Charlie Kirk said many things. So many things.

Let me tell you a story. It’s a story about a man. And the world he tried to build with his words.

Sep 11, 2025

The news of Charlie Kirk’s death reached Nairobi the way most American news does: As a trending topic on the timeline sandwiched between a Safaricom ad and the video of a disembodied AI voice rehashing the synopsis of a random movie currently streaming on Netflix. Another political figure, another stage, another gun. Another Tuesday in that distant “great” land of America.

You watch the footage - the man speaking, the sharp, ugly crack of a rifle, the slump, the gush of blood, the chaos. And for a moment, it’s just that. A spectacle. Their madness, not ours. We have our own fires to put out, thank you very much.

But then you start to come across the quotes. The snippets. The videos. Then you start digging. You fall down the rabbit hole of his words, the relentless torrent of declarations that defined his life before a single bullet brought it to a close. And that comfortable distance evaporates.

The poison you see is a familiar one. It’s a cultural export, shipped out from the West in neatly packaged talking points, finding fertile ground in our own societies, whispered by our own politicians, sometimes even from our own pulpits.

Charlie Kirk said many things. And listening to the echoes of his voice from here, in a city built on the bones of an empire he admired, it’s clear that his words were meant to - designed to - build a world. To build a world that looks down on - that steps on - people like me and the people around me.

And it’s a world we must refuse to live in. It must not stand.

- - -

“I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term… and it does a lot of damage.”
(The Charlie Kirk Show, October 2022)

Let’s just sit with that for a moment.

This line. This line... Yuck.

This is no mere throwaway line. In actual fact, it’s the key that unlocks the entire code. To declare war on empathy is to declare war on the very thing that makes us human. It is the foundational rejection upon which every other cruelty is built. It’s a philosophical statement that says, “I refuse to feel your pain. I refuse to see the world from your eyes. Your humanity is an inconvenience to my comfort, to my ideology.”

From this keyboard of mine in Nairobi, let me just be clear: This isn’t some abstract, high-minded debate. This is part of our lived and still very recent history. It is the logic of the coloniser who drew lines on a map without a single thought for the peoples and histories he was carving up. It is the logic of the politician who stokes ethnic flames before an election, refusing to see the mother on the other side of the divide who fears for her children, instead putting his greed and [blood]lust before the very existence of other human beings.

Kenyans, for all our shortcomings, have one thing going for us: When it’s time to band together, we fucking band together. It’s an instinctive state woven into the fabric of our being - it’s fairly easy to strike camaraderie and conversation with a Kenyan, because on some fundamental level, there’s a recognition that our humanity is inextricably bound together. My well-being is your well-being. Your pain is my pain. It’s the default state, before the Tates, Kirks and Kibes of this world start their counter-conditioning.

Charlie Kirk’s entire project was the antithesis of this default state of being that I know so well. His argument wasn’t against a feeling - he was arguing against the connective tissue of a healthy society.

He later clarified, saying he preferred “sympathy,” but that it was a “separate topic for a different time.” Well, I guess time’s up.

The distinction is crucial. Sympathy in this case is akin to standing atop a Land Cruiser. looking down from the open sunroof and saying, “Wah. Uko mbali. I’m sorry you’re down there.” Empathy is getting out of the damn car, and rather than being so infatuated by the sound of your own voice, taking a moment to listen - to genuinely listen - and saying, “I may not fully comprehend your pain, but I hear you. You are not alone.”

Kirk’s ideology required the distinct divide to exist, and for him to remain safely at the top. He built a brand, a movement, and a fortune on teaching a generation of young, aggrieved people that this emotional distance wasn’t a moral failing, but a political strength. A superpower. And once we understand that, the rest of his declarations fall into place with a chilling, predictable clarity.

- - -

“British colonialism was the most benign global empire ever… [it] actually made the world decent.”
(The Charlie Kirk Show, September 2022)

I mentioned the coloniser earlier. To speak of empire, for a city like Nairobi and for many cities across the Africa and the world, is to speak of ghosts. They are in our street names, in the architecture of our buildings, in the very inefficiencies and injustices of our administrative and governance systems. The legacy of colonialism is more than a mere chapter in history books for us.

Try saying that sentence out loud on these streets. Say it to the descendants of the Mau Mau and other freedom fighting collectives across the country, who were systematically tortured in concentration camps for the crime of wanting to be free in their own land. Say it in a continent still reeling from the economic and psychological wounds of extraction, subjugation, and erasure. To call that legacy “benign” is a profound and staggering act of violence. It is to look at our scars and dismissively call them beauty marks.

On his show, Kirk introduced the topic by asking, “Separation of powers, habeas corpus, freedom of speech, individual property rights… where did all of those come from?” The implication, of course, is that these were benevolent gifts, generously bestowed upon us savages by a superior culture. It’s a narrative that conveniently ignores that we had our own systems of governance, our own philosophies, our own concepts of justice long before the first mzungu arrived to “discover” our lakes and mountains. It ignores that the “individual property rights” he champions were often established by violently dispossessing us of our communal lands.

This isn’t just about the past. This rhetoric has a terrifyingly present consequence. It is the intellectual groundwork for a new, insidious form of colonialism. Right now, American conservative groups are exporting their culture wars directly to Africa. They pour money into local proxies - pastors, politicians, activists - to fight their battles for them. Some, allegedly in defense of “traditional African values”, while actively bullying and persecuting others in the name of so-called righteousness.

The sheer audacity. That they, heirs of the empire that did everything it could to dismantle our cultures, now position themselves as protectors. They that ship the political poison, then praise the sickness it creates as a sign of our cultural purity. Charlie Kirk’s sanitised, whitewashed version of history is essential for this project to work. If you believe the original empire was a noble, civilising mission, then it’s only natural that its cultural and religious descendants should continue the work. You must first reject empathy for the colonised, past and present.

- - -

“MLK was awful. He’s not a good person… We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
(Turning Point’s “American Fest” conference, December 2023)

There are some statements so breathtaking in their malice that they leave you speechless.

Kirk’s argument was that the Civil Rights Act - a piece of legislation that simply affirmed the basic humanity of Black people in those “great” United States - was a “huge mistake” because it created a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy” that enables ‘anti-white discrimination’.

Which… Ok. Ok. Let’s unpack that. He is arguing that the legal framework designed to dismantle a system of brutal, violent, and state-sanctioned white supremacy is, in fact, a tool of oppression against white people. It is a a logic so twisted that it would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.

This sounds hauntingly familiar. It is the precise logic of the architects of Apartheid. They too argued that racial separation wasn’t about hate, but about preserving the unique culture and identity of the chosen ones. They too framed any attempt at equality as an existential threat to their existence.

(I was, of course, talking about South Africa here. But hey, if the shoe fits…)

This MLK statement wasn’t an isolated comment. He called George Floyd, a man whose murder sparked a widespread cry for justice, a “scumbag,” and spent his “Exposing Critical Racism Theory” tour spreading debunked claims that Floyd died of a drug overdose, not from a knee on his neck.

This man said, “I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

Words mean things, guys. Words mean things. For me, a Kenyan professional who has had to work twice as hard to be seen as half as good in international spaces, his comment about the pilot is the casual, insulting, demeaning bigotry that is a slap in the face. He was telling every Black person on this planet that our pain is a lie, our heroes are frauds, and our freedom was a mistake.

To do that, you must first possess a profound, bottomless lack of empathy. That, or you must have actively, willfully, and continuously chosen the path of malice and spite.

- - -

“This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way.”
(Appearance with Donald Trump, 2024. I’ve lost the exact date in my notes.)

This man said things. He said so many things.

Here in Kenya, we know a thing or two about Christianity. Over 85% of the country identifies as Christian. Well, “alleges to be Christian” is the more accurate statement. Made most evident in the waves of human bodies in and out of Sunday service that brings traffic to a standstill, in the pastor whose pronouncements make national news, and in the “God willing” that punctuates every plan.

Bwana asifiwe.

And because it is so central to our lives, we are intimately, painfully familiar with its corruption. We have seen politicians wrap themselves in the cloth of piety to hide their greed. We have watched the pulpit become a marketplace, a stage for peddling division and hate in exchange for votes and influence. It is a constant struggle, a battle for the soul of our faith.

In fact, it got so bad that in recent years, our own church leaders - the Anglican Church, the Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) - had to take the extraordinary (and absolutely fantastic) step of banning politicians from speaking at the altar. Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit declared the pulpit a sacred space, not a campaign stage. Think about that. The church had to formally evict the political class and their agents from its holy places because the political rhetoric had become so toxic, so divisive, so profane.

Then you hear Charlie Kirk. A man who built a movement on the fusion of God and political grievance. He called the contest for power a “spiritual battle” where anyone else “stand for everything God hates.” This is the very poison our church leaders are (were?) trying to purge. Kirk’s “Christian Nationalism” is a perversion of faith that uses the name of Christ to justify the very things He stood against. It is a theology of exclusion, a faith that requires an enemy - the Muslim, the liberal, the feminist, the immigrant. Africans have certainly seen this brand of “Christianity” before: It was the theological engine of colonialism and subjugation. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa provided the moral and spiritual justification for a system of racial hierarchy, arguing that God himself had ordained separate destinies for separate races - which is a thing I only learnt about earlier this year when I visited Cape Town.

Yho.

So when Kirk says America is a “Christian state,” it sounds less like the Sermon on the Mount, and more like a Christianity that crucifies Christ anew every waking day.

- - -

“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
(The Charlie Kirk Show, August 2025)

Of all the things Charlie Kirk said, this unsolicited advice to Taylor Swift - who, as Swifties would argue, is one of the most powerful and successful women on the planet - might be the most revealing. Precisely because it’s so perfectly distilled in its misogyny, so pure in its patriarchal panic.

He argued that marrying might “de-radicalise” her and make her “more conservative.” He mused that one of the reasons she had been so “annoyingly liberal” was because she wasn’t yet married. He told his audience at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit that they should prioritise finding a husband over a career, warning them of their diminishing chances of marriage and children after the age of 30. (Because yes, to be woman is to be beholden to a man and his seed.) He claimed birth control makes women “angry and bitter” and that the modern dating pool was infected with a “Jezebel spirit” because of feminism.

It’s a familiar sentiment, isn’t it? “You’re too loud. Too ambitious. Too… much. Tulia ndio upate bwana.”

Sound like the desperate cry of a man terrified of a world where he is not in charge. It’s about power. Not even proper power - cheap, unwarranted, undeserved power. It’s about maintaining a social order in which men like him hold the reins, and women know their place.

- - -

“Counting or not counting gang violence?”
(Utah Valley University, September 10, 2025)

And so, we arrive at the end. The final, brutal irony. A life lived by the word, ended in a single, physical act.

A university stage, a microphone, a question from the audience. The scene isn’t new, but this one would be his last. The question was about gun violence. An audience member asked how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the last decade.

Kirk’s answer was a reflex, the well-practised, knee-jerk response of a man whose ideology requires a constant supply of villains. “Too many,” he said. An answer from the gut, not the brain. An answer that doesn’t need facts because it has feeling. The feeling of righteous certainty.

The questioner, however, had the facts. “Five.”

He then pivoted, asking Kirk if he knew the total number of mass shooters in the same period. This was the moment the script was flipped. The ground shifted beneath the performer's feet.

And in that moment, Charlie Kirk made his final rhetorical move. Cornered by a fact he couldn’t dispute and a broader question he didn’t want to answer, he did what he always did. He deflected. He tried to change the subject. He reached for a familiar, ugly tool from his belt.

“Counting or not counting gang violence?”

It is a pivot. A dodge. A rhetorical sleight-of-hand designed to shift the conversation away from the uncomfortable, increasingly overwhelming general problem of gun violence, and towards a specific, racially-coded scapegoat.

It is a final, desperate act of “othering.”

In his last seconds of public discourse, as in so many times before, his instinct was not to engage, not to reflect, but to casually insinuate and divide, to offhandledly point a finger at a different, darker-skinned boogeyman.

No final grand statement. No compelling closing argument. Just a final deflection.

Seconds later, the sound of a pop. Screams. Chaos.

“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”
(Turning Point USA event, April 2023)

The man who had once argued that human lives were an acceptable, “prudent” price to pay for the right to bear arms became, himself, part of that price.

His death is a personal tragedy for his family, a fact that I do not dismiss. But it is also a grim, public warning. His final words were a perfect microcosm of his life’s work: A reflexive smear against an “other”, and a racial dog whistle to evade a truth.

When you build a world without empathy, you build a world without mercy. It’s a reality that’s not kind to anyone involved, including you, the evangelist of such a world order. The lawn at Utah Valley University is quiet now. The sirens have faded. All that remains is the silence where a voice used to be.

Charlie Kirk said many things. So many things. I’ve read too much about and from him today. I feel dirty. That’s enough of that.

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