by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
Kirk’s final words were about the scourge of transgender violence. He was right.
It is the blackest irony, like a sick joke by the universe, that Charlie Kirk was gunned down as he discussed gun violence. That word – ‘violence’ – was the last he ever uttered. Milliseconds later, violence of the gravest kind was visited on him. Actually, we need to be more specific: Kirk was discussing trans violence in the seconds before his death. He was pushing back against one of his student interlocutors who seemed to downplay the phenomenon of trans mass shootings. The student badgered Kirk to say how many such shootings there have been. ‘Too many’, Kirk replied. Seconds later, his carotid artery was severed and he was dead.
I’m not suggesting Kirk was executed for daring to talk about trans violence. The gunman will not have been able to hear what Kirk was saying – he was on a rooftop 200 yards away. Yet while it might be coincidental that Kirk was so tyrannically slain in the very moment he was lamenting the violent turn of trans ideology, it nonetheless feels chillingly noteworthy. For it captures a dark truth about this act of militant cancel culture, this savage censoring by bullet: namely, that Kirk was seemingly targeted for his love of giving blasphemous voice to facts and ideas the woke would rather redact.
The thing is, he was right: there are too many trans shootings. There has been a violent turn in the trans ideology. The trans sect does seem ever-more consumed by a brutish animus for anyone who dissents from its post-truth orthodoxies; for those phobes, bitches and heretics who dare to withhold their validation from men who claim to be women or youths who claim to be non-binary. And for people like Charlie Kirk: witness the sick celebration of his death among the post-sex, post-social blue-hairs in that digital cesspit of trans lunacy. You thought the ‘revolution’ would be ‘magically bloodless’, asked one well-known trans activist before Kirk’s body was even cold.