Before his killing, I had never even heard of Charlie Kirk. Having stepped away from X/Twitter, I had no real exposure to the American right-wing influencer bubble. Yet, in the last 48 hours, our UK media has been saturated with his name, his photograph, his story. Rolling coverage, live updates, glowing tributes – as if a man most Britons had never heard of until yesterday is suddenly of historic importance.
And it begs the question: why this level of obsession?
In Britain, we know the devastation of political assassinations. We remember Jo Cox, brutally murdered by a far-right extremist in 2016. We remember Sir David Amess, stabbed to death in 2021. Both were sitting MPs, elected representatives serving their communities. Their deaths shook our nation. Yet our media reported those killings with restraint and dignity. Their funerals were sombre, their legacies remembered in context – not idolised, not mythologised, not immortalised into warrior legends.
In stark contrast, the coverage of Charlie Kirk has taken on an almost mythic tone. He is being cast not just as a victim of violence, but as a martyr, a heroic defender of Western civilisation. Even the FBI director, Kash Patel, referred to him as a “brother” and signed off with the words, “see you in Valhalla.” The choice of language is extraordinary: Valhalla evokes Norse warrior mythology, a world of pillage, conquest, and violent glory.
For a public servant, heading a law enforcement agency, to draw on that imagery is jarring. It blurs the line between sober justice and the aesthetics of battle and martyrdom. It is not Christian, not civic, and not measured. Instead, it romanticises Kirk’s death, elevating him into the realm of myth and legend, far removed from the much harsher reality of who he was and what he stood for.
Let’s be honest: Charlie Kirk was not some neutral “family man.” His public career was built on misogynistic, racist, and homophobic views. He mocked the deaths of Palestinians and condoned the brutality in Gaza. He pushed an aggressive pro-gun agenda in a country already bleeding from gun violence. Yet now, headlines describe him as a family man, a patriot, a visionary – erasing the uglier truths of his record.
This sanitisation matters. When our media joins in the idolisation of figures like Kirk, it imports America’s culture wars into our public space and tells us which lives and deaths deserve reverence. And that culture is not one we should aspire to in Britain. We do not need the American habit of turning every political death into a battleground for myth-making or a chance to crown martyrs of the culture wars. It is not British to glorify individuals while erasing the harm they caused, nor to frame politics through the lens of warriors and enemies. Our own traditions, as seen in the restrained reporting of Jo Cox and David Amess’s tragic murders, have emphasised dignity, respect, and context. To abandon that for imported culture-war theatrics is to diminish our standards of public discourse and warp the values that hold our society together.
And then there is the double standard. In Gaza, medical sources say that at least 59 Palestinians were killed today alone, including 14 members of the same family. These deaths are rarely given the same level of coverage – entire families wiped out, schools and refugee camps bombed, lives ended with barely a mention in our news bulletins. Those deaths are summarised as mere statistics, stripped of names and stories. Meanwhile, one white American man is treated as a world-historical figure.
The contrast could not be clearer: Jo Cox and David Amess: reported with dignity but without cultish martyrdom. Palestinians: invisible, their humanity barely acknowledged. And Charlie Kirk: catapulted into canonisation.
To be clear, his murder cannot be justified. Political violence is corrosive and must always be condemned. But that does not mean we should whitewash who Kirk was or what he stood for. The media’s obsession risks doing just that: painting him as a saint while erasing the damage of his rhetoric, and worse, ignoring the global suffering that dwarfs his singular tragedy.
So perhaps the real story here is not Charlie Kirk himself, but what our coverage of him reveals about us. Whose lives are deemed valuable? Whose deaths spark vigils and wall-to-wall coverage? Who is humanised? Who is sanctified? And whose lives and deaths are brushed aside, treated as too complex, too foreign, too inconvenient to confront and better forgotten? If the cameras can follow every detail of his death, they can also follow the destruction of Gaza. If his life is worth endless analysis, so too are the lives of Palestinians whose stories remain untold. Until that imbalance is confronted, the obsession with Charlie Kirk tells us less about him and far more about the values of those choosing to mourn him so loudly.
Soulful Spaces 