A wounded America, and a shot that will backfire

Stephen Price

With the end in sight for my 24 year old boiler, an engineer called around yesterday morning to size and price things up. Arriving early, with the obligatory and overdue house clean mid-progress, we had a few chats about the joys of his home city and my former stomping ground for both work and university.

When he asked about my studies, I sheepishly held back and talked around my chosen subjects, before offering my usual, “but I went back to Swansea uni and did an MA to right the wrongs’ but he insisted I give up the goods.

“Philosophy and World Religions,” I said. “But with Welsh too – at least *that* part has been useful for work.”

This has happened before plenty of times. On my LinkedIn, even, we do not mention my A Levels or Undergrad degree. An unspeakable, almost joke – a working class, former council house dwelling gayboy from the edge of the valleys who obsessively reads, thinks, tries to understand, to empathise.

Sometimes, I look back at the confused deer-in-headlights youngster I was, unsure of divergent career paths ahead, wishing I’d chosen ‘better’ subjects – courses that qualified me in something. But I know that given those choices again today, being made to choose one thing to do forever, day in day out, I’d still struggle, because, in the words of Chelsea Wolfe, “I want to be all things.”

Since time immemorial, my ancestors hunted, farmed, reared children and mined – things were more straightforward, tougher in many ways, sure, but this delicate runner-from-the-rugby-ball had to be spat out now.

Now of all times.

Brilliant.

“Watching storms start to form over America”

What my studies have equipped me with, both pre and post graduate, was a hard-earned armour for being able to think, to question, to ask if something is right, and to take criticism on the chin.

I have a natural leaning toward justice – for human and animal and planet alike – and I take criticism as joyous sparring, priviliged to hone my own ideas against others and to, I hope, reach shared understanding or, in the case of my media criticism later on, a better standard of writing, a better finished piece, an appreciation of other angles.

Which leads me on to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I’d only watched a handful of his videos before this week – usually on the subject of trans youth or immigration, two of the USA’s most toxic points of discourse, and then it was next in line for the doom scroll – pugs being pugs, artists sharing their unattainable works and ads, oh yes, ads and more ads. The joyless sludge of social media.

A friend messaged me on Wednesday evening, at around 8pm, and simply said, “Charlie Kirk has been shot.”

“Shit.”

“Girl, someone had to do it”

To quote the over-quoted, Herbert H. Lehman summarised beautifully the need for debate, discourse, and cooperation with those who think differently.

He said: “I must respect the opinions of others even if I disagree with them.”

Naturally, opinion can be hateful, and it can be incorrect, but as someone who *I hope* sits in neither camp, watching without the popcorn from the sidelines, this quite clearly applies on both sides of the fence, left and right.

Was Jo Cox’s murder a bad one, this a good one? The online narrative from the left suggests thus.

Where one side makes 2+2 into 4, the other 5, there’s often too much polarisation to expect a meeting in the middle. I’d even put money on an India and Pakistan style population exchange one day – a civil break-up, if you will, where oil and water accept that there is no more hope.

Words and opinions ultimately lead to action, and even policy.

Following his death, journalist and college professor Stacey Patton wrote: “Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.

“Some received death threats. Some had their jobs threatened. Some left academia entirely. Kirk sent the loud message to us: speak the truth and we will unleash the mob!”

No one in their right mind would deny the butterfly-effect of Kirk’s opinions. But does that justify his murder? Does anything, ever, in a civilised country?

Closer to home, along with thousands of others, George Abaraonye, a Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at Oxford University who became president-elect of the Oxford Union after a vote earlier this year, posted several comments appearing to celebrate what happened.

The Times reported that in one message to fellow students in a WhatsApp chat, Mr Abaraonye wrote, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f****** go”, while another on his Instagram account read, “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”.

Mr Kirk and Mr Abaraonye, a politics, philosophy and economics student, met during a debate on “toxic masculinity” held by the Oxford Union – which is primarily for students and staff at the university – in May.

In a statement posted on X on Thursday, the Oxford Union criticised the student’s comments and said it “firmly opposes all forms of political violence and strongly stands by our commitment to free speech and considerate debate”.

“The Oxford Union would like to unequivocally condemn the reported words and sentiments expressed by its President-Elect, George Abaraonye, with regards to the passing of Charlie Kirk,” the society said.

“His reported views do not represent the Oxford Union’s current leadership or committee’s view.”

The statement added: “We would like to reiterate that our condolences lie with Charlie Kirk’s family, especially his wife and young children, who are enduring such terrible grief.”

The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life.

A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation.

No more political violence. pic.twitter.com/SR71FJkiDz

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 11, 2025

Bernie Sanders spoke beautifully following Kirk’s assassination, saying: “A free and democratic society which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organise, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured or humiliated for expressing their political views.

“That is the essence of what freedom, of what democracy, is about.

“Political violence is political cowardice.”

Sowing the seeds of hate

At odds with Kirk’s stance on Palestine, which he maintained doesn’t exist, I’ve stood in pro-Palestine demonstrations since before the current war on Gaza, I’ve written countless pieces calling for justice for Palestinians, hunted out others to platform again and again and again.

I’m also in the LGBTQI2spiritwtfnow brigade (so probably not someone he’d be a fan of either), but an old school G that’s quite dumbfounded at the current state of affairs, but that’s for another piece.

Kirk’s views are no less inflammatory than opinions held by many many Christians and Muslims alike, his debates were often measured, faultless, with him tending to come out on top when holding up an impenetrable cloak of logic.

But back to Palestine… I’ve shared hundreds, if not thousands, of images of brutalised Palestinians and the ruins of hospitals, churches, homes.

And whilst I, more than most, am doing all I can for a resolution, and to open other people’s eyes, I’d take no comfort in Netanyahu receiving a bullet to the neck. None at all.

The Hague? Now that would be satisfying.

Not only would it be satisfying for a man that has been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, the displacement of millions, and trauma that will pass down familial lines for generations to come to be held accountable, it would also help to disarm the countless others behind him that are just as, if not worse, than him in every way shape and form.

A figurehead is just that. Netanyahu is the symptom, and ‘comparatively measured’ mouthpiece, for an endless supply of people in the wings with deeper, darker motives.

But to think that you can kill an ideology or thought through violence is misguided and naive.

Losing a figurehead is a win for Kirk and those behind him, not a loss. Assassination brings with it elevation to god-like status, immortalisation, and allows an encapsulation of scattered ideas to be better formulated, better weaponised.

I know, from my own anecdotal evidence of social media, that friends, relatives and strangers have shared his content more in the past few days than ever before.

And those who may have sat on shared opinions of his are now emboldened, and perhaps rightly so, in their fact-based opinion on the true nature of many who consider themselves ‘on the left’. That murder is OK for some if they’re disagreed with.

Since his death, Kirk will, if he hasn’t already, receive a level of martyrdom that will only inspire even more polarising figures, more ‘eye for an eye’, and even less measured debate.

America will never be the same. pic.twitter.com/Wd2AJsn0W0

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 10, 2025

One of the last seeds he sowed was a very valid anger following the murder of a Ukrainian refugee at the hands of a man who had slipped through the net in America’s failing justice system. A murder that few outside of the right wing have cared to amplify.

A murder which can, and perhaps even should, be a catalyst for change.

So while many on the left will be dancing, meme-making, and saying ‘he got what he deserved,’ anyone listening to the canaries in the mine knows that this is a shot that will backfire for many years to come.

And it’s the people who are taking the most pleasure in his murder that will have the most to fear.