This piece was written on Friday, September 12. At the time of its completion, the details of Kirk’s assassination were still under investigation.
I wrote this in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death: a conservative activist known for his Christian identity and his strong defense of the Second Amendment. He was shot and killed at a university event in Utah as part of his “American Comeback” tour. What quickly followed was a chaotic spectacle of polarization online. Some celebrated his death, others mourned him as a man of God. Still, many insisted that his murder was a karmic inevitability as a result of his advocacy. Though the motive for his murder is presently unclear, what we do know is that his death immediately became a battleground for political labelling.
This is one of the many issues I have with political labelling. It pulls us into the binary logics of the colonial gaze: left or right, good or evil, martyr or monster. It causes us to overlook complexity and disables our ability to focus on our reality, the harm Kirk’s politics mobilized and the simultaneous grief that comes with any death. After reading the reactions to his death, I had sat with this question: if we celebrate the killing of someone we despise, are we also mirroring the very violence we condemn elsewhere? That’s not to invalidate the very harms his actions have taken against my own communities. What happens when those who honour his death neglect to also hold him accountable? What happens to those left with the damage of his legacy? In this binary logic, there is little space for the full spectrum of grief.
Political labels by design seek to simplify and contain our humanity into tidy boxes easily
controlled and regulated. But simplification also produces the erasure of lived realities and lived suffering. One of my Elders reminded me recently of the interdependence between all living beings (yes, not just humans) and the choices that ripple out beyond the temporary labels that we carry. The colonial gaze we’ve all been conditioned by imposes categories of race, gender, identity, and nation by flattening complexity and forcing people into boxes to serve systems, not life.
Therein lies the tension I feel with theory because it alone cannot be our saviour from this predicament. As Black feminist and poet Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” If we continue to debate within the confines of identity labels placed upon us – left versus right, liberal versus conservative – we continuously reinforce the systems of categorization in place. The real harms that continue today in prisons, of colonial violence, of alarming housing and food injustices, of inaccessible healthcare, persist unrefuted.
Meanwhile, on the internet, people are fighting over who gets to claim a moral victory over Kirk’s death. But the internet is not the real world. It is one technological aspect of it built in binary code and transformed into a “culture” that profits off of division and rage, while the real world goes on. The orange hue of the sun continues to shine, the trees continue to release oxygen, and communities continue to fight despite ongoing injustices. It’s easy to get lost in the internet delusion and use up all our energy in online reactions, to the effect that we don’t have capacity any longer for the real work of change.
But real mobilization is happening. Here in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), the tenants’ union SLAM-MATU valiantly fought and won against a 19.8% rental hike as a result of collective organizing. In British Columbia, the Supreme Court recognized the Haida Nation as having complete sovereignty over the terrestrial areas of Haida Gwaii. These actions are not about labels, but are about innate human needs for food, housing, support, and collective care. They are about living in respectful and reciprocal relationships with one another.
So, what do we want to build? An internet world where labels rule and transactions thrive, or a living world where relationships are essential and transformational? What are we able to learn when we stop obsessing over who is right or wrong online, and instead ask what the people around us need? What movements can we organize, here and now, where we are?
Charlie Kirk’s death shows us what happens when labels consume us. In this space, nuance disappears, violence becomes a spectacle, and we lose sight of what liberation demands. True liberation does not grow from ideological purity or choosing the right side of the internet war. It comes from rebuilding our relationships, restoring the deficit of trust between strangers, and cultivating communities of care. Start small. Start local. Start with who is in your life. It’s the micro shifts that make the macro change possible.