cannot mourn in silence while pretending that Kirk’s words did not embolden extremists or give cover to discriminatory policies.
Kirk’s speeches, broadcasts, and posts often worked as stochastic terrorism. That term describes how repeated dehumanizing rhetoric by public figures can inspire violent acts by followers without a direct command. The violence becomes statistically predictable even if no single attack is planned in advance. His words also carried the features of fascist rhetoric: dehumanization, scapegoating, and the casual acceptance of violence as a price worth paying. In 2023, he said that “some gun deaths are worth it” to preserve the Second Amendment. Now, having lost his own life to gun violence, his words echo with cruel irony: was the cost he once defended worth paying when it was his own?
And there is another truth the right will not say out loud: Kirk’s assassin fits the profile of most American mass shooters — a white cis-gender man. He came from a MAGA family, described by his grandmother as staunchly pro-Trump, not from “the left” as his allies now claim. His death came at the hands of the same movement he helped radicalize. Fascist rhetoric always consumes its own, and Kirk’s end was no exception. But that does not mean he should be canonized. To sanctify him now would erase the damage his words have done and will continue to do.
And since this was a horrible crime, we should be asking: where is that same urgency now? Trump sent troops into Los Angeles to confront protests against ICE raids. But when armed insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6, the military response was delayed. Will there be a show of force in Utah now that one of Trump’s own has turned a gun on Charlie Kirk? Or does state power only come down hard when the people in the streets are immigrants, people of color, queer, or poor?
Together, those patterns created the conditions for harm long before the bullet that ended his life.
Too often, political figures who trade in cruelty are polished into saints the moment they die. Their bigotry is softened, their divisive rhetoric erased, their records rewritten in the name of “respect.” That rewriting does violence too, not with a bullet but with silence. It asks those of us who lived with the consequences of their hate to swallow our pain yet again, this time in the name of civility.
I refuse.
We have seen this before. After 9/11, grief was turned into a weapon, used to justify endless wars abroad and surveillance at home. The same playbook is unfolding now: a tragedy is being repackaged to erase context, to sanctify cruelty, and to make a martyr out of someone whose politics were built on scapegoating.
I will not mourn a man who used every microphone he was given to make my community less safe. To do so would be dishonest to myself, to my neighbors, and to the truth.
What we can mourn is the country that made Charlie Kirk possible: a political culture where cruelty is currency, where young leaders are rewarded for stoking division, where targeting marginalized people is a career path. His death does not end that culture. If anything, it may deepen it. Already, his allies are using this tragedy to paint conservatives as perpetual victims and to double down on the very rhetoric that divides us.
That is what we must resist, the machinery of hate that he helped keep alive.
Charlie Kirk is gone. The harm he caused is not. Taken together, his words made clear that scapegoating marginalized groups was not incidental to his politics. It was the foundation. His rhetoric worked as stochastic terrorism, language meant to dehumanize until someone else acted on it, creating the conditions for violence by casting entire communities as permanent targets. That is his legacy.
Our task now is to dismantle that foundation by telling the truth, refusing silence, and building a country where no one’s humanity is ever up for debate.
Tracee Michelle Porter is a 2025 SPI State Policy Fellow and Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project. She is a writer and advocate working to shift narratives, influence policy, and build Black women’s political power through reentry, economic justice, and community-rooted leadership.
