Charlie Kirk’s body wasn’t even cold, when the right wing started calling for war. Calling for the annihilation of “the left”. Saying that those not in their camp had caused this, after years of “stoking the fires of hated” by calling people like Kirk and Rufo and Miller “nazi” online. And already, Kirk’s legacy is being rewritten to proclaim him as a titan of modern conservatism, whose peaceful politics got him killed when others could not win debates with him. That he was a kind and loving man who was fundamentally a family man, a giving man, and whose death is like unto the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m not gonna blow smoke up your ass and say I’ll miss Kirk. He was a vile son of a bitch and the world is better off without his rhetoric. I’m sure as shit not gonna eulogize that slimy toad of a grifter. He preached the sword – or more accurately, violent oppression via the 2nd amendment – and he’s now another body stacked on the pile because of it. Let’s look at some of his political positions, shall we?
- Kirk advocated imprisonment and execution for doctors who treat Trans folks.
- He believed gay and queer people should be put to death.
- He believed anyone who wasn’t white couldn’t be competent at a complex job, and was a DEI hire.
- He called black people “cockroaches”.
- What’s more, he called them innately mentally inferior to whites.
- He believed the death of schoolchildren to be a reasonable price to pay for the 2nd amendment.
- He advocated bailing out the nutjob who attacked Paul Pelosi.
- He believed empathy to be ‘made up’ and the cause of the nation’s woes.
- He said MLK Jr was “awful” and “not a good person.”
- He said the civil rights act of 1964 was a terrible mistake.
Charlie Kirk embodied everything vile, corrosive, and smugly cruel about modern politics in the United States. He was a grade A, USDA prime piece of shit.
Too many people are either complicit in normalizing his hate, have been gulled into thinking he wasn’t that bad, or are too cowardly to call out his rhetoric for what it was: racist, christian nationalist poison.
The United States will be better off without his brand of politics, and I will give him exactly as much grace and kindness as he gave the people he spoke out against.
So am I glad he got assassinated? Fuck no.
Because his assassination – any political assassination – has those unintended knock-on effects that Gust Avrakatos cautioned Charlie Wilson about. “We’ll see” when talking about how something may have good or ill effects. Or to put it another way: violence has inertia, and inertia doesn’t care who or what is in the way.
As I noted: his body wasn’t even cold before the right wing in this country started calling for war, for murder, for persecution of the “other” who didn’t believe in Kirk’s brand of venom. Never mind the killer hasn’t been caught. Never mind there’s no indication of his ideology. They need only the excuse to begin their purge, and Charlie Kirk may be the Horst Wessel of our era.
And so, without evidence one way or another, these ghouls can and will call for war – unironically – because they claim the ‘other’ has declared war on them.
