The Ironic Death of Charlie Kirk

Heads up: this one’s messy, hard, and urgent.

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Charlie Kirk - 31, political firebrand and cofounder of Turning Point USA - was fatally shot at Utah Valley University while doing a Q&A about, of all things, gun violence. His last words to a crowd of 3,000 were literally “gun violence” before a single shot from a rooftop ended his life.

It’s almost too on-the-nose, like the universe writing satire in real time. Kirk, who spent years cheerleading for a culture where more guns supposedly meant more safety, died in a moment that collapsed his rhetoric into reality. The shooter is still unknown.

Charlie Kirk was the founder of Turning Point USA, a far-right youth political organization deeply tied to MAGA politics and Christian nationalist movements. He built a massive following among young conservatives through campus chapters, media appearances, and his daily podcast The Charlie Kirk Show. Beyond being a media personality, he was a powerful political influencer who helped shape the culture wars around gender, sexuality, race, and morality. His message was clear: America needed to return to “family values,” and anyone who challenged that - including sex workers, LGBTQ people, feminists, and racial justice advocates - was cast as an enemy of the nation.

Sex workers have a problem with Charlie Kirk because his politics and rhetoric consistently harmed our communities.

He regularly conflated sex work with trafficking, pushing the dangerous myth that all sex work is exploitation. This kind of framing has fueled laws like FOSTA-SESTA, which stripped sex workers of online safety tools under the guise of “protecting victims” but actually led to more arrests, surveillance, and violence. Kirk’s alignment with Christian nationalist morality politics only made this worse, reinforcing stigma that erotic labor is sinful or dangerous, and supporting punitive systems that treat survival strategies as criminal behavior.

Kirk also positioned himself as a champion of free speech, but his defense of that principle was selective. He was eager to protect conservative voices on campus while simultaneously supporting policies that censored and criminalized sex workers, queer activists, and reproductive justice organizers. Through TPUSA, he gave a platform to speakers and ideologies that actively worked against marginalized communities, including calls for harsher policing and deeper criminalization in the name of “protection.”

In short, Charlie Kirk mattered because he wasn’t just talking - he was mobilizing.

His network influenced legislation, emboldened policymakers, and mainstreamed the idea that sex work equals trafficking and moral decay. For sex workers, that meant fewer resources, harsher criminalization, and more violence. His death is significant not because many sex workers disagreed with him, but because he represented a political machine designed to erase us. His legacy is one of building backlash, and sex workers are among those who have had to live with the consequences of the movements he amplified.

This moment isn’t just about one man, one gun, or one university. It’s about the way state violence, political polarization, and America’s gun culture have fused into something necrotic that touches all of us. Charlie Kirk’s murder during a Q&A about gun violence is shocking not because violence is rare, but because it ripped away the abstraction. For those of us who live in the crosshairs of criminalization - sex workers, queer folks, people of color - violence has never been distant. It stalks our workplaces, our homes, our streets. What feels extraordinary to the political class is what we have been surviving all along.

The irony is bitter: Kirk was exercising free speech, in a room with no metal detectors and minimal security, when his final words - “gun violence” - became prophecy.

We don’t have to agree with what he said to recognize that he had a right to say it without fear of being killed. Yet we also know that our own voices, when we speak out about survival or rights, carry even greater risks: arrest, stigma, assault, and erasure. If safety is owed to voices society despises, then it must also be owed to those society tries hardest to silence.

This killing cannot be pinned on a single shooter alone. It’s the inevitable product of a culture where fear is weaponized, where access to high-powered guns is easier than access to healthcare, where polarization makes enemies out of neighbors.

The same logic fuels violence against sex workers: demonize us, strip us of rights, and suddenly harm feels justified. When dehumanization becomes normal, pulling the trigger - whether literal or systemic - becomes imaginable.

And yet, even here, solidarity matters. We disagreed deeply with Charlie Kirk’s politics, but death is not conditional. We mourn because we refuse to normalize killing as an answer to conflict, even when the target of that killing was a man who built his career on opposing our very existence. Our struggle is bound up in rejecting all violence, not only the violence that touches us directly.

From this moment, we demand more than platitudes. Accountability must reach beyond a rooftop sniper to the systems that made the shot possible: unfettered gun access, inadequate safety protocols, and a culture addicted to division. We need investment in prevention, not punishment - mental health, conflict resolution, community care, and real spaces for dialogue.

We need solidarity across movements, because political, criminal, and interpersonal violence all spring from the same poisoned well.

And we need to decriminalize and destigmatize survivors, who too often emerge from violence only to be punished again by debt, suspicion, and neglect.

Charlie Kirk’s death is not just another headline - it is a mirror. It shows us how fragile the line is between speech and threat, between rhetoric and reality. For those of us who already live at the margins, the reflection is familiar and chilling. Safety cannot be conditional on respectability or political alignment.

Either we fight for a world where everyone’s safety is non-negotiable, or we resign ourselves to a world where no one is safe at all.