Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. But the declaration he’s a martyr, we need to mourn his death, those who dare criticize him must pay, OMG what a tragedy— WTF?
Paul Campos: “This country has gone completely insane. Charlie Kirk is being given the equivalent of a state funeral for a national hero: the vice president is his pallbearer, carrying his casket onto Air Force 2, the president has ordered flags to be lowered to half mast, and Democratic governors are complying, Trump is awarding him the Medal of Freedom (technically the nation’s highest civilian honor) etc.
“Charlie Kirk was a thoroughly deplorable right wing troll, who spent his entire adult life helping to create the conditions that made Donald Trump and everything he represents possible. His murder was a terrible thing, both because murder in general is a truly terrible thing, even when the murdered person is a terrible human being, and because the political effects of this murder are themselves obviously horrible as well. But mourning him, like mourning the death of any key enabler of Trumpism, should be an extremely optional activity, rather than a civic duty.
“The reaction to Kirk’s death, much more so than the murder itself, is what’s significant here. After all, what were once newsworthy attempt to commit the public mass murder of children in America, via our sacred untouchable guns, are now so commonplace that they barely merit a brief mention below the fold of our national newspapers.”
Some of this is undoubtedly that the right-wing loves martyrdom. Conservative Christians have been declaring themselves martyrs for decades (people criticized them and subjected them to moral opprobrium!) and now they have a real one to curse the left about (“martyr” might be a bit strong for someone who was solidly in line with right-wing orthodoxy rather than a persecuted outside, but hey). And from some of what I’ve read, Kirk was a bigger deal on the right than I realized (here’s a look at how good he was at bringing together neo-Nazis, generic conservatives and theocrats).
Combined, those factors may explain why we have Republicans such as Rep. Clay Higgins declaring that if you criticize St. Charlie of Kirk, he wants to kick you off social media, destroy your business, have you expelled from school and revoke your driver’s license. Curiously, he didn’t seem as outraged when Alex Jones declared Sandy Hook kids were faking their deaths or had never existed — and if Obama had reacted to Jones like this, every Republican would have screamed about Tyrant Cancel Culture Thought Police.
As Jessica Valenti says, “An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives. We live with this kind of violence, we experience it, every single day. We just don’t call it ‘political’. To conservatives, it’s not even violence. That selective empathy, I think, so many Americans are having a difficult time with the Republican demand that we loudly perform horror and outrage over Kirk’s death—as horrible and outrageous as it was. Conservatives’ insistence that we remember Kirk’s humanity comes in the same breath that they refuse to recognize our own. And they’re more interested in our loud condemnations than they are our actual lives.”
Author/activist Kylie Cheung at the same link: “In the coming days, the right will relentlessly impress upon us that Kirk’s death is some extreme aberration of mounting political violence, all thanks to so-called left-wing extremists. But Kirk’s death is only aberrant in so far as most political violence in this country and around the world victimizes women, people of color, queer and trans people, immigrants, children, and certainly Palestinians in Gaza, subjected to daily, live-streamed U.S.-funded atrocities. This violence is overwhelmingly inflicted not by leftist social media users, but the government—which is currently, largely run by far-right zealots.
“… We’re now implicitly being told by most of our leaders and the president that Kirk’s murder is the only political violence that matters. Some of the same right-wing voices that recently called for Greta Thunberg to be bombed for trying to deliver aid into Gaza are now condemning social media users for not expressing appropriate amounts of grief for a man who wanted us to lose our most basic rights. It’s not enough that their policies are killing us—they need us to celebrate them as heroes, too.”
Kelly Hayes, on trans people’s right not to mourn: “Democrats who have indulged in compulsory expressions of grief are indulging a culture that demands we prove our humanity by mourning the deaths of people who wanted us dead. While I know some people are pained by Kirk’s death, in spite of his hatred for them, it is also completely human to smirk when someone who wanted people like you enslaved, brutalized, or wiped from the earth, exits this mortal coil.”
Corey Robin, quotes in Hayes’ post: “I suddenly have such a visceral sense of what it must have felt like to be a formerly enslaved person, an abolitionist, a Union soldier, the families of Union soldiers who lost their sons or husbands or brothers, a radical founder of the Republican Party, to see this happening. It’s stupefying, shocking, as I said, to see a version of it now, in real time, right before my eyes. It’s like I’m seeing Birth of a Nation getting made right in front of me.”
And finally, The Onion: ““When that first shot rang out, we all figured it was going to be a run-of-the-mill mass shooting” said UVU junior Michael Tompkins, who explained that when students spotted a man clad in black and carrying a rifle on a roof overlooking the crowd, they had no reason to suspect anything unusual.”
