by Hugo Timms, spiked
One year on from Charlie Kirk’s killing, the #BeKind crowd celebrated the anniversary and desecrated his statue.
For many left-wing activists, the murder of Charlie Kirk last September was a moment of celebration. A year on, and their hatred for the American conservative icon is unabated. No sooner had a statue to commemorate Kirk been unveiled outside the organisation he founded – Turning Point USA – than it was defaced with red paint.
The vandal responsible took care to remind everyone of the details of Kirk’s killing, which appears to have been a politically motivated assassination. The paint is concentrated on the left-hand side of the statue’s neck, where the real Kirk was shot, by suspect Tyler Robinson, as he addressed students at Utah Valley University on 10 September last year. A large red cross was painted across his face – a warning to Kirk’s supporters, who would have been the first to see it, that holding the ‘wrong’ views can sometimes be fatal.
This desecration has been accompanied by other disturbing scenes elsewhere. Students at the University of South Carolina and Georgetown University held Charlie Kirk lookalike contests to celebrate the anniversary of his death. At the University of California, Berkeley, students hosted a ‘Kirkaversary’ to mock the 31-year-old father of two. ‘We carry the flame’, they chanted. A group of young men shouted ‘Jerk for Kirk’. It was all a reminder, one young man said indifferently, that they found Kirk ‘low-key evil’. But if there is any evil, it surely exists in the hearts of those who gloated, and continue to gloat, over Kirk’s assassination.