Of all the tributes to Charlie Kirk, Robert Kennedy Junior’s might be the most startling: ‘Once again, a bullet has silenced the most eloquent truth teller of an era. My dear friend Charlie Kirk was our country’s relentless and courageous crusader for free speech.’ Is Kennedy here making a parallel to the assassination of his father RFK or maybe JFK? Perhaps. But is it possible he’s referring to the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior? And if so, is there really any connection between these two figures?

Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, certainly made the case that her husband was ready to ‘lay down his life’ for the cause of freedom. The naysayers, assuredly, will recoil at the idea of a pro-Maga spruiker being anything other than an apologist for Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, white privilege, Zionism, misogyny and so forth. For the more radical elements of modern-day leftism, Trump is Hitler and Kirk was his Goebbels. And in the struggle against political evil, justified violence has a role. Thus the message on the casing of one of the assassin’s bullets: ‘Hey Fascist! Catch!’

For the majority of progressives, with notable exceptions, the brutal murder of a 31-year-old father of two young children has not been cause for public celebration. More a case of praising with faint damns his passing. For instance, Wajahat Ali, on Bluesky, agreed that ‘the murder of Charlie Kirk was criminal, wrong, and should be condemned’. That said, Kirk was a ‘horrible, hateful man who spent his life radicalizing young people to embrace their worst demons by targeting women, people of color, immigrants, and the marginalized’. The aptly named ManiacalZ, also on Bluesky, encapsulated a sentiment shared by many a progressive: ‘The person who motivated the shooting of Charlie Kirk was Charlie Kirk.’

Before pushing back on the notion that ‘karma’s a bitch’ or variations on that theme, a major trend on social media sites according to Reuters, let us first acknowledge that Charlie Kirk put it all on the line last year when he visited twenty-four university campuses in battleground states with his ‘You’ve Been Brainwashed Tour’. His engagement of college students, amplified a millionfold by its presence on TikTok, has been touted as the single most important reason for a surge in Trump’s support amongst Generation Z, previously considered a lost cause for conservative politics. In a political atmosphere acknowledged by Kirk himself to be an ‘assassination culture’ after the two attempts on Trump’s life in 2024, he was risking it all when he kicked off ‘The American Comeback Tour’ in Utah.

Though a $50 drone would have located Tyler Robinson on the rooftop overlooking the campus quad, perhaps no amount of security could have prevented Kirk’s assassination at some point during his prospective campus tour. Nevertheless, witnesses of the murder event report the absence of any security checks on the day. Insane. There are reputedly 400 million guns in America and getting shot, even if you eschew politics altogether, is always a possibility. Kirk was a Second Amendment advocate, another pretext for blaming him for his own death, and yet if I were a permanent citizen of the USA – let alone a celebrity – it would be foolish not to carry a concealed weapon or at least hire an armed security detail.

All of this, nonetheless, is not to question Kirk’s decade-long campaign to de-radicalise young people indoctrinated by university professors with every kind of perverse theoretical loathing of the pillars of Western civilisation, not least Christianity. Kirk, though himself only briefly a university student, could argue as well as any professor that America’s founding papers were Christian-inspired documents created in the most part by practising Christians. MLK – though this might come as a surprise to pro-BLM types – also understood this and used his Christian faith not only to provide the moral framework behind his commitment to the civil rights movement but to argue that ‘colourblindness’ was a fulfillment of America’s original promise.

As a Christian, Charlie Kirk believed – as MLK did – that Americans should ‘not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’.

Kirk’s supposed racism was confirmed on the eve of his assassination when he mentioned that Iryna Zarutska’s murderer, an African American, boasted that ‘I got that white girl’. The motivation of racism, as Robin DiAngelo argued in Nice Racism, must never enter the equation when a white is the victim. Conversely, a white person can never be not racist. Bluntly put, progressives and proponents of DEI have pathologised normal people. Inherently bigoted and in most ways deplorable, normies are the tool of right-wing demagoguery. Only the ideological progeny of Malcolm X, MLK’s anti-Christian rival for the hearts and minds of African Americans, would defend this form of neo-racism.

Kirk, then, was controversial in the sense King was controversial. In both cases, they entered into the lion’s den and took their chances. Kirk’s genius was for public debate and pointing young people in the direction of normality: that is, marriage, parenthood, home ownership, faith, financial responsibility, community service and love of country. In his last interview, the day before the Comeback Tour commenced, Kirk was advocating for Generation Z to attain better access to affordable housing while expressing his concern that too many of them were opposed to marriage and to buying into traditional notions of the American Dream.

When Charlie Kirk questioned the ubiquity of abortions, he was accused of threatening the ‘reproductive health’ of women. He called for the sealing of the southern border and was labelled a xenophobe. Kirk, wearing a white tee shirt with the word Freedom inscribed on it, was responding to a question from the crowd about the correlation between transgenderism and violence when Tyler Robinson, purportedly in a relationship with a trans partner, shot him. The ideology – or temporal religion – of the modern-day left is not a forgiving one. Perhaps, in the end, the main difference between MLK and Charlie Kirk is that the former was taken down by a right-wing bigot while it was a left-wing bigot who took out the latter. In any case, the words of Erika Kirk serve as an apt epitaph for both of them: ‘Now and for all eternity he will stand at his saviour’s side wearing the glorious crown of a martyr’.