After the assassination of far-right commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the choice to denounce the act is an easy decision for any public figure or political organization that was in opposition to what Kirk stood for. First of all, the Post-Democrat condemns this act of political violence. Here locally, the act was condemned by Delaware County Democrats, and all Democratic members of the Muncie City Council condemned the statements made by Human Rights Commission member SteVen Knipp, who said he hoped Kirk’s death was “only the first” before being swiftly forced to resign from his position. Candidate for IN-District 5 Jackson Franklin called the act “deeply troubling and does not make this country any safer”, and continued to say “political violence has no place in this country”. New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani addressed the shooting the same evening, at one point telling the crowd “it must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all.” For that matter, it was Jacobin Magazine, a popular socialist outlet in the United States, that condemned the act as “a tragedy and disaster” in their article the day after the assassination.

Throughout the U.S., this wasn’t a hard decision to say that the principle of freedom of speech should be guaranteed. But what does this mean if you weren’t a public figure, political organization, or had similar institutional power? Besides major figures, what makes it mandatory to mourn the death of someone who called for your own? For anyone who’s telling you that a far-right activist should be a free speech martyr, one proving that all extremes should be accepted under free speech, they may go on to say that it doesn’t matter how you felt about what he said but should only care for his right to speak, but they are only rambling on about this because they personally aligned with Kirk. Any regular person would be horrified if George Lincoln Rockwell, an American Nazi Party leader who was killed during a highpoint of political assassinations in 1967, had flags put on half-staff and was awarded a Presidential Medal of Honor after his death. In the wake of the event, we are all being demanded to think of Kirk as a household name and act as if what him and his allies did was a nuanced, intellectual renaissance for family values, and not a decade-long call to arms for the Right.

The most concise statement I can put here is from Mehdi Hasan, who said on Democracy Now! “we should all condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk, but we don’t need to participate in the whitewashing of his record”. His horrific statements are countless, being posted everywhere, and apparently not allowed for scrutiny anymore without risking your own employment, but a massive concerted effort is underway to make Kirk out to be nothing more than a respectable defender for public debate. This happened before with William F. Buckley Jr., as his publication National Review has scrubbed many of his statements, which weren’t limited to calling AIDS “a special curse for the homosexual”, openly aligning with white supremacist groups to defend segregation, or telling Gore Vidal during an infamous TV debate “I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered”. Kirk, like Buckley, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many will forget this and hundreds more of his worst statements.