For many years I have shared my story of the last day of class in a Human Rights and Law course I took at Toronto Metropolitan University back in 2008. It was taught by a Pro-Palestinian Jewish lawyer who told us about her experience in a classroom one fateful day – pulling up the roll-down projector screen to find a crudely-drawn swastika left on the chalkboard. She told us how some students gasped, and some laughed.

She went around the room on that final day of class and asked us to share our own reflections and takeaways from the journey that was this course. One by one we shared moving and personal stories of our learning and unlearning – facing hard truths about the land we lived on and about one another. The campus is a place to face hard conversations instead of fighting the truth or fleeing from it.

We made our way through the class and finally the last student to share was a quiet young white man who never spoke. He took this opportunity to make his voice heard, and explained how he sat there – week after week – being made to feel to blame for everyone else’s struggles and experiences.

Right on cue the clock hit the top of the hour and that one-sided final conversation ended as everyone awkwardly shuffled out of the room to make it to the next class.

I stayed back and walked out with the prof. I told her how I wish I could have continued that conversation with him, or found a way to start one. That moment stays with me – knowing back then that he’d find someone who would listen to him. Make him feel heard. Someone would coddle and comfort him, and promise him justice, vengeance for his perceived oppression. I knew he was one of many people seeking belonging with others who had this grievance, this perceived struggle in common.

Thankfully that conversation was not ended by violence, but far too many discourses, debates, and dialogues have been.

Wednesday September 10th, 2025 was such a date… a life-changing 9/11-like moment for many young white men and white Christian people across America.

On that date, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in broad daylight doing what he sadly did best, right in front of thousands.

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This day will be another of many pivotal moments, a potential fork in the road. It can be a moment where society decides to find its way back to our collective humanity, or pass a point of no return.

For many – Charlie Kirk’s death by gun violence was a moment that confirmed their perceived oppression as young white men, or validated the Christian-Persecution-Complex, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Around 3000 people – many young students – witnessed that conversation end abruptly on the Utah Valley University campus. They saw it up close, a gruesome, unforgettable moment that will no doubt echo in their minds forever.

Who will they have conversations with about it all? The last words Kirk ironically said on this planet were him going out on brand.

Audience member: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”

Kirk: “Too many.”

The person said the number is five, and then asked Kirk if he knew how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years.

Kirk: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

Then an unmistakable sound echoed.

The front of Kirk’s shirt is quickly shifted by a force, and a bullet hits him in the throat like a punch that ended the conversation, forever silencing him. While the human was silenced, the question is will his words echo?

Here are some quick thoughts on what happened in that split-second… the many things, including:

• The man who now famously said: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights” was shot as he spoke about gun violence and mass shootings.
• Two more little children now joined many, many other kids who have lost a parent to violence.
• Some will feel further emboldened to carry on Kirk’s fight against the most vulnerable of us.
• Some felt relief or elation that a well-funded misogynistic, race-baiting, Christofascist, white supremacist peddler of hate to America’s Youth was silenced.
• Some of us sorted through an anticipatory grief of what this moment will ultimately mean for those vulnerable people that folks like Kirk targeted.
• Some offering Kirk the unearned grace of prayers and thoughts for his wife and young children – when his life’s work was dedicated to destroying the lives of millions of women and young children not only in his own country, but around the world.

What happened for me in the moment as I saw it suddenly unfold in real time on my Twitter feed?

I gasped.

I quickly poured through accounts of trusted reporters and voices.

I said quietly: “That’s what you get!”

I reflected on what it meant for me – for us – that once again we face the internal debate of whether violence is a way forward, a means to allow for a way forward to surface, or offers yet another deep wound to the surface of our collective humanity which we urgently need to heal.

I saw the many angles of raw footage.

I watched again and gasped in horror, then went numb for a moment.

I wondered how old he was – knowing he was never going to survive that.

I listened back again and again to that last conversation he had. His last words.

We can think of his life’s work as ‘white-collar mass harm’, a violence that was at the expense of millions but not seen by many as more dangerous, violent or harmful than a one-on-one act of crime. Kirk’s last words on this planet were stray bullets at his favourite targets: words that purposefully ignoring cis-men as the vast perpetrators of mass violence and instead blaming the epidemic of gun violence on trans people, while allude to gang shootings amongst Black folks. This was his life’s work.

He spoke in a language of violence.

His words were bullets that pierced the tattered strands of connective tissue left between us.

In his death, his words will either become a lesson we must heed, a warning we must hear, or they will become even more potent weapons – quoted with adoration as a massive cult-following descends into the darkest stages of hate.

This has been my quiet fear – a moment of violence leading to a deeper acceleration which furthers hyper-radicalization… it just wasn’t the public figure who I thought who would become that martyr.

In this case with Kirk’s murder, it’s not just the young men who listened to him or were fans of him. It’s people of all ages, or certain faiths, and not just white folks.

For far-right Christians and folks who were becoming more emboldened in taking unapologetic steps towards white supremacy – folks who already perceived they were under attack… for them he was ‘one of us’.

The answer to the question Kirk tried to derail was one he never got to hear. The answer was over 3,400 mass shootings in the last ten years, with trans people committing .0147% of them. You see, Kirk taught his targets (youth) how to sidestep truth in the name of sewing seeds of division and hate.

The lesson they must take from this moment is that Kirk trafficked in hate, and when it comes to playing with hate – you will eventually be next.

Who is working to build off-ramps for these folks off of a one-way street headed for collective destruction? Where are the on-ramps into dialogue and communities of healing, justice and repair?

It’s not work meant for everyone, but we can choose a lane and there are multiple lanes we collectively need to travel. Some of those lanes are the needed work ahead which includes building those off-ramps to get people off the road to destruction, and the on-ramps toward a destination of no violence, no more harm.

As for the place we truly need to go as a society? There are few paved roads leading there, and building those long roads, that is our work.

That is the work.

Those are some of my thoughts, and here is my prayer: that more of us take this moment as a call to action towards change. More of us will reject the tradition of handing down hate.

Which direction are we headed as a people?

Which roads lead us back to our humanity?

Which way will our choices take us?

Which direction are you headed?

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about jeff perera

Since 2008 jeff perera has spoken to tens of thousands of people of all genders across North America about healthy versus harmful ideas of manhood, men striving to be allies, building bridges between us, and how we as men can be the lesson in action.

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*bonus: I’m sharing below some helpful thoughts from Brian Recker