Following Charlie Kirk’s shooting death on September 10th, representatives, as well as the general public, were quick to condemn such violence on social media. However, I pause at the response of condemning all political violence, a sentiment many have expressed after Kirk’s killing. In my view, the ability to condemn political violence correlates with privilege, a perspective which implicitly trusts the power of our voices.
We must consider what shapes the imagination of communities whose voices have been ferociously limited. For communities whose networks are saturated in such language of violence, we must accept a posture of humility in understanding how they feel they can gain access.
To be clear, Kirk’s assassination is unacceptable. For anyone still struggling to understand why Charlie Kirk’s assassination has no place in our current state of affairs, I would point them to Van Jones’s article for CNN. Van Jones writes about a direct message that Charlie Kirk sent him just before his death, inviting Jones to debate him on The Charlie Kirk Show. Jones suggests that Kirk really believed in freedom of speech and that Kirk’s murder threatens everyone’s voice.
Ben Shapiro, in his woefully misguided article The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Violent Movements We Must Denounce, says, “The only way to truly fight political violence is to denounce the ideologies that breed it. Anything less means that more radicals take their ideologies to the logical extreme—and the result is blood in the streets, innocents dead, and an ever-widening cycle of violence”. For once, I actually agree with Ben Shapiro. Except that, while Shapiro mistakenly suggests the ideologies breeding violence are boogeymen like “trans ideology” and “radical Islam”, we can actually observe the violent rhetoric being spewed out by the Trump administration and its supporters. Following Shapiro’s train of thought, the ideology that constructs such language must be completely rejected.
Statistically, language correlates with violence. Studies by the Williams Institute School of Law and the Human Rights Campaign (as well as many others) found that trans people are more likely to become victims of violence than their cis peers. The Human Rights Campaign notes that “Texas and Florida, two states with some of the most extensive slates of anti-LBGTQ+ bills in place, are home to the highest number of fatalities…” We have a wealth of evidence to suggest that, even when anti-trans bills and ideas fail to pass, their language enters public dialogue, and therefore the homes of every American. The public discourse creates a parody of trans identity in the minds of Americans, even if they meet or get to know a trans person. Right now, the parody of transness is horrifically violent.
As of September 18, the Oversight Project, a lobbying group supported by the Heritage Foundation (responsible for drafting Project 2025), called for the FBI to “…designate Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism (TIVE) as domestic terrorism”. It is worth noting that at the time of that publication, it was already known that Kirk’s killer was not transgender, despite the Oversight Project naming, in the first sentence, Kirk’s death as a key reason for their proposal. Inevitably, Americans will believe Oversight’s parody of trans people as violent and volatile. Their belief will endanger the safety of our trans communities. The Oversight project, and efforts like it, aim to elevate a rhetoric of violence into state language.
Because of the dynamics between systems of power, I think people in positions of privilege often consider violence through the lens of the powerful. That is, when we read about violence against a trans person and violence against political movers and shakers, we equate the killers’ motivations under one umbrella. This simply cannot be true.
We tend to connect the act of violence with a pathos – the pursuit of abstractions like catharsis or revenge. When we apply this logic to acts of political violence by marginalized groups, we reduce their action to emotional volatility. A privileged perspective assumes that upward mobility is always possible through dialogue, work, and self-determination. In this framework, we have no use for violence except as an emotional outburst.
Administrative systems that determine mobility intentionally block access to marginalized groups. A framework that conflates violence and catharsis fails to consider how someone without power derived from their identity can envision mobility. I implore everyone to consider how your understanding of yourself, of mobility, of power dynamics, is affected by being constantly berated with the language of violence. Our systems of power intentionally confound violence with communication. For many of our peers, violence is their linguistic inheritance.
Considering systems of power and the reality of group dynamics, we must confront two ideas. 1.) We must use the language of community, leveraging it against systems of power that want to envelop entire communities in the language of violence. 2.) Until this language of violence changes (which it likely never will – until we break free of the patriarchy, white supremacy, and addictions to power), we cannot reasonably condemn all political violence.
I do not, have never, and will never advocate for violence. I only insist that we consider why political violence happens, and not reduce the intentions of violent protestors. Until the prolific language of violence and the constantly looming might of the entire US military, which reinforces it, ceases, we must do our best to offer the language of community and mutual responsibility. While we speak in community, we must give our language action. We must craft a rhetoric that redefines the marginalized self-image into someone who is not violent or inherently irredeemable, but someone worthy of a voice with an actionable tenor. While continuing this effort, we must ask ourselves if we can reasonably condemn people for speaking the only language that they know will be heard.
Mac Chamberlain is a fourth-year English and Spanish major at Lipscomb University. Mac is a poet and a fellow with Common Ground Journalism.
The Fulcrum's Executive Editor, Hugo Balta, is an instructor with Common Ground Journalism. He is an accredited solutions journalism and complicating the narratives trainer.
