On September 10, controversial right-wing political activist and media personality, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated while speaking at a public debate event on the Utah Valley University campus in the US.
Kirk, one of the most prominent voices of the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement in the Donald Trump-led Republican Party, was the founder of Turning Point USA.
The conservative organisation, with branches across several US higher learning institutions, has played an instrumental role in the assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programmes that were introduced by successive Democratic governments.
The many racist, xenophobic and sexist positions of the organisation are well documented.
Despite the revisionism that some media houses have engaged in that seeks to sanitise Kirk, he was a defender of Zionism to the core.
This was clearly outlined in an article published in The Times of Israel a week ago, which stated: “Israel was, to him, a prophecy come true, a picture of grit against its enemies, and as a partner in defending faith against modern threats.”
A traffic circle in Israel has recently been named after him.
Much like his icon, Trump, Kirk believed in the “divine right” of Israel to illegally occupy Palestinian territories — occupation that is violent and unquestionably genocidal.
No-one with a conscience can still deny or explain away the genocidal actions of the apartheid state of Israel in Palestine.
As of September 2025, more than 65,000 Palestinians, half of them children, have been brutally murdered and starved to death by the Israel Defence Force that has relentlessly unleashed its monopoly of violence on defenceless Palestinians, international journalists and aid workers.
Kirk’s funeral this past weekend was attended by thousands of mourners to whom he was a hero.
Trump announced that Kirk would posthumously receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian award of the US.
Trump, Zionists and many conservative and right-wing elements would want us to remember Kirk as a hero.
This is not how I, and many others, will remember him.
Unlike the apartheid state of Israel that he spent years defending, I do not revel in the killing of other human beings, not that of innocent children in Palestine or that of people with dangerous politics like Kirk.
Equally, I do not revel in creating saints out of people just because they have died.
The idea that we must not speak ill of the dead is dangerous because it sets parameters for historical revisionism and ignoring the harm that they caused in life.
When hateful people who cause or justify unimaginable suffering in the world pass on, I may not light fireworks in celebration, but I certainly will not mourn them.
To expect me, as a black woman, to mourn a man who refers to someone who looks like me as “a moronic black woman” who is nothing more than an “affirmative action pick”; a man who disregards the human rights of the LGBTIQ+ community and calls on America to “have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor”; a man so hateful of Muslims that he refers to Islam as “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America” and calls Muslims “dangerous” and “a threat”; a man who has cemented the false and dangerous narrative of “prowling blacks” who kill white people “for fun” (a narrative that has been used in our country to erase the colonial and apartheid experience and trauma of black people using false claims of a “white genocide”) — is to ask me to embrace my own oppression. I will do no such.
Those who wish to rewrite history about who and what Kirk was in light of his brutal assassination may do so.
But the rest of us must not be gaslighted into being “humane” and not speaking ill of the dead.
The only way to have people speak well of you in death is to live a life of goodness, compassion and fairness.
When you choose to live a life where you dehumanise people and justify genocide, we will remember you in death as I do Kirk — as a racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and hateful white supremacist. History has the references.
The Herald
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