Legitimate Targets

How the "N-word", the "F-word", the "B-word", and the "T-word" justify political violence

We are standing at a precipice. Every society reaches moments like this, when the path forks. One road leads back to a culture of argument, persuasion, and disagreement without fear. The other plunges us into the abyss, where calling someone a Nazi used to be the gravest accusation you could make. It means death camps, mass graves, and the worst crimes of the twentieth century. Now the word is thrown around so often that it has lost its meaning. "Nazi," "fascist," "bigot," "TERF"or as Kate Nash’s song “, GERMS’ — not descriptions anymore, but weapons.

Once the label is attached, the person disappears. You are no longer an individual with a name, a history, a family. You are simply "a fascist," or "a TERF," or "a bully." It is a process of erasure. To call someone these things is to strip them of personhood and reduce them to a threat. And once someone has been defined as a threat, violence against them becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

Charlie Kirk was not killed as Charlie, a husband, a father, a man with his own story. By the time the bullet was fired, he had already been branded a "Nazi." That single word made it possible for his killer to see him as disposable, something to be eliminated rather than engaged with. The language prepared the ground for the act.

What makes this even more chilling is how quickly misinformation spread about Kirk in the hours after his death. Stephen King, with his millions of followers, claimed Kirk "advocated stoning gays to death" — a complete fabrication that raced across social media faster than any attempt at verification. King later apologised and deleted the tweet, but the damage has been done. The false narrative has already taken root, shared thousands of times before truth could catch up.

But the details didn't matter anyway. Once the "Nazi" label is attached, facts become irrelevant. Look at Kirk's actual words: "I believe marriage is one man, one woman. Also, gay people should be welcome in the conservative movement. As Christians, we are called to love everyone." He supported Trump's efforts to decriminalise homosexuality in 70+ countries where it remains illegal. He opposed violence and persecution. Yet somehow this man became a target for elimination. When did holding traditional views on marriage whilst advocating for gay people's safety and inclusion become grounds for celebration of murder? When did mainstream Christian compassion become indistinguishable from hatred in the public mind?

The tragedy cuts deeper because Kirk spent his career pushing against this very polarisation. He was a conservative, often sharp in his criticism of progressives, but he believed debate mattered more than division. He went to campuses not to bask in applause but to take questions from people who opposed him. "If you disagree with me, come to the front of the line," he would say. He listened. He believed disagreement could be handled without hatred. For holding these views — views that would have been unremarkable in any previous generation — he has been vilified. For that, he was called the worst names imaginable until someone decided the label was enough reason to kill him.

I don’t have to look across the Atlantic to understand how this works. I’ve lived it.

In April 2023, I spoke at a Let Women Speak event in Belfast and gave a speech about how women who defend their rights are harassed, intimidated, and punished for speaking up. I warned that women who dare to tell the truth about biological reality would be hunted down and forced to pay a devastating price. And then, right on cue, the witch hunt began against me.

Until then, I had worked as an Audience Development Coordinator at Belfast Film Festival, where my job was to build bridges across divides in Northern Ireland’s fragile post-conflict society. I ran events with LGBT groups, cross-community organisations, and marginalised voices. My career was about inclusion and dialogue. But none of that mattered once the label “transphobe” was pinned to me. Overnight, I was no longer Sara with years of professional experience, a mother, a colleague. I was a symbol, a problem to be erased.

The accusations bore no relation to reality: “She spoke at a hate rally.” “She’s spouting anti-trans rhetoric.” “She’s dangerous.” None of it was true, but truth didn’t matter. The accusation was enough. Social media mobs lit up, professional contacts and friends fell away, and my employer folded under pressure. I was investigated, isolated, locked out of my work accounts, and eventually hounded out of my job. I hadn’t committed misconduct. My only “crime” was believing that sex is real, immutable, and important. Stay tuned for my employment tribunal mid-November…

That experience taught me in the rawest possible way what happens when labels replace people. Once you are branded, you are no longer seen as human. You’re treated as a threat, and threats don’t deserve fairness or rights. They deserve punishment.

And I recognised it instantly, because I’d seen it before. Growing up in Belfast, I watched words prepare the ground long before bombs or bullets ever appeared. People weren't just civilians or policemen or politicians — they were "legitimate targets." It took me years to understand what those two words actually meant: that once someone was branded that way, their death could be shrugged off as necessary, even righteous. They weren't individuals anymore with mothers who would cry for them or children who would grow up fatherless. They had been turned into symbols, and symbols don't bleed.

The pattern is always the same. Stalin called anyone inconvenient an "enemy of the people" and sent them to gulags or firing squads. Your crime could be owning a shop, knowing the wrong person, or simply being in the way. Strip away the person, replace them with a category, and violence follows as surely as night follows day. In Belfast, it was ordinary people who paid the price, not the politicians who threw around the words from their safe distances. The shopkeeper who served the wrong customer. The teacher who lived on the wrong street. The teenager who wore the wrong colours to school. Language made their killing possible, and when they died, their deaths were absorbed into the greater cause.

Watching this unfold again now feels like seeing a film I've already watched, except this time I'm old enough to recognise all the scenes before they happen. The same words, the same escalation, the same wilful blindness to where it leads.

The corrosion spreads fastest through social media, where nuance goes to die. In the hours and still now, three days later, after Kirk's death, posts calling for "Trump next," "JK Rowling next," "Shapiro next," etc. Murder treated like a playlist, names queued up for elimination. On TikTok, Bluesky, Facebook, and X, hundreds, then thousands, piling in with memes, jokes, chants, open calls for more blood. The noise is loud enough to drown out any sober reflection.

That truth was driven home in Belfast at the weekend, where Jenny Holland (of the Free Speech Union spoke at a peaceful demonstration. Reading a statement issued by the heads of Free Speech Unions across the world, she reminded us that Charlie Kirk “devoted his life to arguing for what he believed as eloquently as he could, always engaging with his political opponents in good faith and modelling the value of open and honest debate. Free speech cannot be allowed to die with Charlie.”

Speaking in her own voice, she went further: “The woke left’s decade-long campaign to cancel, demonise, and unperson its political opponents has culminated in the political assassination of one of the most effective political organisers and communicators of our age. Charlie Kirk lived for and died for free speech. The woke left cannot live with free speech because free speech unmasks all its lies, contradictions, and hate.”

Her words resonated deeply in Northern Ireland, a place that knows more than most about the nightmare of political violence. To hear the same patterns emerging again, dehumanisation, justification, celebration, is to recognise the peril of the moment.

On Bluesky this afternoon, someone wrote: "Controversial opinion, but I think trans people should feel safe here on Bluesky, and nazis shouldn't." Thousands endorsed it. But who decides who the Nazis are? Whoever the poster dislikes, apparently. Once a person is placed in that category, the conclusion follows automatically — they don't deserve safety. They don't deserve life.

Yet some voices cut through the celebration. Bernie Sanders, hardly a political ally of Kirk's, wrote and spoke simply: "The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life. A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation. No more political violence." Here was a man who disagreed with almost everything Kirk stood for, yet he recognised what was at stake. If we can't protect the right of our opponents to speak and to live, we have already surrendered the possibility of democracy itself.

Even Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, spoke bluntly in the aftermath: “We can return violence with fire and violence. We can return hate with hate … but at some point we have to find an off-ramp.” His warning is the same one I have carried since childhood: once a society drifts too far down the road of hate and retribution, the way back becomes harder to see.

The most chilling thing is how familiar it feels. In Belfast, I remember how killings were excused with a shrug, "they brought it on themselves," people would say, as if the victim had somehow authored their own execution simply by existing in the wrong place, with the wrong name, holding the wrong opinions. That was how language carried people from suspicion to death, one casual conversation at a time.

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I don't mean to suggest that all strong criticism is wrong, or that genuinely dangerous ideas shouldn't be challenged. But there's a difference between saying someone's wrong and saying they're evil. There's a difference between arguing against someone's position and arguing that they don't deserve to exist. JK Rowling put it well: "If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist."

When we cross that line — when we stop seeing opponents as people to be convinced and start seeing them as threats to be eliminated — we've already lost what makes debate possible.

Violence doesn't just kill the person in its sights. It ripples outward, warning everyone else to keep quiet, to keep their heads down, to think twice before speaking. This is how free societies die: not in dramatic moments of revolution, but in the accumulated fear of people too frightened to speak their minds.

Each step has led to the next. Cancellation, doxing, "punch a Nazi" — a steady escalation that was always heading toward this moment. Now we have arrived at murder, and the only surprise is that anyone is surprised.

Charlie Kirk once said, "When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence." He was right. But the inverse is just as true: violence kills talk. It drives fear into every room where ideas once moved freely. Which path we take now is vital.

The choice is still ours, but not for long; we must see this terrible event as an opportunity.

But anger isn’t enough. If all I do is rage at what has happened, then the cycle continues. Something has to change.

We need to rebuild the old discipline of disagreement. Kirk’s Prove Me Wrong tables on college lawns were closer to democracy than any of the so-called debates on television or social media. Face to face, argument against argument, listening as well as speaking — that’s how persuasion happens. If Tyler Robinson had sat across from him in a chair instead of pointing a rifle, they would have found a man who would listen before he argued back.

We need institutions that stop laundering slurs into facts. Newspapers and broadcasters should spike stories that brand people as Nazis or bigots without evidence. Politicians who cannot tell the difference between opposition and dehumanisation should be voted out. They’ve had a decade to learn where this leads. I have had enough.

We need solidarity that crosses political lines. If Bernie Sanders can condemn Kirk’s murder, then conservatives can and must defend progressives when the mob turns on them. That is the real test of a democracy: not whether we protect our friends, but whether we protect our enemies.

Mostly, I think it comes down to ordinary courage. The next time you see a pile-on, don’t add your voice. The next time you hear a colleague smeared, don’t stay silent. Every time you refuse to join the mob, every time you insist on seeing the person instead of the label, you strike a blow for the possibility of freedom.

That’s the choice we face. Not between left and right, but between a society where speech is possible, and a society where violence decides everything.

….And please, for love of god, stop calling everyone you don’t like ‘fascist’.

Sara Morrison is the Director of Genspect Ireland

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