After Charlie Kirk, will the right fight or forgive?

Charlie Kirk’s status as a martyr was sealed at his packed memorial on Sunday evening, when an estimated 100,000 people showed up to honour him. Among the crowd was Joseph Moulton, a young right-wing activist from York. He was not far behind President Trump and members of his administration.

Moulton is a founding member of Flag Force UK, one of the original groups that inspired the Raise the Colours movement. When Kirk was assassinated, Moulton had just landed in Phoenix, Arizona, at the beginning of a trip to recruit powerful allies that could spread the movement even further. He had meetings arranged with the Turning Point team and was pushing for a podcast appearance with Kirk himself. ‘Charlie would have been a massive fan of Raise the Colours,’ says Jack Ross, CEO of Turning Point UK.

‘The moment I stepped off the plane, I was bombarded with 30+ messages,’ says Moulton. ‘“Have you seen Kirk?” or “check Twitter for Kirk”. At first I assumed he might have reposted one of our tweets or something… then I was greeted with the grisly video.’

The assassination changed everything. After getting off the plane, Moulton went to the Phoenix airport bar to have a few drinks and process the news. Everyone was talking about Kirk there. Afterwards, he went to the Turning Point headquarters in Phoenix to lay flowers. Kirk was killed early that afternoon and there were already dozens of people gathered outside, with a growing pile of bouquets and mementos. Mitchell Manley, who worked with Kirk for more than a decade, and met him when he was just 16-years-old, was part of the group. Moulton and Manley spoke.

‘I met Charlie at a small event in Colorado,’ Manley said. ‘He was trying to gain support for a then small organisation, TPUSA. He gave me his personal number, and from there we developed a decade-long friendship and professional relationship.’

Kirk suggested that Manley attend King’s College, a small Christian liberal-arts school in New York. Manley received a scholarship from Turning Point to attend King’s. He then interned for Charlie throughout college. ‘I helped build the headquarters here – securing contractors or building chairs… I spent a year working for the Charlie Kirk Show, I toured 25 different colleges with Charlie, I managed his email… Whatever needed to be done, I did it, and it was all because of Charlie’s inspiration and leadership,’ Manley said.

‘Charlie believed in me more than I believed in myself a lot of the time. He was the same charismatic, genuine, Christ-loving figure on and off the camera. He offered them a mic, and they put a bullet in his throat for it,’ he said.

As Moulton stood speaking to Manley, people who wanted to gloat at Kirk’s death started entering the crowd, one of them wearing a black beret and a bulletproof vest. Angry mobs surrounded them. ‘This is exactly what they want!’ said a woman appearing to advocate for de-escalation. ‘Think about what Charlie would do? We need to embody Charlie.’

A woman called Latisa Victoria Perkins and her daughter drove six hours from Long Beach, California, that day to pay their respects at the memorial. Perkins used to live in Phoenix and was a Turning Point volunteer. 

‘Being a woman and a minority, Charlie really helped me open up my eyes to a lot of the lies that are spread in these blue states,’ she said. ‘I had to bring my daughter here, who is bi-racial, so she can learn about the lies of the left.’

‘I’m not for violence. But we are at a point where they are not coming for our children, they are already here for our children… So right now we need to physically, literally, take back our country. Or else when my daughter’s daughter gets here, it’s over.’

On 14 September, a 19-year-old man named Ryder Corral showed up at Kirk’s memorial and trampled on the tributes laying at its base. He was thrown to the ground, beaten by locals, and later charged with criminal damage and disorderly conduct.

The Kirk assassination has produced two very intense and dissonant streams of thought in western conservative politics. Many emphatically say that the right needs to embody Kirk’s example of open dialogue and magnanimity – stooping to retribution would be a thing of the left. But others say that while violence isn’t the answer, dialogue is becoming impossible. 

At Kirk’s memorial on Sunday, his widow Erika chose to forgive Tyler Robinson, her late husband’s killer.  ‘My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men just like the one who took his life… That young man… I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do.’

President Trump, in contrast, decided to show his pugnacious and vindictive side. ‘He [Kirk] did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry, I am sorry Erika,’ the President said. 

Isabel Brown was a Turning Point chapter president at Colorado State University and a close friend of Kirk. She now hosts a show on The Daily Wire. On 14 September, Brown, who is a Catholic, spoke on her show about the previous day’s mass reading. The Catholic Church sets Mass readings years in advance through a standardised cycle.

The reading on 13 September was Luke 6:27: ‘Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well. Do to others as you would have them do to you.’

Brown also posted a 2014 tweet from Kirk, which reads: ‘To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.’

Instead of violence, conservatives have responded with one of the left’s oldest tactics: cancellation. Progressives who openly or implicitly celebrated Kirk’s murder are now facing a wave of calls from outraged conservatives pressuring their employers to fire them.

In Canada, a professor at the University of Toronto posted on X that the ‘shooting is too good for fascists.’ She was placed on administrative leave by the University. Down south, an assistant dean at Middle Tennessee University was fired after she wrote: ‘looks like ol’ Charlie spoke his fate into existence. Hate begets hate. Zero sympathy.’ Shortly after the assassination, a website was created named ‘Expose Charlie’s Murderers,’ which included at least 41 names of people who gloated about his death. The website has since been taken offline.

‘It’s almost impossible to build bridges with people who view conservatives as “Nazis” and then justify or even celebrate violence against them,’ said Elie Cantin-Nantel, a Canadian journalist and publisher of EMCN Media. ‘Some people are so radicalised that meaningful dialogue is simply not possible right now.’

Back in the UK, Moulton and his team of right-wing activists have been facing increasingly violent and confrontational left-wing mobs. ‘Last Monday, a man in his sixties tried to push my friend off a ladder when he was raising a flag – he was almost two stories in the air… This is largely due to the council and media giving credence to the idea we are far-right or extremists, which is not the case’ Moulton said. 

The last post Kirk ever made on his Instagram was a picture of Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee who was viciously murdered by a repeat offender named Decarlos Brown Jr. Kirk added a caption: ‘America will never be the same.’ The murders of Zarutska and Kirk have galvanised the western right into existential fear and righteous indignation.

‘I believe that Charlie’s death will only inspire more people to pick up the torch of debate and civic engagement,’ said Moulton. ‘But something has changed in the psyche of the right. People are painfully aware that the other side doesn’t want to debate, but destroy.’