Image from The Oakland Post
originally created FEB 13th, 2025
This one is political and has mentions of racism, homophobia, and the like so if you aren't interested in that you may want to leave
Charlie Kirk is, to put it mildly, a controversial figure. A brief search shows you a list of things he's documented as saying, highlights including:
"MLK was awful. He's not a good person"
"We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s"
"Can we stop giving half the screen during these crisis briefings to sign language interpreters? I have nothing against the hearing impaired of course, but this is a joke."
and of course, the one everyone knows him for
"It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment"
All these quotes and more are on daveio's page on Charlie Kirk.
Image from The Oakland Post
Suffice it to say, Charlie Kirk is not a great person. He is adored by conservatives for having the appearance of someone just trying to have an honest intellectual debate, but of course, like most mass debaters, he really is only trying to make himself feel good. (and make money and ruin lives of people but that doesn't lend itself well to a sex joke)
Flash back to me, a freshman at Oakland University, attending for my first time. things are going interestingly, not great not terribly, but I'm very overwhelmed with the state of politics. How could anyone paying attention not be? I hear that Charlie Kirk, someone who, frankly, only very politically active people and neck-deep conservatives would likely know about if not for his death, has died. Shot through the neck by some guy and turned into a martyr, his history of advocating for anti-LGBT, pro-gun, and ultimately just very conservative ideas drawing people towards him.
Charlie Kirk's death likely would've been concerning for me, not sure what to think of the rising tide of political violence, and the fact that people claim that someone as clearly despicable as Kirk is a "neutral" person, but whatever. Ultimately, Kirk would've registered as only a blip on my radar if not for the subsequent obsession that people had with him and his death, both those sympathetic to him and the ones rightfully mocking him. Kirk quickly ended up turning into this larger than life figure with thousands of people mourning him, many of whom likely didn't know who he or what his organization was.
Obviously the internet, especially sites like Facebook, latched onto Charlie's death, but what I was more suprised about was the fact that it had taken its way to our campus, one which I had mistakenly beleived to be a safe space to get away from rampant conservatism that had defined much of my life. Living in Wyoming, I had been surrounded by people with much the same ideals as Charlie Kirk, and even those who didn't were able to go past their own beliefs in order to not upset the masses. Teachers and faculty largely didn't respond to homophobia and transphobia, trump flags were more common than not, and overall I'm sure several groups of teenagers had took it upon themselves to see how often they could say the n-word before getting in trouble.
I figured that in moving to Michigan and Oakland University, I would be surrounded by people as far left or further than I was. This may largely be true, but my experiences with certain people on campus has made me skeptical.
You see, on the day of the vigil, there was already a homophobic preacher type standing around on campus yelling about how gay people are destined to go to hell or whatever, probably some like racist and sexist ideas in there as well but I wasn't paying close enough attention to really pick out what all he said, and this was long enough ago I don't remember perfectly. Basically, his main premise was that homosexuality is a sin, and God hates sinners. Some people went up to try and debate him, shouted insults, what have you, and most of these proved ineffective. One person from the crowd shouted that they hated the homophobic man, only for another voice to say that they agreed with the preacher wholeheartedly. To some extent, I realized how even on a liberal campus conservative politics would still be a major part of my life. Even as I tried to escape them, I couldn't run from them in full.
The rest of this page will use The Oakland Post as a source, being the school's official newspaper. I did not attend the vigil or protest against it, so i can't give my own account of what happened.
Approximately one to one and a half thousand people attended Oakland's campus that night, some were students, of course, most were random people not attending OU or another college. Around a thousand random conservatives were at a school that promised to be one of the most LGBT-friendly in the United States. Fox 2 Detroit was doing interviews of people on campus, and in general people seemed not to grasp how much harm Kirk had done. Kirk claimed himself to be a neutral figure simply expressing ideas, but his ideas were at best ill-informed and often served to harm minority groups. If you're on Neocities you probably don't need me to tell you that though.
What I'm trying to get at is seeing this made me feel hopeless in the world, made me feel like there was nothing that could be done about any of the injustices in the world, even this place, which claimed to be some queer-friendly area had proven itself to be no more inviting than many of the places in Wyoming.
The next day, there was a disussion held amongst the Gender and Sexuality Center goers about what had transpired the night before. A thousand people came onto our campus and had, frankly, undermined everything I thought it had stood for. The Gender and Sexuality Center coordinator, who organized the weekly Queer Agenda meeting, had called us to explain what had happened emotionally. For most of us, it had come as a stab in the gut. That this place we had called our home allowed something like this, especially allowing not just students of Oakland or local collages, but random conservatives, onto our campus. I had explained to the group how it felt growing up in Wyoming and expecting this kind of large scale endorsement of discrimination and hate, and how I had come here only to be confronted with it again. Many of the people there hadn't dealt with something like this that called into question the safety of them and their peers, and I meanwhile had constantly dealt with people saying shit about the queer community. (I remember one time someone said that trans people are mentally ill and deserve to be locked up for life, along with many similar comments.)
Later that day, hope had returned. a small group of maybe about 20 students had organized a protest near Elliot Tower, the same spot where the preacher had been the day before, against Oakland endorsing any future events like this, and probably also attempt to have some sort of long lasting consequences for the people in charge who approved such a thing. I don't really remember the specifics, me personally, I ended up sort of wandering into the event. After the events of the previous day more than anything I needed to clear my head. I ended up taking a walk around campus late at night, and kind of watching from a distance for a while before moving into the protest group. Maybe I should've been more careful incase stuff got violent, but it was a small enough gathering that I don't think it would've significantly escalated. The sheer fact that these people had come up and tried to do something about what was happening on our own campus was a big deal to me, having seen nothing done in Wyoming to protest or prevent the rampant conservatism over there. I had long accepted the so-called Equality State to be effectively a dead zone, so to see something done in Michigan restored my hope. It reassured me, however little, that things could take a turn for the better if actually try and fight against oppression.
I guews my main takeaway from this is not to lose hope, difficult as it is. There are people out there fighting the good fight, and while it may be difficult to see it, if we try, in the end things will end up better than when we started.
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