gracchusdixit

The death of the right-wing activist and provocateur, Charlie Kirk, unleashed some of the most toxic aspects of our country’s disintegrating public and political culture.  Within hours of Kirk’s death, Donald Trump and the slavish sycophants who surround him rushed to declare, without a shred of evidence, that Kirk had been the victim of “radical left violence,” and promptly used that canard to justify a legal jihad against all those who might even so much as suggest that Kirk was not the moral and ideological knight in shining armor they proclaimed him to be.  Even worse, they have done their utmost to turn Charlie Kirk into MAGA’s equivalent of Horst Wessel, the vicious Nazi storm trooper who got himself killed in the tumultuous years before Hitler came to power and was thereafter lionized as a martyr by the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

Rather than exposing this attempt to sanctify Kirk for the shameful political maneuver it actually is, the so-called “mainstream media” have contented themselves with platitudes, bemoaning Kirk’s death as the result of political polarization, as if that polarization were spontaneous in its origins and bipartisan in its expression.  Instead of condemning Kirk’s toxic opinions, they have spent their time lauding his accomplishments as a conservative “influencer” and fund-raiser, with no regard for the utterly amoral implications of those accomplishments.

Even more depressingly, Democrats have offered little in response to Kirk’s death but timid and vacuous pieties decrying violence and extolling the right to free speech, all the while they know full well that, for demagogues like Charlie Kirk, free speech is a one-way street and political violence is entirely acceptable as long as it leads to right-wing hegemony over every facet of our public and private lives.

No decent person should condone violence, either personal or political, and the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk should, if found guilty, be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  The fact that Charlie Kirk was murdered, however, does not make him a martyr, let alone a hero. Victimhood does signify virtue, nor does it entitle the victim to a moral get-out-of-jail-free card.  Not only is it possible, it is absolutely necessary, to condemn the manner of Kirk’s death and, at the same time, to condemn the manner in which he lived his public life—because the record of that public life is painfully clear.

Judged by his own words and actions, Charlie Kirk was a bigot, a racist, and a liar.

He heartily endorsed one of the most barbaric passages in the Old Testament, calling for gay people to be stoned to death.  He blamed Jews for funding a conspiracy to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.  He lectured and hectored the singer Taylor Swift with the words, “Reject feminism.  Submit to you husband…you’re not in charge.”  He condemned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a “huge mistake”.  He impugned Michelle Obama, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and other brilliant Black women as “affirmative action picks” accusing them of stealing “a white person’s slot”.  And just in case all that was too subtle, he added:  “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be, like, I hope he’s qualified.”  He called the epidemic of gun violence in our country a “prudent deal” worth making to protect his absurd misreading of  the Second Amendment.  And in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, he dismissed climate change as “complete gibberish, nonsense, and balderdash”.

There have been countless attempts to “contextualize” Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric and to minimize or disguise its malign intent.  Unfortunately for those attempts, social media “influencers” inevitably damn themselves, because they are so self-righteous, prolific, and vociferous.  True to form, Kirk left behind a long trail of venomous opinions that cannot be elided, explained away, or erased.

Not only was Charlie Kirk a bigot, racist, and liar, he was also, like so many of his ilk, a hypocrite and a huckster.  Shortly after his death, his widow held a press conference, during which she said the following:

Two days ago, my husband, Charlie, went to see the face of his savior and his god. Charlie always said that when he was gone, he wanted to be remembered for his courage and for his faith. One of the final conversations that he had on this earth, my husband witnessed for his lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Now and for all eternity, he will stand at his savior’s side, wearing the glorious crown of a martyr.

Apart from the oily and repugnant sanctimony of these words, they are transparently false.  If Charlie Kirk truly wanted to be “remembered for his courage and his faith,” why did he work so enthusiastically to elect as President of the United States a convicted felon, serial adulterer, and sexual abuser?  Why did he embrace members of that gangster’s family as “close personal friends”?  And why did he advocate public policies that violate every moral tenet propounded by the “Lord and Savior” he professed to believe in.  Charlie Kirk’s right-wing catechism simply cannot be squared with the Sermon on the Mount.

Which brings us to the ultimate and most unseemly reality.  Whatever else he may have been, Charlie Kirk was a money-making machine—for the radical right, for the Republican Party, and for himself.   He died at the age of 31 with a net worth of $12 million, a $5 million estate in Arizona, and a million dollar condominium in Floria; and, as the head of the purportedly “non-profit” organization, Turning Point USA, he paid himself an annual salary of more than $400,000.  To think that a community college drop-out with no professional skills or real-world experience acquired all this lucre based on hard work and merit beggars belief.

When Kirk’s widow declared, “Now and for all eternity, he will stand at his savior’s side, wearing the glorious crown of a martyr,” she neglected to mention one of her savior’s most important admonitions:  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  

Good luck with that, Charlie Kirk.