Gift baskets are being made, parties are being planned and people are taking the day to revel in the festivities, and no, it’s not a holiday they’re prepping for.
Some people are celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Not only are they excited to participate in “Kirkversary” merriments, but some have also made it clear that unless you were celebrating the day it happened, you’ll be kept from the function.
“Everyone’s talking about ‘oh Kirkversary, happy Kirkiversary, who’s excited?’ If you weren’t there, giggling and laughing, standing on that hill on the day of Kirkversary last year, you’re not allowed to celebrate Kirkversary this year,” an online streamer with more than 2 million subscribers said.
For me, as someone who witnessed the bullet strike Kirk’s neck and watched as he closed his eyes and fell backward, the memes represent human decency being set aside and moral values left at the door.
A tragedy with caveats
Hunter Kozak was the last person who spoke to Kirk as he debated him in Utah Valley University’s campus courtyard. He had a front-row seat to the tragedy, and a video of his reaction to watching Kirk die before his very eyes has become a meme for radicals online.
“Sorry to put a damper on the funny little meme campaign that we have about a man dying but just want to share that I went to a carnival today to celebrate my daughter’s birthday and I had a persistent thought like ten times about someone shooting the place up,” he said in an X post on Monday.
“I know I have PTSD and I shouldn’t rewatch these videos but for a year now they’ve been inescapable on the internet, simply because people find it funny. Like seriously, look at the (expletive) context that this is in response to,” he continued. “It’s sick. You guys have something broken inside you to use this video as a response in the way you did.”
The shock and horror are still just as fresh in my memory as they were 365 days ago.
Now, as I cover the criminal case of his alleged killer, hardly a day passes without some detail from Sept. 10 resurfacing, and my mind inevitably leads back to that moment — the gunshot, his eyes closing, his body falling — replaying until I can finally break the loop.
Whether it’s an interview with someone who knew Kirk personally, a story I’m assigned that day or simply a conversation with someone who knows my connection to the case, I find myself revisiting Sept. 10 often.
But out of all of those interactions, what has surprised me most isn’t the response from the most radical corners of the internet, where people openly celebrate the death of a Christian conservative father.
It’s the conversations with otherwise good, principled people who acknowledged the tragedy, only to quickly qualify it with something Kirk said or believed that they disagreed with — as though adding that caveat makes their response more measured or reasonable.
Did Kirk spew hate?
After he died, accusations spread that Kirk promoted hateful, racist or otherwise bigoted rhetoric. Even Kirk’s alleged killer’s defense attorney accused Kirk, the victim in the case, of “speaking hatefully of certain groups of people.”
“He spoke hatefully of people who don’t have traditional, norm-conforming gender identities. He spoke hatefully of people who are not strictly heterosexual. He spoke hatefully of people who have sexual relationships out of marriage,” attorney Richard Novak said.
Kirk, like anyone, probably said things he regretted, but context can be the difference between understanding a statement and misrepresenting it.
In an informal analysis of 100 videos, theologian and author Thaddeus Williams examined some of Kirk’s most controversial remarks and their broader context.
These were his main findings:
- In 44 of the 100 videos, neither Kirk nor his fellow debater engaged in name-calling.
- In the remaining videos, Kirk’s opponents called him derogatory names 59 times.
- Kirk himself engaged in what Williams classified as name-calling 11 times.
- When examining those 11 instances individually, he found that several commonly circulated Kirk quotes lose important context when presented alone.
“In one video he called someone (a) ‘low I.Q. Individual.’ Who was he referring to? A young man who praised Adolf Hitler. In another video, Charlie used the term ‘idiots.’ Who did he use that term to describe? A now-defunct group of Neo-Nazis known as Identity Evropa,“ per Williams.
Williams continued, “he leveled the insult ‘stupid Muslims.’ In the very same breath, he made it obvious that he is not describing all Muslims, but speaking of that subgroup within Islam that ‘kills Jews,’ or he used the terms ‘tranny’ and ‘freaks’ in the context of describing specific individuals who celebrate such terms themselves.”
You don’t have to believe Kirk was a martyr or that he lived without flaws to give his death grace. Celebrating his murder asks us to surrender something far more fundamental than political agreement: our humanity.
