It’s OK to speak ill of the dead. In fact, sometimes we must

2 hours ago 1

Opinion

September 17, 2025 — 5.00am

I am often puzzled by the way we respond when someone dies. It’s almost as if our brains have been switched off.

Me? I’m not very kind to the living, so I’m entirely unsure why my behaviour should change when someone dies. The idea that we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead is baffling. It comes from a time when we were far more committed to the woo-woo than we are now. As in, spooky woo-woo, some weird leftover from more spiritual times. Maybe people are riffing on that old saying “from your words to God’s ear”. If you believe in God, that is.

Charlie Kirk was a highly visible and important member of the conservative movement, and touted as a future president.

If you speak ill of the dead, they will end up in hell. If you believe in hell, that is.

Sadly, that approach is stopping any serious discussion of the real legacy of Charlie Kirk, murdered last week.

Let’s be clear. I am definitely not in the camp of celebrating Kirk’s murder. I don’t celebrate violence. I was totally gobsmacked and impressed when John Howard wangled gun bans. Awesome. That man saved lives, while destroying many others with his policy on boat turnbacks.

I mourn the way Kirk’s family has been devastated. No one deserves that. No child deserves to be deprived of a parent (a lesson perhaps Donald Trump could learn as he deports the parents of minors).

But I cannot speak kindly of a person who, when living, was filled to the brim with hate. Kirk was a white Christian nationalist, the worst of US exceptionalism. He hated Latinos, Jews, blacks, with a special level of hatred for black women. He believed white people were victims of racism. He hated feminism. He was anti-abortion. In response to a question about what he would do if his 10-year-old daughter was raped and became pregnant, he said she would go on to deliver the baby. Apparently something about good coming out of evil. Thank god our Queenslanders have more sense.

Kirk and the Turning Point USA organisation he founded are anti-migration. He touted the widely discredited “Great Replacement” theory. He supported the idea that the 2020 US election was stolen. He was pro-Trump and, sadly, pro-gun. Of course, he was anti-trans. One of his favourite projects? Professor Watchlist, where university students could dob in leftie academics. We don’t need that here. Instead, we have Janet Albrechtsen and Sharri Markson.

But Kirk stood for more than the brain-dead outing of leftie academics. He stood for hatred. Hatred and division. White folks good. Black and brown folks bad.

Speaking of white folks – pretty confident that the alleged killer is white as. Again, US media doesn’t do too much commentary on the whiteness of the murderer, or on the fact that right-wing terrorists are responsible for many more murders than left-wing terrorists.

Predictably, the right is targeting the left and calling for its undoing, describing it as unlawful and violent. It’s interesting that the US government, that bunch of sooks who tug their forelocks when approaching Donald Trump, now want to chuck a full McCarthy. Eradicate every leftie (can we please begin with Tuesday’s Wordle?). Meanwhile, those January 6 lunatics are running riot, wanting to wipe out the left entirely.

But if you want to stop political violence, I suggest the right looks elsewhere – like, in the mirror. According to the Cato Institute, 3599 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975 to September 10, 2025. Most were killed in the 9/11 attacks. And who was responsible for the most of the remainder of political murders? “Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 per cent of the total,” it says in its report. Left-wing terrorists murdered 2 per cent of the total.

And the US media are entirely onboard with, ahem, whitewashing Kirk’s political position. I asked Kyle Spencer, journalist and author of Raising Them Right, what she’s observed.

“When Kirk died, the American media behaved as if they were polite guests at a wake, rather than journalists whose job it is to honestly assess someone who had very hateful rhetoric and who held opinions that were very cruel.”

That kind of behaviour, she says, comes from a place of fear, where Americans see the vengeful tactics and responses of Trump and those adjacent to him. The sackings. The litigation. The beckoning of the hounds.

On Monday night Australian time, The Washington Post sacked one of its most influential columnists, the last remaining black woman in the opinion section, Karen Attiah. She says she was fired over social media posts about gun control following Kirk’s murder. Attiah wrote on Substack: “They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”

Haha. The Post hasn’t upheld fairness since before Trump won. Owner Jeff Bezos, participant in the world’s most vulgar wedding, refused to allow staff to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 US election.

Now the US president is suing the New York Times – it’s not yet clear exactly why but perhaps for its coverage of the links between convicted sex offenders Jeffery Epstein and Donald Trump.

The weak coverage by US journalists has, in some ways, made coverage of the Kirk murder even more partisan, says Spencer.

“The hesitation to go for the jugular ended up really offending the folks that Kirk considered enemies,” she said. It was hard for anyone demonised by Kirk to be forgiving of the gentle handling of the influencer’s views in the wake of his death.

Spencer says the MAGA worldview has infiltrated journalism. Some journalists have become experts at whitewashing, glorifying and sanitising MAGA initiatives, probably at the behest of their masters. If it’s of their own volition, that’s terrifying. And she reminds me of a saying that that journalists have used – don’t trust your mother. “But they’ve come to a place where they trust the rhetoric of the extreme.”

Charlie Kirk was a husband and a father. But he also made it his business to demonise everyone not like him. That makes him a demon, not a saint.