Nobody should be murdered. Nobody should be gunned down, regardless of politics, in situations that aren’t self-defense or the like. And Kirk’s death clearly wasn’t that.
That said, I don’t mourn him. Contrary to CNN’s headline this morning, it isn’t an American tragedy, it’s just one more shooting death like hundreds of others that happen in the US every year. It’s less tragic than the school shootings the Republicans dismiss with Thoughts and Prayers, Nothing Can Be Done To Stop Them. Hell, listen to the man himself: “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death,” Kirk said. “That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am—I think it’s worth it.”
That said, there are couple of points worth making:
1)Republicans scream like a gored ox any time someone suggests their rhetoric calling for violence might lead someone to act violently. Here’s a look back at when Sarah Palin said criticizing her pollitical ad showing Democrats in gunsights and one of the Dems, Gabby Gifford, getting shot, was blood libel. Here’s more of the same a decade later.
In recent years there’s little violent rhetoric coming from the Democratic side and what there is comes from places like comment threads on blogs or BlueSky posts (of course, they claim being called Nazis is violent rhetoric). Not from people in authority, not from the Democratic mainstream. Nevertheless, Republicans are all over it being the left’s fault. Nancy Mace says Democrats own this, with a hint the killer must have been trans (trans people are her personal bugaboo, and trans shooters are the right’s new bogeyman). Laura Loomer, Jesse Watters and other fascist propagandists are all in on crushing the left.
Shitbag Florida Rep. Randy Fine has not been at all troubled by his fellow Republicans politicizing the killers. But he freaked out when a Florida reporter asked Fine if the shooting made Fine reconsider his anti-gun control stance. The Florida Politics website promptly fired the reporter, for which shame on them. It’s a legit question and I doubt Fine was at all grieving — more likely he just didn’t have an answer.
At this point we don’t even know if it was political, personal or political in the sense that someone thought shooting Kirk would liberate us from the control of the hidden lizard people, as No More Mr. Nice Blog points out.
2)Once again I think the double standard about Democrats and Republicans is coming into play, that they’re respectively the mommy party and the daddy party (“It’s a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right’s behavior. It’s also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does.”). As I put it in another post, the Republican brand is “’shitty, bigoted authoritarians.’ Democrats, by contrast, are supposed to be decent people. When Republicans act like scum, there’s a sense of shrug; when Democrats do it, there’s a sense of shock.”
When an attacker came looking for Nancy Pelosi and assaulted Paul Pelosi, Kirk said he wanted an amazing patriot to put up bail money (Republicans have been doing this crap all the way back to MLK’s assassination). No consequences. Neither did Sen. Mike Lee suffer consequences for politicizing the June murders in Minnesota.
Today Nancy Pelosi expressed regret over the Kirk shooting (insincere, I imagine); if she’d said “He cracked jokes about my husband getting attacked; I shed no tears” the media would be outraged. Heck, an MSNBC commentator just got axed for saying, truthfully, Kirk was “one of the most divisive, especially divisive, younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups.” Conservative pundit Thomas Chatterton Williams is outraged people on BlueSky are celebrating Kirk’s death. I suspect (in fairness I don’t know) he wasn’t as outraged about Kirk. Daddy gets to be mean. Mommy has to smile and give Daddy a kiss. The NYT’s Ezra Klein, for instance, thinks the left blaming this on Kirk’s politics is no different from the right calling for violent revenge. Mommy needs to shut her mouth and not criticize daddy.
3)As Fred Clark once put it, yes, we are justified in speaking ill of the dead. As a liberal evangelical, he frames it in terms of a lesson for the living: “It reminds us that we can either live so as to make the world a better place, or else be remembered only for making it better by dying.” But others have pointed out that if we don’t speak accurately of their wrongs, their political allies will paint them as heroes. Rush Limbaugh was a vile man; being dead didn’t change that, though it stopped him from causing more woe. Reagan, someone once pointed out (blogger Alex Pareene I think, but can’t swear), left office with record unpopularity; the memory-washing painting him as a bold visionary, champion of freedom hides the truth and makes his lies about government seem like they came from a trusted source.
Already I’m seeing Kirk’s history undergoing some scrubbing. The NYT’s Maggie Haberman refers to Kirk’s “ability to galvanize young conservatives with his criticisms of the left” while the Klein piece said he was “practicing politics the right way.” NPR refers to Kirk’s Turning Point USA as a free speech group when they were quite happy policing the “wrong” kind of speech.
Kirk claimed black women were all stupid DEI hires taking a white person’s slot. He said the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was a mistake and MLK “was not a good person.” Leftists are trying to “destroy the rise of the masculine energy.” When he’s on a plane with a black pilot, he worries they’re unqualified. The Biblical command to stone gays to death is part of God’s perfect rules for sex. He thought providing ASL communications during emergencies was a distraction. In short, mouthing the same generic whining as every other white man who thinks (or is paid to say, or both) white men should be in charge and everyone should accept it.
