What Fascists Taught Me About Empathy (Part 1)
Grief-policing, pearl-clutching, performative outrage and another win on the board for the fascist expansion.
[An edit of a comment on an X post I found, which complained about “leftists creators” calling people fascists]
For as long as I've had a public profile (and long before Charlie Kirk's murder), I've received threats of violence, death threats, and messages telling me to kill myself. Violent rhetoric has always been the rule, not the exception, for anyone who dares to challenge the status quo.
This fact has made the widespread grief-policing, pearl-clutching, and performative outrage over Kirk's death this past week incredibly jarring. It confirmed what was already obvious: for the right, empathy is a weapon they swing selectively, not a value applied universally. For the keyboard warriors losing their shit in comment sections, DMs, and inboxes, it was probably confusing and confronting to see someone who looked, spoke, and thought like them become the victim of violence for once.
White men are not used to seeing white men as victims, because we are far more likely to be the perpetrators of violence than the targets of it, but why confront that reality when it's easier to point the finger at trans people and gang members? Unfortunately for the fascist narrative, Kirk was killed by precisely the kind of person they refuse to see as dangerous: a “good boy”, from a “good family”, a god-fearing, gun-loving family.
This just in! Turns out we live in a system that is itself violent, built on colonisation, exploitation, and inequality, sustained every day through harm against marginalised people. So, while a weird coalition of self-described alphas and incels go around cancel-culturing and dibber-dobbing, women's bodies, queer bodies, black and brown bodies continue to be brutalised and exploited, so that these snowflakes might have the opportunity to swing their meritocra-dicks around a boardroom somewhere, ensuring profits go up regardless of the natural or human cost.
That's not to say these lil guys shy away from the philosophy of harmful systems entirely; they can always be counted on to wade in and excuse the chaos. To apologise for genocide with a "fuck around and find out" or dismiss sexual violence with a "she was probably asking for it." But when one of their own, who just like them, openly upheld racism, sexism, and bigotry, is killed? Cue the waterworks from people who have never spared a tear for anyone who wasn't like them.
One comment on my post captured the delusion perfectly:
"Charlie Kirk is a man who had basically centre-right views. Just like me. And you clearly want him dead. I can only assume you feel the same about me."
Any attempt to contextualise Kirk's death was read as a threat to their own existence. I didn't want Charlie Kirk to die. I don't think it's a good thing that he was murdered. I never have, and never will, advocate for violence. I still believe it’s possible to create a more equal and just world without violence. My work has always been focused on dismantling systems of exploitation without replicating their brutality. The same cannot be said for Charlie Kirk. He was not a good man. He does not suddenly become one in death.
He was a man who spent his time debate-me-bro-ing whether Black people should be flying planes and pondering if the civil rights movement was a good thing. A man who, when shown a photo of a dolphin fetus and asked if it was human, confidently declared "without a doubt, yes" to justify his anti-abortion stance. This is their martyr?
And hold the fuck up, Kirk was NOT "centre-right." He was a bigoted white supremacist whose entire life's work was dragging the Overton window further right and normalising oppression. They wanted his death placed in some sacred category of tragedy, untouchable by context. Still, his record speaks for itself: he joked about genocide, made racist statements too numerous to count, scapegoated trans people, told successful women to "submit to their husbands," and argued gun deaths were an acceptable trade-off for gun rights. In a country where mass shootings are routine, he became the victim of the very culture he spent years defending and stoking. And no, despite some of his final words, it was not at the hands of a trans person.
The outcry his murder has provoked has already dwarfed the compassion he ever showed others. The same can be said of his fans. When I mentioned Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl shot more than 350 times—one person replied:
"What a stupid comparison… On one hand, you have a political figure, on the other, really a nobody."
What kind of moral universe mourns a demagogue more than a murdered child? By any humane measure, an innocent six-year-old should command more grief than a man who spent his life justifying violence against others?
Children are buried beneath rubble in occupied Palestine. Children are starving while burying their parents in Sudan, Myanmar, Congo, their lives reduced to statistics, their suffering buried beneath the fold. Meanwhile, the death of one man (a father, a husband!) and a defender of violent systems has eaten up column inches, cost people their livelihoods, and covered up the everyday atrocities of a planet which spends three-quarters as much on killing machines as it does on feeding people.
The practice of universal empathy means being able to accept multiple truths at once: acknowledging Kirk's humanity and his family's grief, while also recognising the humanity of those whose suffering his platform minimised. It means understanding that bigotry itself is systemic and that accountability grows with privilege, and Kirk used his to amplify harm.
So I do grieve the death of Charlie Kirk. I grieve for his children, who will grow up in a world where their father's death gets weaponised to encourage more people to punch downward and sideways rather than up at the ruling class. I grieve that more kids just like them will be hurt and harmed by the very systems his martyrdom will be used to defend. I grieve that his death will justify more suffering, more division, more violence against those who can least protect themselves.
We've moved beyond a contest of ideas and into a war of visions for the future. The fascist vision is built on inequality, supremacy, and the wilful denial that capitalism is incompatible with human survival. The alternative vision recognises that survival depends on class solidarity—on systems that prioritise human need over corporate greed, and on treating the planet not as a resource to be exploited, but as a refuge to be shared.
The fascist vision is winning.
Now, hundreds of thousands of angry people take to the streets, not to fight against fascism but to expand it, while the billionaire class laughs all the way to the bank, and then to their bunkers.
“Violence is coming to you,” warns the world’s second-richest man, as if there’s any symmetry of experience between Elon Musk and the flag-waving electrician in the crowd. As if the centuries of violence unleashed by capitalism and colonialism weren’t real simply because they didn’t land on men like him.
He’s right that violence is coming because violence is the status quo. But sure, lads, go ahead. Fight the people actually trying to change that.
Thanks for the lesson in empathy, fascists. It’s given me new resolve: to keep fighting for your right to affordable education, housing, and healthcare on a habitable planet. Because that’s what empathy actually is: recognising the suffering and pressures faced by people of every colour, background, belief, and identity, even when they hate you for it. It means fighting for the material conditions that allow everyone to live dignified, healthy, and happy lives. And even though I think those loudmouths in the comment sections are heartless, boot-licking, narrow-minded losers, I’ll keep fighting for a just world for them to live in, too.
Part 2 will examine why fascists are winning and how we push back.