A Week’s Worth Of Contemplation On The Charlie Kirk Murder

Credit: Gage Skidmore | gageskidmore.com | via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

1. I’d like to remind everyone proclaiming Charlie Kirk’s righteousness that he once tweeted out, “As a black man. [sic] I think Charlie Kirk is great,” apparently busting himself for using burner accounts posing as minorities to artificially boost his posts’ engagement, and pretend he has cross-racial appeal. Kirk’s murder was a political tragedy and democratic travesty, but we should remember his political career was often spent whitewashing his somewhat blatant personal racist tendencies. I’d bet Republicans and their staffers do this kind of social media Blackface much more than anyone knows. Nancy Mace’s staff has accused her of forcing them to use burner accounts to promote her posts. Trump’s political career has been certainly boosted by bots and paid trolls, many of them foreign!
2. Ted Cruz photographed himself today painting over a spray paint graffiti that said “fuck Charlie Kirk” on a brown concrete embankment with a paint roller, leaving a giant ugly splotch of white on it. Ted could have used brown paint. I can’t prove this for a fact, but I just know Cruz had a staffer spray paint that so he could do this photo-op.
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3. The Kirk shooter is being accused of turning into a leftist radical terrorist because he spent a single semester in college, which is some real alleged speed of liberal professor brainwashing. He then dropped out and enrolled in an electrical apprenticeship program at “Dixie Technical College” in Utah. Of all the Republican tropes, “college brainwashing” is one of the most annoying because most professors can’t convince their students to do any of the assigned reading or attend class, let alone fully convert and commit themself to Marxist-Leninism.
4. That’s certainly true of this shooter coming from a Mormon/Utah background leaving behind a trail of Groyper memes, and who was reportedly in a relationship with a trans person. It’s kind of a suggestion of the horseshoe theory where the further extreme one goes on the political spectrum in either direction one kind of ends up in roughly the same spot.
5. We cannot disentangle the Kirk murder from America’s easy access to guns, and conservatives’ fetish for guns. If Kirk had finished his speech, walked off stage, and the shooter had instead just sprayed an AR-15 into the crowd killing 30 students and maiming dozens more, Republicans would be shrugging and lamely offering their typical token “thoughts & prayers.” Kirk himself might even repeat his sacred belief that gun violence victims are a cost of doing freedom business.
6. It’s quite paradoxical that Republicans are celebrating Charlie Kirk as a free speech martyr and then, often in the same sentence, calling for getting Charlie’s Kirk’s online critics fired from their jobs. It’s also absurd for so many conservatives to be anointing Kirk as their Martin Luther King Jr., particularly because those conservatives hate MLK Jr. If MLK Jr. was campaigning for social justice today, Kirk’s podcast would be routinely calling him an “affirmative action minister,” and claiming King doesn’t have enough brain processing power to be taken seriously.
7. I am a boy-who-cried-narcissistic-sociopath, but I’d like to remind everyone one more time that several days ago Trump was offered condolences for the murder of Charlie Kirk and asked how he was holding up, to which Trump immediately pivoted: “I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”
8. I’d say it was a sign of Trump’s blatantly worsening dementia, but it’s the exact kind of sociopathy he’s been expressing his whole life… like when 9/11 happened and he famously expressed his excitement that it meant his Trump Tower was now higher on the list of Manhattan’s tallest buildings.
9. It’s so dishonest when conservatives highlight idiot leftist trolls on social media who have been callously celebrating Kirk’s murder to suggest that all liberals should be investigated or arrested when Democratic officials and virtually all mainstream and serious liberal pundits have put out extremely empathetic and moderate statements calling for peace, nonviolence, and lowering the temperature. Meanwhile Republican senators, governors, and pundits all across the media (and, of course Donald Trump, the president of ALL Americans) are raging, demanding vengeance, and seething with partisan vitriol. Stephen Miller has been practically vowing for the last week to go full Gestapo on his leftist bogeymen.
10. It’s imperative to remember that the liberals at Kirk’s event were protesting peacefully and lining up to ask him debate-like questions, and Kirk was shot by a Groyper possibly hyped up on Nick Fuentes’ insistence that Kirk’s ethno-nationalism wasn’t hardcore enough. It’s also a fascinating facet of American society that, compared to European domestic terrorism, homegrown US shooters really don’t tend to be that ideologically driven or focused, and they’re often lone misfits whose politics and motives don’t make much coherent sense.
11. The people (mostly Republicans) who are clamoring for a civil war need to read up on the Spanish Revolution, or read Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls (on a literary level, I recommend the book — though the Hemingway clichés might make you roll your eyes a lot, and it definitely could have been 100 pages shorter). Civil war is not great, and a many of these wannabe revolutionaries will die or suffer for years if a civil war actually broke out. Truly, the people who salivate for a civil war are idiots ignorant of history, unappreciative of freedom, and nihilistic toward any form of community or societal responsibility.
12. If you check the scoreboard, right wing violence has been much more prolific than left wing violence for the last 40 years, and actually elected Democratic legislators were assassinated literally just a few months ago. And much of this violent crime would be prevented if Republicans passed a few modicums of sensible gun regulations that Democrats, with no hyperbole, exhaustively call for. It’s ludicrous to blame Democrats for our ever increasing gun violence.
13. I’m kind of sick of talking about and reading about Charlie Kirk now. Republicans are blowing his murder out of proportion for partisan gain, political fear mongering, and civil war hyping. The proposed honors include giving Kirk the Medal of Freedom, holding mass memorials all across the country, and state lawmakers in multiple state are even proposing honoring Kirk with a state holiday. It’s a tragedy Kirk was murdered, but I’m not sure states should be annually eulogizing Kirk’s Christo-fascist crusade getting cut short by a nihilistic political weirdo. 🥃

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