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From their perspective, Charlie Kirk "denied their existence" every time he got up on stage and talked about transgenderism, and so they naturally decided to deny his existence in return.
The left has definitely been intensifying its long standing equivocation between speech and violence. Indeed, even silence, the act of not speaking, has been described as violence. Nothing except eager agreement and affirmation is interpreted as a violent attack that should be responded to in kind.
There is a flattening of responsibility across complex systems. Every utterance of criticism or mocking remark is stochastically upstream of persecution and pogroms, and so they are to be treated as morally equivalent.
This kind of left-wing rhetoric has been getting more and more extreme across my lifetime, and it now seems orthodoxy on too many college campuses. While there have been people expressing these kinds of sentiments since the 60s, it is now more mainstream than ever before. While for many such words are mere political hyperbole, for too many, especially those who are too young to remember otherwise, this rhetoric is just the political reality of the world they were raised in.
The scary part is that within this worldview, all political action is fundamentally violent, and even the personal is political. There is no distinction between politics and violence, speech and murder. The only reason not to use murder to achieve your political objectives is a lack of power, and every public utterance is just an attempt to tilt the scales of stochastic violence against your opponents.
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