Wednesday right-wing organizer Charlie Kirk got assassinated while he was holding a debate at a Utah campus. I spent the day going over my review of the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, cause frankly I considered that more important.
And no, I’m not going to say “RIP.” That can be interpreted in different ways.
The reaction among Republicans is predictable, as is the reaction of the co-opted “liberal” media, who spent much of their coverage calling Kirk a “free-speech advocate.” The current occupant of the White House ordered all US flags at half-staff through the week, and Station Casinos in Las Vegas put up marquee displays celebrating Kirk “in loving memory”.
If anything the ubiquity of gun violence in this country ought to be pointed up by the fact that also on Wednesday, another mass shooting occurred when a student at Evergreen High School outside Denver, Colorado shot two other kids, one critically, before killing himself to avoid capture.
If one day, the press says that three kids got shot in a school, nobody panics, cause it’s all ‘part of the plan’. But the same day, one conservative influencer gets shot, everybody loses their minds!
My first impressions:
The main thing that stood out to me when I heard the story was that Kirk was only 31 years old. He seemed a lot older.
The assassin took one shot, straight to the carotid artery of the neck, which is guaranteed to cause massive blood loss and quick death. I thought, that’s what happens when you get a professional.
And for that reason, unlike the Right, I did not assume the shooter is some transwoman vegan antifascist with pastel hair. Cause if Sniper School has been training those people, I finally get why Pete Hegseth is so mad.
As it turns out, just this Friday, the shooter was caught based on photographs from the scene, and because his own father talked to the police. He turned out to be Utah’s own, a 22-year old named Tyler Robinson, from a right-wing household that frequently trained with guns. When police picked up materials, including rounds, from the scene, they saw slogans like ‘notices bulges OWO’, ‘Bella Ciao’ (an Italian partisan song) and ‘catch this fascist’ – which would seem to indicate a leftist antifascist sentiment but have actually been co-opted by the so-called ‘groypers‘ who opposed Charlie Kirk within the Right because he wasn’t reactionary enough.
One reason I thought Kirk was older than he was is that I barely pay attention to him. You have on one hand Trump, who is a total attention sponge, and then you have the various other “intellects” of the alternative-to-being-Right like Kirk and Benny Johnson, and the “mainstream” media doesn’t pay attention to them and I don’t see much cause to either. But they are very popular and influential in their own sphere, which is why the Trump Right is so discombobulated by Kirk’s murder, more so than they were by yet another school shooting.
Did I want Charlie Kirk dead? No. Like I said, I barely even think about him more than I have to. I certainly don’t think he should have been killed for opinions. He was shot while holding a debate. Debate is how this country is supposed to work. But am I surprised that Kirk was killed?
No.
And the real story of this event is that I doubt anyone on either side of the political debate is all that surprised that such a thing could happen either.
As one person on social media perfectly summed it up: “I’m not advocating for what happened to Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk advocated for what happened to Charlie Kirk.”
I can go over some of his more offensive political opinions, like him being the kind of professional Christian who thinks Christianity means women should submit to their husbands and carry unwanted pregnancies even at the age of ten, as opposed to say, caring for the poor or protecting life outside the womb. Indeed he also said “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty … But I think it’s worth it. 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”. He’d also said that black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” Those are opinions. You do not kill somebody for having opinions.
The issue that so many on the “Left” are bringing up in the wake of the shooting (‘Left’ meaning, ‘anybody who doesn’t think Trump was appointed directly by God to rule America for eternity’) is that Charlie Kirk went beyond political advocacy.
He said for instance that Leviticus 20:13 (‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death’) was “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was beaten half to death by a deranged home invader, Kirk said that a “patriot” should have been able to bail the assailant out and said, “I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?” Regarding the same incident, Trump joked, “Nancy Pelosi has a big wall wrapped around her house. Of course, it didn’t help too much with the problem she had, did it?”
An academic on Substack posted a first-hand account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Kirk’s campaign: https://substack.com/@drstaceypatton1865/note/c-154757002
“For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: “bitch,” “c*nt,” “n****r.” They threatened all manner of violence.
They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that I be fired. The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer me an escort, because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do me harm.
And I am not unique.
…Some received death threats. Some had their jobs threatened. Some left academia entirely. Kirk sent the loud message to us: speak the truth and we will unleash the mob!
That is the culture of violence Charlie Kirk built. He normalized violence. He curated it, monetized it, and sicced it on anyone who dared to puncture his movement’s lies.
And now, in the wake of his shooting, there’s all this national outpouring of mourning, moments of silence, yellow prayer hands, and tributes painting him as a civil debater. But the truth is that Kirk and his foot soldiers spent years terrorizing educators, trying to silence us with harassment and fear!
And now the same violence he unleashed on others has come full circle.”
This is of course the same culture that had nothing to say about the attacks on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or the assassination of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband, by the same person who tried and failed to kill a state senator. Under the LOL Right, threats are free and acting on them is tolerated. Mob intimidation by Republicans and Right fellow-travelers is to be considered fair and expected by their Democrat opponents, but Republicans wail like Lucille Ball should they get any such treatment in return.
If this were not in fact the policy of the Trump Party, Trump would not have issued a blanket pardon for all the people who committed violence against the Congress on January 6, 2021.
If such provocation only aggravated one side of the debate, that would be bad enough, but the abstract argument against the destruction of standards and the toleration of violence is that it makes it possible for your enemies to act on the same level. As we now see.
Again: I’m certainly not going to endorse violence against Charlie Kirk or his side, but I also don’t think that’s the point. The point is it’s happening anyway.
I’m still going to affirm the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, that one has a right to self-defense, but not to initiate force to achieve political or social goals.
And I’m still going to share things like The Onion post saying “Charlie Kirk Bravely Offers Himself As Tribute To The 2nd Amendment”.
Because as anti-gun liberals know all too well, getting all sad and offended that people on either side are using violence to achieve political or social goals doesn’t stop that violence from repeating, because no one in charge really wants it to stop, and it’s looking like some people want to encourage it.