They swore that Charlie Kirk was their "martyr," their "hero." On Friday, September 19, about 250 people gathered under the mid-September sun at the foot of a mounted statue of Lafayette in Paris's 8th arrondissement. They had come to "pay tribute" to Kirk, an influencer and a prominent figure in the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, who was killed on September 10 in the American state of Utah. While the motives of the main suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, are still unclear, all those in attendance were convinced that the far left was behind the assassination.
On a small stage, two banners bore drawings of Kirk, accompanied by the slogan "Je Suis Charlie," ("I Am Charlie"), first used after the Islamist terror attacks on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. It did not matter that the newspaper stands for values diametrically opposed to those expressed at the Kirk tribute event (notably the French conception of secularism and women's right to control their own bodies). Nor did it matter that there was no link between the ideology of the Kouachi brothers, who committed the attack on Charlie Hebdo, to the as-yet-undefined beliefs held by Robinson. The event's organizer, Nicolas Conquer, insisted that there was a connection between the two Charlies: "The same bullets killed them both."
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