In June, Melissa Hortman, leader of Minnesota’s House Democratic caucus, was murdered, along with her husband, by anti-abortionist Vance Boelter, who had already shot state senator John Hoffman and his wife, and had made a kill list of Democrats and liberal figures. Two months earlier, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro and his family escaped an arson attack by a man with bipolar disorder, over what he imagined were Shapiro’s “plans” for Palestinians.
Even by American standards, it is a febrile, alarming time. The September 10 shooting of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk seemed like a horrifying escalation, if only for its very public nature: it was captured on a live video stream. What has followed is an escalation of a different kind, one that has reached us here.
Act Party leader David Seymour tried to have Parliament pay official tribute to Kirk, a man who held no office and whom most New Zealanders had never heard of. After the opposition blocked his bid, National Party influencer David Farrar declared on X that Kirk’s murder was “a monumentally huge event”, adding, preposterously, that “only the assassination of the President or VP would reverberate more”.
Mohan Dutta, distinguished professor of communication at Massey University, quoted Farrar’s post and said the attempt to honour “a far-right white supremacist … should give you a full list of who the backers of the far right are in NZ mainstream politics”.
It was at this point that National Party MP Joseph Mooney leapt in to declare that “New Zealand doesn’t need a ‘Professor of Communication’ at one of it’s [sic] universities encouraging this kind of divisive and hyper-politicised rhetoric”. Multiple people replying to Mooney on X demanded that Dutta be stripped of his citizenship and deported (“back to Ceylon to pick Dilmah tea”) and his university defunded. The clamour to use the power of the state to punish speech was unabashed and Mooney made no apparent attempt to defuse it.
Simplicity co-founder Sam Stubbs found himself in the headlines after he posted on social media, “We should mourn the violence, but not the man. And we certainly cannot eulogise a racist, sexist and bigot.” Israel Institute of New Zealand director Ashley Church responded that Kirk’s views put him “pretty much in the centre of the political spectrum”.
Church, a conservative Christian, may have thought so, but by any realistic measure, Kirk’s rhetoric would identify him as an outlier, even an extremist in New Zealand. He repeatedly touted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory – the idea that there is a covert strategy to supplant the white race – that the Christchurch mosque killer cited as a motive for his atrocity.
In 2023, Kirk told an audience that then-president Joe Biden “should be given the death penalty”. More than once, he attacked “Jewish donors”, whom he called “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness”. His response to the brutal beating of Paul Pelosi, husband of then-speaker Nancy Pelosi – that some “amazing patriot” should be a “hero” and bail out the far-right conspiracy theorist responsible – was vile.
Even if his fans understood Kirk as essentially a Christian motivational speaker, the failure to acknowledge the worst of his rhetoric feels like cognitive dissonance.
Kirk’s alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was not, as the inscriptions he made on his bullets initially seemed to indicate, a far-right “groyper”. He grew up (and learnt to shoot) in a conservative Mormon family, but appears to have been bisexual and thought killing Kirk was a way of defending the trans flatmate he’d fallen in love with. That young men see public murder as a solution is a peculiarly American agony.
None of this – not the rhetoric, not the guns, not the spiralling purge that has followed – is anything we should want for ourselves. Politicians in particular should not try to pull us toward it.
