Like most Americans, I’ve been thinking a lot about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I was traveling when the shooting happened and was horrified that a person would be murdered while speaking on a college campus. While Charlie Kirk often worked to silence professors with whom he disagreed; colleges and universities should be bastions of all kinds of speech. His murder was a crime against all of us. And I absolutely understood the need for his family, friends and followers to mourn his death and lean into the deep grief of loss. So yes, let his memory rest.
But in the meantime, I started reading about Charlie Kirk. He said some truly terrible things; including that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not have the the “brain processing power” to do her job and that she stole her seat on the Supreme Court from a white person. I cannot say if he was a racist but this was certainly racist thinking. And he encouraged polices that made the world less safe for people of color, for women and for those in the LBGTQ community. As a young man, he was rewarded by adults for his often cruel and thoughtless views on Americans and our country’s diversity.
He was also pro-violence and comfortable with
death. Kirk called for “an amazing patriot” to bail out the man who attempted to beat Nancy Pelosi’s husband to death. He approved of the genocide in Gaza. And rather than making space after the beating death of George Floyd, Kirk used his platform to call him a scumbag. Kirk wanted more capital punishment and wanted public executions to be witnessed by children as a rite of passage. He said gun deaths were a fair price to pay to preserve the Second Amendment. And he was dismissive of the death and damage that will likely come from failing to address climate change. He had no interest in understanding the lives of trans people, so he painted them as dangerous. He found it easy and profitable to make humans into other and then into enemies. He may have been a good person, but he said and advocated for terrible things.
And now, so soon after his murder, the right in America has decided not to let Kirk’s memory rest. Instead, they are using our government to lionize him in a way that makes many of us uncomfortable. And when writers have begun to examine Kirk’s record, they have been silenced; often with threats and loss of jobs. The Washington Post fired a columnist who wrote about Kirk’s record on race. (In the meantime, Fox News stands behind its guy who called for euthanizing homeless people). I drove around Florida with flags at half-staff for a young political figure whose views are opposed by most Americans. J.D. Vance says he will use the power of the government to crack down on liberal speech, in Charlie Kirk’s name. Our prez and governor make baseless accusations against “leftists” in an effort to silence reality. To the extent people say Charlie Kirk stood for free speech, let’s honor him by speaking the truth. Words not guns. I’m not sure Charlie would have agreed.
mamiejane 