Contra Trump
近朱者赤，近墨者黑
The title of this chapter in our series Contra Trump — ‘An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’ — is a famous line attributed to Henry Wotton (1568-1639).
Reacting to the murder of Charlie Kirk, a notorious extreme-right wing provocateur, ‘influencer’ and Trump lickspittle, Richard Marles, the Acting Prime Minister of Australia, said that the fatal shooting was nothing less than an ‘absolute tragedy’. Repeating the commonplace nonsense that there is ‘no place for political violence’ in the United States, Marles went on to offer the usual pieties about ‘the government’s thoughts’ being ‘with the family of Mr Kirk’. Echoing this pro forma statement, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ambassador to Washington issued a message of condolence for a man justifiably described by one black writer as ‘the modern day Joseph Goebbels for Donald Trump, whose white supremacy Kirk made palatable for his millennial supporters. He was Rush Limbaugh in skinny jeans. A KKK youth recruiter without the hood and burning cross.’
Kirk’s ideas, provocations and performative politics were an affront to moderate politicians and public figures everywhere, including in Australia. If it were not for the craven behaviour that the Trump White House requires of its ‘allies’, Kirk’s death would have merely been ‘noted in passing’. Instead, it required an expression of fealty, something reminiscent of the ‘pledging of loyalty’ 表忠心 in China.
As for Erika Kirk, the grieving widow, she was quick to declare publicly that her late husband’s message and mission will be ‘stronger, bolder, louder and greater than ever’ and that her ‘cries will echo around the world like a battle cry’. ‘I loved knowing one of his mottos was “never surrender”,’ this pious Christian Nationalist said of her dead husband, revelling in the kind of bellicosity typical of the Trump regime: ‘We’ll never surrender.’
She is continuing the self-delusion of Turning Point, Kirk’s influential (and highly profitable) propaganda operation. As John Ganz, an insightful commentator on right-wing ideas in America, remarked, Kirk ‘did not engage in civil debate but rather in coarse demagoguery that brutally demeaned the dignity of his fellow citizens. That does not in the slightest justify his killing, but to pretend now that he was the model of good citizenship and wise and philosophic public deliberation would be to betray my own beliefs. I think Charlie Kirk made the country a worse place. I believe his murder makes the country even worse.’
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In this chapter of Contra Trump we feature Kevin Rudd’s formal note of condolence. In it he claimed that the thoughts ‘of all Australians’ were with Kirk’s ‘family and loved ones’. In the case of this one Australian, me, this statement could not be further from the truth.
I have known Kevin Rudd for nigh on five decades; nothing about Charlie Kirk, his odious ideas, advocacy and incendiary political posturing sits easy with my memories of this old friend. Although there is the not-insignificant issue of Kevin and Kirk’s shared belief in Christianity. Wait on a minute: there’s also Israel and Gaza.
In 2008, I suggested that Kevin, then Australian Prime Minister, express his government’s concerns about China’s egregious human rights abuses in terms of being a zhèngyǒu 諍友, ‘a friend who defends their principles’. Some years later, in 2015, in fact, I noted that, China aside, Australia even had difficulty being a zhèngyǒu 諍友 to America, its peerless ally. After all, I remarked, that would have required having some base-line principles in the first place. See:
The Chinese rubric of this chapter is 近朱者赤，近墨者黑 jìn zhū zhě chì, jìn mò zhě hēi, a statement, and a warning, about being careful about whom and what you associate with.
We conclude with a poem by Lucas Jones and some thoughts from Terrell J. Starr.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
13 September 2025
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Who Not To Be
Charlie Kirk’s Dead (pt. II)
Lucas Jones
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Fuck Him
Kirk should not have been killed for his views. I believe in free speech, even speech I detest. But words have consequences. He left a record of hate and racism that makes it impossible to summon sympathy. Some say we should refrain from harshly criticizing the dead. I disagree. The most honest way to honor a life is to tell the truth about it.
He was no debater, nor was he some innocent, curious guy seeking mutual understanding with people whom he disagreed with. Kirk was a piece of shit masquerading as a serious thinker. I don’t have empathy for a man who rejected empathy itself and devoted his career to dehumanizing people like me. His death does not erase the fact that he stoked white nationalism and spread disinformation about anyone who wasn’t a white male. …
Well, for a man who said Black people weren’t qualified to hold their positions, at least the white man suspected of killing him clearly wasn’t a DEI hire. He hit his target on the first try. Good thing he wasn’t Black, I suppose?
Shrug.
If Kirk were Black and liberal, the fact that he was a college dropout would be plastered across conservative media and all of his poor life choices would have been highlighted for all to dissect—just as Kirk did in the case of George Floyd.
His bigotry extended beyond race. At a church event, he described trans people as a “throbbing middle finger to God.” On his show, he claimed LGBTQ+ people want to “corrupt your children.”
We are told to condemn political violence and seek unity—even though Trump refuses to do the same, unlike Biden and Obama.
Kirk spent his life pushing for policies designed to make life miserable for marginalized people. Demanding that we mourn a man who justified slavery as biblical and denied gay people’s humanity is cruelty disguised as civility. …
Kirk loved white people and hated everyone else. He lived as a bigot and died as one. That is how he’ll be remembered. Fuck him. The only people I want to rest in peace are the living, marginalized peoples he targeted with his vitriol. I’m sure you think my words are cold and compassionless—because they are.
If you want me to write nicer words about him, he should have been a nicer person. But he wasn’t. So take your self-righteous indignation of my words to his grave site—not me.
Charlie Kirk’s death is now reaping the indifference, chilliness and racial divisions his own words sowed in life.
— Terrell Jermaine Starr, A Black Man’s Obituary for Charlie Kirk: Fuck Him, 12 September 2025
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