Killed for their words: the parallel cases of Charlie Kirk and Robert Brasillach

On the 10th September 2025, the American influencer Charlie Kirk was shot dead whilst visiting a university in Utah. He was an incendiary figure in the US media who used his sizeable platform to push far-right conspiracy theories, campaign for the re-election of President Trump and defend the right to bear arms at the cost of gun violence. In the aftermath of the shooting, there was no shortage of irony amongst commentators. But can someone’s hate speech, as virulent and dehumanising as Kirk’s was, ever truly justify their death?

Robert Brasillach

This was a question that troubled the French public in 1945. As the Second World War drew to a close, a provisional French government led by general Charles de Gaulle began a process of legal ‘épuration’ to punish collaborators of the Nazi regime. One of the most infamous of these trials was that of the acclaimed writer Robert Brasillach. Novelist, poet, critic and self-proclaimed fascist, he was a frequent feature in the French press during the 1930s and acted as editor-in-chief of the far-right newspaper Je Suis Partout. Its front pages were branded with vitriolic articles by Brasillach supporting the Nazi regime and expressing extreme anti-Semitism. During his trial they were used as evidence of collaboration and he was found guilty of intelligence avec l’ennemi. The punishment was death; he was killed by firing squad on 6th February 1945.   

But was Brasillach truly, as one headline describes, “killed for his words”? (Corliss, 2000). Capital punishment does seem an extreme response for what could be described as hate speech.  But a closer examination of Brasillach’s journalism reveals the deadly consequences of what he wrote. For example, in an article from 1942 [Figure 1], he recounts an anecdote of some Bastille Day celebrations – banned by Pétain’s Vichy government – where the Mayor applauded someone in the crowd mocking Pétain. He identifies this man as having a badge on his arm saying ‘Vendu’ before suggesting how the local townspeople should have responded: « Croyez-vous que la jeunesse italienne de 1922 n’aurait pas fait une exposition punitive contre ce village avec des gourdins et des purges ? »  As the historian Alice Kaplan (2000) notes, the town Brasillach describes was in the non-occupied zone and Je suis Partout would only have been available to the police, not the public. Not only was he “practically suggesting a fascist raid on the town”, he was givingfascist militiathe information they needed to carry out anti-resistance arrests – or assasinations (Kaplan 2000, pp. 81-82).  

Figure 1. Je suis Partout article published 7 February 1942. https://www.retronews.fr/journal/je-suis-partout/07-fevrier-1942/1/bdfa695c-a392-407e-b156-d2534fa28f05

An even more damning article appeared in September 1942, urging the Vichy government to deport Jewish children alongside their parents: « Il faut se séparer des Juifs en bloc et ne pas garder les petits, l’humanité est ici d’accord avec la sagesse. »  As thousands of Jewish men, women and children in France were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, Brasillach’s ‘wise and humane’ advice was on the front pages of “the most widely read newspaper in the occupied zone”. It is hard to measure just how many people were influenced by what Brasillach wrote, but given that by 1942 there were 250,000 copies per issue being printed, his audience was undeniably large  (Kaplan 2000, p. 50). Moreover, whether he intended to or not, his words inspired fascist action. There was a clear correlation between the names that were routinely denounced in the columns of Je Suis Partout – typically members of the resistance, such as the Jewish politician Léon Blum – and the targets of the fascist secret police who were arrested, sent to camps or killed outright. (Kaplan 2000, p. 55)

Brasillach’s journalism therefore was far more than mere propaganda condoning the Nazi regime. Rather it was an active tool that promoted the identification and elimination of its enemies. The fact that he exploited his literary talents to push hateful fascist rhetoric only reinforced his guilt. It wasn’t just a betrayal of the French state; it was a betrayal of intellectual duty. As de Gaulle surmised, « la talent est un titre de responsabilité » [cited in Kaplan 2000, p. 212] and Brasillach had abused his completely.

Charlie Kirk

It is in this vein then that we begin to see the similarities between Brasillach and Charlie Kirk.  Though ‘intellectual’ might not be as accurate a term as ‘influencer’, as Kirk’s intelligence was indeed questionable, the most striking similarity is their shared ability to exploit their chosen media to push their far-right agendas to a very large audience. Kirk’s attention-grabbing style was well-suited to social media formats and earned him millions of followers, with over 5m on Twitter/X and 7m on TikTok (Evans 2025). The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed daily on the pro-Trump news platform ‘Real America’s Voice’, served as the mouthpiece for his views in much the same way as Je suis Partout for Brasillach.

However, what distinguished Charlie Kirk from other social media stars was his real-world engagement. Despite holding no government position, he was a close ally of the Trump administration and was credited with winning the Republican vote among gen-Z in the 2024 election (Smith 2025). Since founding Turning Point USA in 2012, which currently describes itself as America’s largest ‘youth movement’, Kirk has bolstered a far-tight presence on university campuses and effectively transformed them into ‘cultural battlefields’. (Speri 2025)

Figure 2. Kirk at Utah Valley University on 8 Sept. 2025.  Photograph: The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

Under a banner blazoned with the words ‘Prove me wrong’, Kirk held live debates on university campuses across America. [See Figure 2.] Students could line up to question him one-on-one, usually on polarising topics like immigration, abortion and gun-control. This was arguably “his favored medium” (Speri 2025) as it created the exactly the kind of confrontational exchanges that thrive online. A “clickbait savant”, there are endless tweets, TikToks and YouTube clips of Charlie Kirk debating his opponents and winning sound-bite victories. (Demopoulos 2025).

However, when observed in long-form media, as in the Cambridge debate below [Fig. 3], Kirk’s arguments often appear less rational than that of his opponents. But as academic studies have pointed out, when it comes to populist discourse, this no longer matters. While trust in traditional sources of authority has broken down, appeals to reason and evidence are seen as inherently suspicious and mark someone out to be part of the intellectual elite (Sligo 2018, p. 138). In contrast, Kirk identified himself with the “muscular class” of America (cited in Speri 2025) and with his ‘prove me wrong’ provocation demonstrated that the over-educated woke-left could be outwitted by someone who does not have a college degree.

Kirk also resembles Brasillach in his ideological support for authoritarianism. During a debate at the Cambridge Union in May 2024, Kirk was asked about a professor watchlist on the Turning Point USA website.  Set up in 2016, the watchlist allows people to anonymously contribute American university professors’ names whose teachings they disagree with. In response to the whether this infringes upon teachers’ freedom of speech, he responded  “if they don’t say obscene things, they won’t end up on our watchlist […] it is using our own free speech to expose professors who we believe are making America a worse country” [02:23-02:33] This hypocritical response is characteristic of the modern far-right whose defence of ‘free speech’ frequently comes at the cost of everyone else’s. Kirk even argues that if professors on the watchlist faced harassment or even lost their jobs, “then so be it” [02:45 – 03:00], justifying what could easily become a purge of left-wing academics from higher education under the current Trump administration’s ‘anti-woke’ agenda. Most concerningly, it echoes the denunciation tactics of fascist hit-lists like Brasillach’s.

An Eye for an Eye

In 1946, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay on vengeance named Oeil pour Oeil, inspired Brasillach’s trial. She recalls how the desire for retribution against collaborators was an everyday feeling under occupation  « Quand nous lisions les articles de Je suis Partout […]  nous nous disions avec emportement « Ils paieront. » » (de Beauvoir 2008, p. 87). Yet she cautions strongly against seeking vengeance for vengeance’s sake, as it will simply further the cycle of violence and ultimately lead to tyranny. In the case of Brasillach, however de Beauvoir acknowledges that ‘châtiment’, rather than vengeance, is necessary. Unlike the French court, whose charge was treason, she finds him guilty of an ‘absolute evil’: « ce mal absolu qu’est la dégredation de l’homme en chose » (de Beauvoir 2008, p.90). For an existentialist philosopher like Beavoir, the ultimate act of inhumanity is when you deny someone else their selfhood, or ‘soi’, by treating them like an object. The only was to redress the balance is to make the perpetrator undergo the same process of objectification (Kruks 2012) – they must ‘pay’ like for like, eye for eye, soi for soi. However, this is almost impossible to achieve; the wrongdoer must suffer like their victim and must recognise this as justice but because of their free will there is no way to force them to feel this. Human consciousness will always have the final say and so « les intentions de la vengeance ne peuvent jamais être satisfaites. » (de Beauvoir 2008, p.93)

Yet when a collective of writers and thinkers came together to ask for Brasillach to be pardoned, de Beauvoir did not sign their petition (p. 107). She grants that while legal punishment is flawed, it is always preferable to ‘la vengeance privée’ enacted by individuals who are prone to caprice and errors of judgement. (de Beauvoir 2008, p. 96) For at least the state can represent the agreed upon values of society and defend them when they are violated, and so Brasillach’s death sentence served ‘as an expression of society’s extreme revulsion at this violation’ (Kruks, 2012). What would de Beauvoir have thought of the shooting of Charlie Kirk? Though his speech was certainly hateful, can it be classified as le mal absolu? The circumstances of his death would fall under the tyrannical violence that she condoned. However, the fact that Charlie Kirk was killed by an act of gun violence, directly reversed the roles of wrongdoer and victim. While according to national statistics (BBC 2024), an average 50 Americans per day were killed by guns in 2021, Kirk firmly supported the right to own arms and even argued that deaths were a necessary consequence to protect this right (cited in Stein 2025). Symbolically therefore reciprocal justice was served, but as de Beauvoir repeatedly states, in the end death is an underwhelming punishment.

More relevant to our modern context is the understanding that violent revenge is doomed to fail because it perpetuates the kind of action it seeks to condemn. While Brasillach’s capital punishment “functioned to reaffirm rights and human dignity, it also had the paradoxical effect of dehumanizing life” (Kruks 2012). The same could easily be said about killing political figures like Charlie Kirk. As far-right figures continue to defend their divisive views under the aegis of ‘freedom of speech’, the line between what is permissible and what is an incitation to violence appears increasingly blurred. Figures in the mass media with far-reaching audiences have a disproportionate responsibility to act as moral compasses in the face of growing polarisation (Sligo 2028). When this role is exploited for authoritarian ideology, that responsibility has been corrupted. Freedom of speech cannot be used to defend an ideology whose objective is antithetical to human freedom. Furthermore, authoritarianism functions by enacting objectification of entire populations, committing the mal absolu en masse. When this ideology becomes so prevalent in the mass media, it normalises the devaluation of human life. The solution therefore cannot lie in killing off political enemies, as this only reinforces dehumanisation. Rather, we each possess a societal responsibility to one another to find common ground across the political divide, and choose to reinvest meaning in human life, through words and through actions (Sligo 2018; Marso 2012, p. 178).

Further Reading

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