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“Heartbreaking”: Claremont Students Express Dismay as Peers Celebrate Anniversary of Charlie Kirk Assassination
A year after Charlie Kirk was murdered in front of thousands of onlookers at a debate event at Utah Valley University, the assassination continues to divide the Claremont Colleges. The anniversary of the murder prompted celebrations on campus and online, which drew national attention on X. Students the Independent interviewed expressed concern that the normalization of political violence is chilling free expression on campus.
Dozens of posts on the Claremont forum of the anonymous social media app Fizz joked about the “Kirkaversary,” often accumulating hundreds of "upvotes"—the Fizz equivalent of likes. Many celebrated the day, asking whether there would be parties held, suggesting taking celebratory shots of liquor, and joking about having a “Kirkentine” and leaving hickeys in mockery of Kirk’s fatal neck wound.
“People making jokes about giving hickeys does not mean they support murder,” a Fizz post by a Pitzer student retorted in defense. But students the Independent spoke to doubted whether their peers would respond to other tragedies with the same derision. One student told the Independent that jokes of the same nature about the killing of children in the Gaza Strip or the suicide of Jason Arday would be understood as improper by the Claremont Colleges community.
Residents of Harvey Mudd College’s West Dorm told the Independent that their dorm’s loudspeakers played the AI-generated song “We Are Charlie Kirk,” often used online to make light of the assassination, throughout the day on Sept. 10. Gatherings at Harvey Mudd later that night reportedly celebrated the “Kirkaversary” with beer pong and ambushes of freshmen with water balloons and nerf guns.
A senior at Harvey Mudd told the Independent that the rhetoric he heard made him “feel uncomfortable,” because “we should respect someone’s death…regardless of their beliefs.” Meanwhile, an engineer who recently graduated from Harvey Mudd reflected more critically on the rhetoric he heard during his time at the Claremont Colleges. “I’ve heard many variations of ‘he had it coming’ because of his political advocacy,” he told the Independent, adding that he worried for his safety as a conservative student in the immediate aftermath of the murder.
A junior at Scripps College told the Independent “I can't express how uncomfortable I feel,” describing the Consortium’s speech climate as “heartbreaking.”
“On campus, people feel more free to celebrate murder than they do to share a slightly controversial take about something smaller that doesn’t involve the death of someone.” The day Kirk was murdered, a fellow student interrupted her history class to show a graphic video of the shooting to the class. Other students applauded, jeered, and laughed. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” the Scripps student said.
“I don’t feel safe expressing opinions at all,” she continued. The result was a worsened educational experience: “It’s not really a place where I can learn how to think because I can’t express my thoughts.” The situation was exasperating because “it’s safe to express violence but it’s not safe to express dissenting thought.”
A junior at Pomona College didn’t feel personally uncomfortable with the comments his peers made, noting that it didn’t make him “more reluctant to share my beliefs” or feel “unsafe.” However, he told the Independent that “it made me feel deeply disappointed in my peers, even if I don’t know their identities,” due to the anonymous sharing of posts on Fizz.
“To destroy life is a heinous crime,” he said in an interview. “Why, then, would anyone make fun of it? It really sickens me.” He said that he forgave his peers for their statements but expressed hope that Consortium students will better recognize our shared humanity.
A different Pomona junior was less hopeful, telling the Independent that “the [Claremont Colleges] have not felt like a safe speech campus” because “the student community doesn’t hesitate to ostracize, doxx, and spew out hateful words about you.” This Pomona junior told the Independent that she was subject to significant harassment by anonymous posts on Fizz for expressing her opinions since her freshman year, when “people shared my Instagram account, my face, and told the entire [Claremont Colleges] community on the platform about what a horrible human being I am” in response to a political post on one of her personal social media accounts.
A sophomore at Pitzer College, who identifies as politically progressive, told the Independent that she “hated Charlie Kirk and basically everything he stood for.” Nonetheless, it made her “uncomfortable when people openly mock his death without shame.”As she told the Independent, “We have to remove ourselves from these cycles of hate…and recognize/restore humanity to both sides.”
“I find myself wanting to discourage my peers from mocking and essentially delighting in the death of another human being,” as “the hateful energy and vitriol directed towards him…is simply not conducive to any sort of progress or real, genuine advancement.”
The Pitzer sophomore said that she understood the perspective of her insensitive peers, but that it “is only HARMFUL to an environment (college/university) where we’re meant to learn and connect with other perspectives and grow our understandings of ourselves and the world.”
The Independent also spoke with a junior at Pitzer, who said they were surprised by the reactions of others that ostensibly shared their values. To watch others “celebrate violence without remorse is sickening,” they said.
Professor Ioannis Evrigenis, director of Claremont McKenna’s Open Academy, viewed the aftermath of the Kirk assassination as an opportunity to set CMC apart from other schools in its dealings with free speech. He told the Independent that it was “evident that students, in particular, were shocked both by the event itself and their peers' reaction to it online, and that it was necessary to provide an opportunity to process what had happened and express their concerns.” After the assassination, the Open Academy hosted a lunch forum on the dangers of political violence at CMC's Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Dozens of students attended.
“The discussion that took place was thoughtful,” Evrigenis commented, “and it allowed students, faculty, and staff to see how many others had been affected by the assassination and its aftermath, and hear what they were thinking.” He told the Independent he believes the Open Academy’s quick response time was an asset that “made it possible to have such opportunities to reflect on consequential events…keeping it as productive as possible.”
Many CMC students share Evrigenis’s assessment that the College’s speech climate is strong, as indicated by consistently high rankings in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual college free speech rankings. Some disagreed. A conservative freshman told the Independent that while “I chose [CMC] because of its highly rated free speech index,” reactions to the Kirk assassination’s anniversary were “deeply alarming.” This student found it “shocking to see an allegedly educated student body abandon basic human decency simply because they disagree with someone's politics.”
Earlier this week, the rhetoric that has dismayed so many students was subject to national scrutiny after a CMC freshman shared screenshots of posts on Claremont Fizz to Libs of TikTok, a large right-wing account run by Chaya Raichik. Over 675,000 people viewed the resultant X post, which included a collage of dozens of posts from Fizz Claremont that joked about celebrating the “Kirkaversary,” often in an explicit manner.
While denouncing the rhetoric of Claremont Fizz users, commenters on the viral X post often used inflammatory language themselves, with some calling for violence against students who made the posts. The CMC freshman who originally shared the Fizz posts with Libs of TikTok disavowed any support for these comments, he told the Independent in an interview.
A CMC Instagram post about the new Sports Bowl also received many critical comments accusing the school of not sufficiently addressing pro-political violence sentiment among the student body. The comment section was subsequently deactivated.
Another CMC freshman told the Independent that he opposed the leak of Fizz screenshots to LibsOfTikTok, but that the tone of subsequent attacks on that student made him afraid “to express my views or participate openly on campus."
In an interview, Raichik’s source compared his actions to the decision by a member of the Florida International University College Republicans to leak screenshots displaying what the CMC freshman described as “disturbing pro-Nazi messages.” He said he was impressed by the ability of the leaker in that case to induce the resignations of those involved.
Raichik’s source hoped the public reaction to the Fizz posts would create “reflection” because “sometimes the impact of your words on others only appears to you when seeing the reactions of the general public or certain individuals about what you said.”
“If no one is aware of what is going on in colleges across the nation, nothing will ever change,” the CMC freshman explained, arguing “the best way to prevent hateful speech from spreading is by making it public.” He said that the anonymity of the posts made the decision easier, because “there is no individual who can be publicly identified from the screenshots.”
He told the Independent that he chose to attend CMC because “I think Claremont McKenna especially does have a great debate culture” and feared that “every little joke made about political violence deteriorates our strong culture of disagreement into dangerous normalization of hatred and murder of political opponents.”
Summarizing his feelings, the freshman explained that he had sent the screenshots because “joking about political murder has become normal at the [Claremont Colleges], and that should alarm everyone going to our consortium.”
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