There is another stunning quote of Kirk that is often brought up in this context.
"I can't stand the word empathy. I think it's a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage".
I read this article in thehindu and I think in Germany you would get into a lot of trouble for this opinion.
The American conservative activist and MAGA firebrand built his brand on vitriol, scorn for empathy, and a defense of violence. His assassination has now split the internet over how much empathy he ever deserved
www.thehindu.com
Here are some parts:
A career in vitriol
Kirk's genius, if you can call it that, was in knowing that cruelty makes better content than civility and that sense of disdain ran through his all his work.
He derided affirmative action by claiming Black leaders "stole a white person's spot." He suggested Black pilots might not be qualified, described Black women in customer service as "moronic," and recycled every tired trope about absent Black fathers and criminality. He compared Black Lives Matter to malevolent forces, called Martin Luther King Jr. "awful" and the Civil Rights Movement a "huge mistake." He trafficked in the great replacement theory, warning that migrants would "eliminate" white Americans and that Haitians were "infested with demonic voodoo".
For women, his message was just as cruel: stay home, remain fertile, and forget careers. College, he recently told a fourteen-year-old girl, was worthwhile only as a means to snag a husband. Birth control, he claimed, made women "angry and bitter." On an episode of
Jubilee, he once implied that he would force his 10-year-old daughter to carry a pregnancy to term if she was raped.
To queer folk, he offered only contempt, branding them "groomers," celebrating Supreme Court rulings that legalised discrimination, and calling for "Nuremberg-style trials" for doctors providing gender-affirming care. He also famously cited
Levitucus: 18 from the Bible, implying the gay community should be, "stoned to death".
For Palestinians, his sympathy was simply nonexistent, because Palestine itself "does not exist". According to him, the thousands upon thousands of children dead was apparently a fault of their own making, just as Japan had brought atomic devastation upon itself.
This is the fascist boomerang at full spin. The violence you normalise becomes the violence you suffer, and then the violence you suffer becomes the violence you justify. Kirk did not just live by the sword, rather built an entire brand around sharpening it. Now the same blade will likely be wielded by others, in his name.
Should Kirk have been assassinated? No. Should we mourn him? Not necessarily. The more urgent mourning is reserved for his victims — the trans kids driven to despair by his rhetoric, the Black people he belittled, the migrants he caricatured as animals, the women demeaned, and the Palestinians whose deaths he shrugged off. They deserve empathy. Kirk, who sneered at the very word, is harder to mourn without feeling complicit in hypocrisy.
So how should one respond? Perhaps the clearest path is to divorce empathy for Kirk from empathy for the world that produced him. It is possible to feel sorrow for his family without sanctifying his life's work. It is possible to lament the climate of violence without pretending its latest victim was innocent of creating it.
Empathy is not unconditional. It is conditional on how we live, what we give, and whom we harm. Charlie Kirk lived without it. He leaves the world no poorer for its absence.