I made a conscious decision not to write about Charlie Kirk after his assassination last fall.
I think all the tpc writers did. When I searched ‘Charlie Kirk’ in our archives, I only got two results. Both had only passing references to Kirk, and only one was written after his murder. Some fruit’s a little too low-hanging, apparently.
That’s not to say I didn’t have ideas for a Charlie Kirk post. I thought of a one-man Socratic dialogue, inspired by the infamous rooftop debate from Daredevil, where my Daredevil half would argue Charlie Kirk’s humanity and my Punisher half would list all the reasons Kirk didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. I thought of an assessment of Kirk’s legacy, one that pointed out that Charlie Kirk did nothing noteworthy and his legacy can be summed up by an (sigh) X I’ve seen about Rush Limbaugh:
I did neither of those things. Instead, I’ve thought of a parallel I want to explain. Charlie Kirk, in several ways, mirrors Game of Thrones villain Ramsay Bolton.
Quick disclaimers: my experience with Game of Thrones is minimal. I’ve watched chunks of a few episodes during some of my college friends’ watch parties of the final seasons. Don’t worry, my buddy Max will tear me a new one for talking about GoT without watching it. Also, I didn’t like Charlie Kirk. I abhor every position he held. He tried to dress his motives up as fReE sPeEcH aCtIvIsM, but in truth he devoted his life and his organization’s resources and influence to making America worse in every conceivable way. If you’re expecting one of those whitewashed, butt-kissing tributes that Trump’s administration tried to wring out of the media, stop reading now.
Anyway.
In Game of Thrones, Ramsay Bolton is the worst of the worst. If you’ve never seen the show, consider this: feeding his baby brother to his hunting dogs is one of the least evil things Ramsay does. Torture, brainwashing, marital rape, knowingly sending his soldiers to their deaths, killing his own men, murdering his family for power, eating a sausage in front of a freshly-castrated man (no, I’m not making that last one up)—all on Ramsay’s rap sheet.
Charlie Kirk, for all his many flaws, never sank to the level of moral depravity Ramsay Bolton did. He did, however: start the Professor Watchlist, a Big Brother site where conservative college students can dox their professors for teaching WoKe LeFtIsT pRoPaGaNdA; say there should be Nuremberg Trials for doctors who provide gender-affirming care to trans people; was a mouthpiece for the extremely racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which has motivated multiple mass shootings…I could go on, but my point’s made. TL;DR: the first parallel is that neither Ramsay Bolton nor Charlie Kirk were good people.
Both rose to prominence from nothing, thanks to their charisma. Ramsay was a bastard son of Lord Roose Bolton, who went unacknowledged well into his adulthood until he asserted himself as an heir to the Bolton wealth by force. And, despite his complete amorality, there is a certain charm to Ramsay’s character. Sure, he sent hundreds of soldiers to their deaths and killed more than a few of them himself, but he still had the leaderly qualities that made his men follow his orders in the first place. He gives his torture victim Theon Greyjoy (the guy he castrated and then ate a sausage in front of) Stockholm syndrome by way of false sympathy and manages to charm Sansa Stark into marriage.
Charlie Kirk was a regular dude from the Chicago suburbs, until he wasn’t. He dropped out of community college after only a semester but charmed right-wing moneybag Bill Montgomery enough that they co-founded Turning Point USA. Through Turning Point and his own people skills, Charlie Kirk found his way to places that, going purely off credentials, he never would’ve. He started a wave of conservative activism on college campuses despite his own college experience spanning less than a year. He spoke at dozens of churches despite not being ordained. He became the Trump Administration’s de facto ambassador to younger generations, but he never held office; his only political experience was volunteering for an Illinois Republican’s Senate campaign in high school.
Similarity number three: the devil’s luck. Even in a land as cutthroat and Machiavellian as Westeros, Ramsay Bolton’s atrocities aren’t without consequences. His torment and mutilation of Theon Greyjoy and rape of Sansa Stark costs his father important connections with their respective families. Killing his father, stepmother, and brother in order to make himself head of House Bolton leads to the rest of their allies cutting ties with the Boltons, knowing betrayal is inevitable. Until his swansong episode, “The Battle of the Bastards,” however, those consequences seemingly land around Ramsay, not on his shoulders.
Charlie Kirk had an effective way to shield himself from any real consequences. How? Two words: RAGE. BAIT. My fellow educators know (and are contemptuous of) a certain kind of student: the attention seeker, who doesn’t care if that attention is positive or negative. Nothing is off-limits for these types of students: smartmouthing the instructor, antagonizing classmates, throwing things, swearing, screaming. Kids like these place students and teachers around them in a no-win bind. Ignore them, and you inadvertently enable their bad behavior and further frustrate their already-frustrated classmates. Engage—whether that’s the teacher sending them to the office or calling home, or students telling them to shut up—and they receive the attention that keeps them going.
Charlie Kirk ran TPUSA on this damned-whether-you-do-or-don’t approach. If the college freshmen he ambushed for a “debate” refused, then they’re a snowflake off to waste their parents’ money on a gender studies degree. If they engaged, whether they avoided his rhetorical traps and ad hominem attacks or walked right into them, Kirk was the guy with cameras and editors. He could clip away any irrefutable points, make a half-second where they looked empty-headed the thumbnail, and upload it with a title that claimed he “OWNED,” “EMBARRASSED,” “DESTROYED,” “CRUSHED” them. The same logic applied to his written or podcasted hatefulness. Ignore him throwing out his ketchup because it was woke or saying the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and your silence was taken as agreement. Clown on him for calling Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s Super Bowl halftime show “sexual anarchy” or TPUSA’s (God, I’m really about to type this) wearing diapers to own the libs, and he had a phalanx of snarky retweets, response videos, and critical articles from the mAiNsTrEaM lIbErAl MeDiA to rile his echo chamber.
Fourth parallel: Ramsay and Charlie’s streaks of bastardly luck eventually run out, and their own actions factor into their respective downfalls.
In season six’s “The Battle of the Bastards,” Jon Snow, Ramsay, and their respective armies fight the titular battle. Ramsay, being Ramsay, kidnaps Jon’s kid brother Rickon and uses him as a sadistic plaything, shooting arrows at Rickon that intentionally miss, waiting until the brothers are inches away from reuniting to put a fatal arrow in Rickon’s back. The battle begins. It’s here that Ramsay’s sociopathic shortsightedness finally sinks him. Ramsay throws everything at Jon, even ordering his archers to fire on the battlefield, dismissing all of his soldiers that are killed. Jon’s reinforcements arrive, and with so many of his soldiers thoughtlessly sacrificed, Ramsay has no choice but to retreat.
Jon and his forces manage to breach Ramsay’s hidey-hole, but instead of killing Jon when he has the chance and decapitating his army, Ramsay instead takes the time to kill Jon’s giant friend Wun Wun with an arrow to the eye. Jon, triply enraged by his sister’s violation, his brother and now Wun Wun’s senseless murders, gets his hands on Ramsay and beats him unconscious.
Ramsay wakes up in a cage, with Sansa’s cool gaze on him. Even with all his resources exhausted and no one to save him, Ramsay taunts Sansa. She coldly rebuts with the truth: “Your words will disappear. Your house will disappear. Your name will disappear. All memory of you will disappear.” That’s when Ramsay realizes: he’s trapped in the kennel with the hounds he gave a taste for human meat and that he starved for a week, anticipating feeding a defeated Jon Snow to them. Ramsay tries to bring his hounds to heel, but his desperate attempts fail: His dogs. Are. HUNGRAY. As Ramsay’s hounds rip him apart, House Bolton dies out, doomed to, as Sansa said, vanish into the fog of history, all thanks to Ramsay.
Charlie Kirk disregarded mass shootings, claiming “some gun deaths” were the cost of having the Second Amendment. He, in a dogwhistling, pretend-ignorant way, encouraged violence against anyone who didn’t believe exactly what he believed. Kirk’s mocking of George Floyd’s murder, celebration of the attempted murder of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and dismissal of empathy as “made up” further deadened the right’s already-atrophied capacity to care for other people. It was one such emotionally deadened, radicalized young man who fired a .30-.06 bullet through Charlie Kirk’s throat, ironically as Kirk was voicing tired, debunked rhetoric about black gang violence.
The right-wing media machine and the Trump administration tried to squeeze reverence out of America at large, with a funeral more like a concert, harsh crackdowns on criticism of Kirk, and talks of making “Charlie Kirk Day” a federal holiday. But the same contempt and disrespect Charlie Kirk dished daily, the public served back. “Kirkifying,” photoshopping or AI-generating Charlie Kirk’s face onto anyone you can imagine, is a trend, and I’ve found Internet forums counting off the best Charlie Kirk jokes.
Which underlines the final similarity between Ramsay Bolton and Charlie Kirk: they’re doomed to a piss-poor legacy, assuming they even have one. Ramsay’s recklessness dooms his whole family to being forgotten in Westeros’ history books. Similar to what Dana Gould said about Rush Limbaugh, now that Charlie Kirk isn’t above ground to stoke right-wingers’ victim complex and antagonize left-wingers, once the last celebrity has had his face Photoshopped over theirs, his words will disappear.
His impact will disappear.
His name will disappear.
All memory of him will disappear.
Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.
