I have many complicated feelings about this guy. Currently I am writing a piece about him over on the main site. He was not a good man, and after his death I definitely did not change my mind. A terrible man isn’t made good, just because he got shot in the neck, especially a man like Charlie, who spread his vitriol throughout the world and actively worked for his entire adult life towards electing Donald Trump and keeping him in power.
To many people he was just a guy that wanted to debate and have a meaningful conversation, while to especially minority communities he resembled something far more insidious, a man that is coming for their destruction. To many, the vengeful glee some posters online have is sick, for others it is only tame when one considers how much pain the ideas Charlie helped directly prop up has caused.
While I really do not have sympathies for Kirk, it is saddening to think about how not even that long ago, at some point, this person went down a path of decisions that led up to a death that almost feels like a bookend to his career. It really was a demise that you think you only read in some kind of comic.
- The crazy extremist guy that tells his underlings that school shootings are a price worth paying for the right to bear arms, dies on a school campus.
- The last thing Kirk has said was a racist dog whistle intended to bring black people into a discussion they aren’t even remotely a part of.
- The discussion itself related to the impact of school shootings in the country.
- And he was sitting right under a banner which reads “Prove me Wrong”, to which the bullet came as an undesired punchline.
The way people talk about the assassination in some manners bothers me too. A large emphasis is put on Charlies “openness to debate”, but it seldom is highlighted that his debates are as flaccid as Steven Crowder’s infamous “Change my Mind” bullshit which so OBVIOUSLY was a flimsy veneer in order to own college students that happen upon Crowder’s tent.
Then there is the discussion about the “D-Word”: Did Charlie Kirk deserve to die? This is one of those questions that everyone can answer for themselves in their head, or how many people do, post about it online to collect social brownie points. I genuinely think it is an unproductive conversation to have, as it is one filled with arbitrary lines put in place and everyone having different weights and biases in their heads that inform their imaginary judge, jury and executioner. Most of the times I consider opinions on this topic a bit of a virtue signal, in both the “Yes” and “No” answers to the question.
A better question in my opinion is, “Was Charlie Kirk’s death expected?” to which my answer obviously is yes.
After a career in saying heinous shit on air for over a decade, leveraging a multitude of target audiences and radicalising them, combined with decentralised extremism and Charlies main guy, Donny T, actually being Americas Führer writing executive order after executive order, in my mind it was clear that this was a powder keg that was gonna bust open sooner or later.
Even if he did only “say shit”, we all obviously know that rhetoric is an express delivery option straight into violence right? Like, we do understand that if you drive wedges between all sorts of demographics of people and call for public executions, the Civil Rights Act being terrible, blacks doing better when they were enslaved as they committed less crime and gays to be stoned, that eventually we boil over to the point we are at right now where Political Violence just keeps escalating until more and more people get domed, either for reaping the hatred they sowed, or out of an unavoidable consequence of radicalisation conducted by ones political opponents.
The family point is… kinda flaccid too, mainly because we collectively do not give a rats ass about anyone’s family when it comes to other killings. The emphasis also distracts away from who Charlie actually was as a person, and curiously, MAGA rarely used his actual beliefs to front load the mourning process for this guy. MLK had “I have a Dream” and Charlie got the lowest common denominator of show empathy, the “B-b-b-but he got a wife and children!” shtick. Adolf Hitler had a wife too, I don’t see you crying about him.
I also genuinely believe that MAGA are the ones disrespecting Charlies death more than anyone else. All of these weird ass social media posts with Erika Kirk kissing her husbands hand and later going on a performative speech on Fox News to talk about “Retribution and Vengeance” to then call out a recruitment ad for Turning Point USA chapters… What is even going on here? Trump doesn’t give a shit about his top propagandist, his widow does not either, the only people that actually seem to give a shit about him are maybe Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro and a whole lot of people that do not understand what this guy stood for.
If you want a good primer into Charlie’s person you can watch this video by Genetically Modified Skeptic, which goes over Charlie’s racist, theocratic and sexist beliefs, with the most notable banger being Charlie describing the stoning of gay people being a piece of “perfect scripture” or something. There isn’t even a “saying the quiet part out loud” moment here, this is just openly saying that you would love to see a sexual minority get erased out of existence.
You should watch the entire video, it is pretty good.
Honestly, start digging yourself on what Kirk stood for, or watch some of his content, and see what you can make of it. Some low lights are his efforts to get Derek Chauvin pardoned, you know, the guy that murdered George Floyd, he suddenly started being an MLK hater believing that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake and he is a blatant religious extremist of course, which we shouldn’t forget about either. Ah yeah, he also believed in the Great Replacement Theory.
I may write more into this note at a later date, but yeah those are some of my raw thoughts for now. Bye.