Charlie Kirk was murdered on September 10, 2025. This is not about his murder. if you want details or information, that’s what I know; I’m nowhere near the investigation or event, and had little awareness of Charlie Kirk before he was killed.

I know a lot more now, because a lot of people oozed out of woodwork I had not known existed to chortle over his death. (I also saw a lot of mourning, some of which was quite significant because of who was mourning.)

The response has been interesting, from a psychological perspective and a social perspective. A lot of people have been reported as having lost their jobs thanks to their response to the murder, including teachers and doctors, people you’d expect to know better. The caveat here is that just as I know of no-one personally who’s rejoiced at a murder, I know of no-one personally who’s lost their job as a result of rejoicing over the murder.

Yet it’s happened; Jimmy Kimmel’s show was suspended indefinitely over his claims that the murderer was “red tribe,” despite a lot of evidence that the murderer was at least highly influenced by blue tribe propaganda.

For example, there’s a meme going around:

Person 1: Charlie Kirk said he can't stand the word empathy, therefore he was a terrible person
Person 2: Why don't you read the entire quote where he goes to to say he prefers the word 'sympathy?'
Person 1: I don't want the entire quote
Person 1: I just want to hate Charlie Kirk

The thing about empathy and sympathy is entirely accurate: I’ve seen people say it literally. When I saw it, I was like “Really?” - because I was also reading these statements by people on the left who were saying that Charlie’s murder was awful, that Charlie was a good man, that he was doing “it” the right way - whatever it was - by literally engaging in good faith debates with people who disagreed with him.

So I looked it up. Kirk did say he couldn’t stand “empathy” - and he did go on to say that he preferred “sympathy” because he didn’t think empathy could be properly encompassing of someone else’s totality, and totality is important for true empathy. (This is my paraphrase.)

I saw the same kinds of claims about his enthusiastic support of the Second Amendment: “he wants to trade dead kids for guns!” - and no, he never said that. That’s a projection of a summary; he actually went into quite a bit of detail about his stance on the Second Amendment (he was for it) and while you may disagree with him, he was logical, sane, and positive about it - and not once did he suggest that a single death due to gun usage was good. He was saying that people will do bad things, and disarming people who would do good things wasn’t the answer, even if it were possible.

He even added that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens were the last refuge against an authoritarian government - an odd stance for a man people are claiming to be a “fascist.”

I saw the same kinds of claims about gay people: he wanted to stone them! – except he didn’t. I saw this from Stephen King - who got called out for it, and did his own investigation, and he actually made a point out of apologizing publicly for the claim.

I saw the same claims about Kirk being a racist - he hated the Civil Rights Act! – which he did. (At last!) Except when you look at why, it turns out that he thinks it did more to hurt the black community than help it, by gamifying malaise in the name of “support.” You may disagree with his description of the Civil Rights Act, but I don’t think you can say that his disdain for it is “racism.” If anything, it’s respect of the black community and regret that portions of it have been harmed.

If you’d have asked me about any of this on September 9 - the day before his murder - I wouldn’t have been able to tell you any of it. I ended up learning a lot more about Charlie Kirk through my own doubt, going “Really?” and asking myself who benefits from telling me all of this about a murdered man.

To me, it looks like it’s all performative morality: people so eager to identify with their political leanings that they make sure to describe themselves as compliant to “their people,” even when compliance describes them as committing an evil. “People liked by my tribe scribble naughty things on precious artwork, so therefore I better get to scribbling. Do you know anything naughty?”

It’s horribly lazy, and that makes it gross. It’s understandable - from the laziness aspect, but that doesn’t change that it borders on direct evil and enables great cruelty in humankind.

It’s a mechanic we’ve seen throughout history: a relatively small group creates an identification that describes an “other,” a group or person that represents monsters. Then they ask a reasonable question: “Don’t you want to fight monsters?”

It’s easy to say “Yes, I want to fight monsters! Down with monsters!” - that’s actually a statement few would even want to disagree with.

The problem is that it’s missing a core question: Are they actually monsters?

Is that man who plays with kids in the park actually a pedophile? He might be… but he might love children and try to encourage their futures.

Is the Jew who refuses to condemn a war to defend his people against genocide a warhawk? He might be - but he might also think that people shouldn’t be killed just because their parents were Jewish, and a war against an aggressor has the hope of teaching future generations that aggression might not be the right path forward.

Is the cashier who refuses to talk to you or look at you, with the nose ring and the dragon tattoo, a degenerate, a sociopath? She might be. Or she might be autistic, or a loner, seeking her own expression of her own life, trying to avoid yet another outsider who refuses to just let her be… or maybe she’s even endured tragedy in her own life and is doing the best she can.

We don’t think about these things enough. We see everyone as if they were a mirror of ourselves: if we’ve suffered, they’ve suffered in the same way, if we have enough money to live, surely they can afford nicer clothes too. We don’t seem to understand that everyone has their own path and their own circumstances.

And then “our side” - whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans - hands us an easy judgement. Yes, a man who plays with children (maybe even his own) is a pedophile. Yes, Jews who … well, do anything at all are evil, because they hold themselves apart as a subculture. Yes, the social outlier who dresses different chooses noncompliance and therefore should be cast out. Yes, a Republican is evil - as long as you’re a Democrat. Yes, a Democrat is a degenerate slimeball… as long as you’re a Republican.

So Charlie Kirk gets these three word summaries written about him - even in life, because those memes and reasonings about him were around before his death, or else they wouldn’t have been so ready for use when he was murdered - and tribal alignments dictate your belief until you have no choice but to confront them.

He had opponents - political opponents, people who disagreed with him on many core issues. And he invited them to debate in good faith. It’s been very difficult for me to find anyone who actually directly confronted him outside of casual incidents who actually resented his existence. And I’ve looked.

By this I mean: it’s not been hard to find people who tried to challenge him out of the blue who resented him. “I gave him an axiom and he disagreed, darn him to the potholes of heck forever” is the pattern there - people who demanded agreement from someone who knew his own mind and refused to say “Oh, you think I’m wrong, how could anyone who picked a decision out of thin air ever be incorrect, I’m on your side now.”

The people who actually engaged with him seem to be pretty unified: they disagreed with him, possibly for these reasons, and maybe they even disagreed with how he phrased things (“I hate ‘empathy’” is eminently misquotable, as we’ve seen), but pretty much nobody said that he was actually an awful person, even if they thought his positions were untenable for them.

None of those people have celebrated his murder. They might still be wearing tribal hats, as it were, but they’re not using premanufactured judgements as guideposts for their lives. (Well, when it comes to murder, I suppose.)

I don’t think I’m much of a tribalist. It’s impossible to be completely neutral, but I strive to be of my own mind: if I’m tribal, it’s because I chose it as much as I’m able. I challenge myself as much as I can. If I see a judgement, I ask “What are the circumstances, what would I do, what would lead someone to do that?” - and sometimes I come up empty. (“What would make me murder someone in cold blood” is a good example where I can only conclude that evil - or utter, incompatible-with-humanity insanity - exists.)

I find tribalism to be horribly lazy; much of it is a desperate desire to belong, or a desperate desire to defy. These are harmful urges. You are human; you do belong to someone, and they belong to you. (If you think this is not true, bloody ‘ell, reach out to me, I will do everything in my power to ensure that you belong with me no matter what, because the desire to not be “an Other” is unifying in and of itself.)

You are also yourself: you defy by existing. That tattoo you have (that says “soup” in Chinese lettering) - even if a thousand others have the same, you defy expectations even if you got it because others did. Or maybe you defy by resisting tattoos: it does not matter as long as you chose.

Being human has only one real requirement: don’t be lazy. Be human.