The flag of St George displayed at an EDL demonstration, photo Gavin Lynn, Wikimedia Commons

---

The eulogising of Charlie Kirk: freedom of speech or media failure?

By KARL RUTLIDGE

On Thursday evening, 10th September 2025, I sat down to watch the 10pm evening news on the BBC, as I often do. The main story was the shooting at a rally in Utah of a man of whom I had never previously heard, who was being eulogised as a defender of free speech and debate across divides, and who also happened to be a close friend and ally of Donald Trump.

Over the next few days, coverage of his murder and reactions to it, together with the hunt for his killer, dominated much of the output of the national broadcaster when they were not giving publicity to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and his bunch of far-right thugs in Central London, and interviewing Nigel Farage for the umpteenth time in typically fawning and uncritical fashion.

if it looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist, thinks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then just possibly it is one

The man at the centre of this drama was Charlie Kirk, who by his own admission was a hardline right-wing conservative Christian who had made a career out of spreading views which, in my opinion, are utterly repellent. For the most part, the BBC could not bring itself to give much of a flavour of what Kirk actually believed, though to their credit, The Guardian did compile a list of quotations illustrating his disdain for everyone from trans people to Muslims, from Palestinians and Black women to anybody needing an abortion.

Now, there are various dimensions to this whole saga which are worth drawing out a little, even as one could write whole articles on each in turn:

Free Speech

---

Kirk has been lionised by some as a ‘fearless defender of free speech’, which pretty much always seems to mean the demonisation of others – whether they be minority groups with nothing like the same platform to respond, or those on the left of the deeply polarised American political scene.

Now, I appreciate that I am wading into highly controversial territory when getting into discussion about the boundaries of free speech. However, it is important to say that, in my view, the reason that so-called ‘free speech absolutism’ does not work is twofold.

Firstly, the old adage that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ is utter nonsense. Words have huge power and can be used for good or for ill. Kirk was not afraid to contribute to the demonising of those he disliked and to call for things such as the stoning to death of gay people. These are not ‘mere words’; they have tangible consequences.

Secondly, there is a manifest inequality seen in the way folks just quoting what Kirk actually said have faced censure, including losing their jobs, as in the case of MSNBC commentator Matthew Dowd, for example. It seems like free speech advocates on the far right do not believe in it themselves when they are on the receiving end of critique.

White-washing and Right-washing

---

One of the most disturbing aspects of this whole affair is the way in which the legacy media, and the BBC in particular (from what I have observed) have engaged in the whitewashing of Kirk’s comments and ideology. People whose words and behaviour would be regarded as abhorrent by most folks if they knew the whole story are sanitised and sterilised, so that only the most anodyne and innocent-sounding projection of who they are and what they are about is given. The net effect of such carefully controlled presentations, and in particular the omitting of important information about those involved, is to give artificial weight and false legitimacy to extreme views.

This whitewashing, or should one say right-washing, appears to be a common tactic when it comes to presenting those with views hostile to minority groups in particular as simply expressing ‘legitimate concerns’, for example, or as being victims of ‘cancel culture’. One would not know from much of the coverage of Graham Linehan’s recent arrest for inciting violence against trans women, for instance, anything like the full content of what he actually tweeted, his obsessive harassment of trans people and cisgender women who support trans rights, and his history of being banned from Twitter for hateful conduct before Elon Musk bought the platform.

In this case, I suspect I was not alone in having never heard of Kirk before his murder, and one could be forgiven from most of the early news coverage in particular for having no idea of the extremity of his opinions. This is dangerous because it serves to give a false picture of who he was and the values his wife, Erika Kirk, has vowed to continue in a video notable for its arguably rather threatening tone. He was very far from a good-faith debater, and it is important that the full reality of who he was is not disguised under a cloak of ‘impartiality’ or made out as in some sense smearing the dead, especially as Trump has already portrayed Kirk as a ‘free-speech martyr’.

Scapegoating and Misinformation

---

Before the shooter in this case, Tyler Robinson, was turned in by his own family, discarded bullets and casings were allegedly found on the roof from which he fired the fatal shot. These bullets are supposed to have had the maker’s initials, TRN, engraved upon them alongside a set of ‘anti-fascist’ slogans (the latter, it turns out, are a mixture of quotes from video games, including ‘Helldivers 2’ and ‘Far Cry 6’, and song titles popular with so-called Groyper groups critical of Kirk and sitting to the right of the mainstream MAGA crowd).

Now, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that a concern for trans rights motivated Robinson to act in this way, but that did not stop the Wall Street Journal claiming that pro-trans slogans were found at the shooting site, a claim echoed by the Daily Telegraph, Times and Daily Mail in the UK. Even if this is later retracted, and it had not been at the time of writing this piece, the damage is done and the response by those echoing this claim has been sickening. The worst example I have seen is from US podcaster Joey Mannarino: “If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer. We’ve already tolerated far too much [from] those creatures.”

Again, this is not the harmless exercise of free speech, but deeply dehumanising and dangerous rhetoric, especially as it comes in the midst of a decade-long campaign in the media to cast trans people as a threat not just to women and girls, but arguably to western civilisation. The level of hostile reporting in this country has been far in excess of the size of that proportion of the UK population who are trans, and is growing year on year across the legacy media from the Telegraph to the Guardian. The rhetoric used, especially since Trump’s second inauguration, has become increasingly hostile, with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security issuing a red warning at the end of June 2025 about the threat to the basic rights and safety of trans and intersex people in the UK. Add to this the passing of regressive anti-trans laws in multiple US states, and the picture into which these lies are being spread is already bleak and dangerous.

The Radical Left?

---

When not scapegoating trans people for Kirk’s murder and/or branding the entire trans population as violent and predatory, the target for retribution has been those on what Trump calls the ‘radical left’, which seems to include every Democrat despite the centrism of many in that party, and those who have been critical of the President himself and the MAGA movement generally.

There is more than a little irony in the insistence that ‘the problem’ here is the ‘violent left’, when the vast majority of those responsible for shootings in the USA in the past year have very much been on the right of American politics. Now, that is not to claim that everyone on the left is an angel who would not hurt a fly, and that everyone on the right is evil embodied; the capacity for violence is a universal fact of human nature. Yet, the data shows that it is very far from accurate to portray matters in a ‘both sides are as bad as each other’ manner, especially in the context of growing online radicalisation of young people in particular.

In this case, it turns out that Robinson comes from a conservative Christian and Republican-voting family, and the about-turn from figures such as Nancy Mace when this incident suddenly became a lot harder for the MAGA crowd to weaponise is striking, flipping almost instantly from vile transphobia to ‘thoughts and prayers’.

Those who have been praising Kirk because he was apparently civil in the tone of voice he used and in trying to shake hands after debating with others fall into the trap of ‘civility politics’ and ‘tone policing’. As many LGBTQ+ folks and people of colour can testify from experience, tone policing is where how somebody says something is treated as more important than what they actually say, which is a form of logical fallacy but all too common as a way in which power is reinforced. The effect is that being angry at one’s oppression is cast as being too emotional or unreasonable, while politeness and calmness can give actually very unpleasant remarks and views a false sense of legitimacy. However, hate speech is hate speech, regardless of how nicely it is said.

Double Standards?

---

The contrast between how the events of 14th June and 10th September 2025 have been responded to is notable indeed. On the former, a Democrat lawmaker called Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark and two friends were murdered by Vance Boelter, a supporter of Donald Trump. At the time, Republican Senator Mike Lee posted mocking and derogatory comments about her death, and Trump refused to attend her funeral. There was no mass media coverage in the UK, no statement from Keir Starmer, no hand-wringing about political violence and suppression of free speech, all of which have followed Kirk’s murder.

What is the difference between the two? After all, both are murders of political figures, and both are threatening to democracy. I would argue that what the reaction of the BBC and Labour leadership reveals is something of the level of connection between the US evangelical right and UK institutions, something arguably also seen in the excessive platforming of another of Trump’s friends, Nigel Farage, by the national broadcaster. Claims of fighting for truth ring very hollow indeed when someone like Kirk can be eulogised and sanitised in this way while political violence aimed at a Democrat is all but ignored. All deaths matter, but some more than others, it seems.

The Rise of Fascism

---

In the midst of this, it was particularly shocking to see the bloodlust from some Republicans and conservative commentators, and the calls for the mass arrest of Democrats. In particular, Matt Forney seems to think that the actions of Nazis following the Reichstag Fire of 1933 are less a warning from history than an instruction manual, arguing that all Democrats should be rounded up and the party banned. At the same time, others complain about Trump’s regime being called fascist and compared to the Nazis.

Now, all of this is taking place when, as noted above, trans people and refugees are among those being branded as the ‘enemy within’ and the cause of all society’s problems, as in 1930s Germany with queer people, the Jewish population, migrants and others. People are being snatched off the street in the USA by masked gangs who seem utterly unaccountable and being shipped off to El Salvador without any semblance of due process and without hope of return. The first camps in Nazi Germany appeared in the 1930s and were used to get rid of ‘undesirables’. Trump’s political opponents are being ousted from their jobs and targeted with (pardon the pun) trumped-up charges, and people from minority groups are being sacked purely because of who they are, again with parallels in the Third Reich. Universities and other educational institutions are being captured and academic freedom restricted. Books featuring positive depictions of LGBTQ+ people are being banned, and critique of the government is being censored. Need one go on?

In short, if it looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist, thinks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then just possibly it is one. This is, therefore, a very dangerous time indeed for democracy and freedom, especially for those who find themselves on the receiving end of the bile of the Charlie Kirk figures of this world.

---

Dr Karl Rutlidge is a Methodist Minister who advocates for trans rights and other social justice issues, and sometimes dabbles in writing poetry.