“A republic, if you can keep it.” – Benjamin Franklin (Credit: Author)
Violence has been on the mind this week. Between Charlie Kirk and the anniversary of 9/11, death is a topic which hangs overhead. I wanted to wait a few days to gather my thoughts on Charlie Kirk’s death because I wanted to ensure that I was being thoughtful and deliberate about my response. I wanted to let my initial wave of emotions leave so I could examine how I truly felt. I think we are more focused as a society on making a quick response rather than a truthful response.
And the truth is that I am a hypocrite.
Morality is subjective. It finds its principles from different sources. Some draw from religion, others draw from laws, others draw from other sources. Some people don’t have any morality at all, and others have a morality so strict and misguided that they are driven to hurt more people in pursuit of helping them than they would had they left everything alone. Personally, I do not like violence. I don’t think anyone should be killed for their political beliefs. I also think this idea that “violence is always bad and anyone who uses it is exactly the same” doesn’t reflect the unfortunately gray reality of the world we live in. Ukraine uses violence to defend itself from the violence perpetrated by Russia. NATO used violence to stop Serbs from committing genocide all over former Yugoslavia. We say that all killing is wrong when it may not be the case. Violence is a nuanced subject and we have, as a nation, allowed that nuance to provide social cover for outright hypocrisy.
The conservative movement in this country has been calling for the deaths of those they disagree with for decades. The Clintons received death threats for decades. The Obamas have been receiving death threats since Barack became President, and even after he left office, as inflamed by the current President. Nancy Pelosi has been targeted multiple times thanks to conservative rhetoric against her, namely on January 6th, 2021 and in 2022 when her husband was assaulted in a home invasion. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is another notable target for conservative rage. Calling for harm to left wing political figures is a consistent rhetorical tool of the conservative movement in America. And three months ago, that constant rhetoric inspired a lunatic to kill Democratic Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home for no other discernible reason than her political party. And had that assassin not been stopped by a lucky police officer, they could have continued their spree of targeted killings based on the list which was found on them when they were apprehended.
Where does this leave us regarding this week’s events?
To be quite frank, the assassination of Charlie Kirk is not something I feel the need to mourn, nor is it something for which I have much sympathy. He made a career out of preaching hatred and fear. I feel that his beliefs ultimately caught up to him in the end. When someone tells you who they are, listen to them. Charlie Kirk’s purported focus was on bridging the gap between left and right. His attempts at doing so were not through thoughtful dialogue, humility, grace, empathy, and a genuine desire to understand. Rather, Kirk hammered hateful messages, demonized people he thought were different, and painted those he disagreed with as the enemy.
Recently, the fertility decline in the United States has been in the headlines. In response to this, Kirk made statements on social media claiming how conservatives are having children at a greater rate than progressives, and then added, “we will outbreed them” which is a eugenicist statement. It parallels Hitler’s rhetoric over expanding the Aryan race through breeding good Germans, especially with the “racial purity” of SS members and their wives. His advocacy of the Great Replacement theory also falls in line with the Nazis.
Kirk has also questioned the credentials of professions as a thin veil for racism. His organization, Turning Point USA, started the Professor Watchlist, which collects the names of professors publishing “leftist propaganda in the classroom” and publishes them openly. This opens these professors up to death threats from the mobs online who see it as their duty to extinguish those who think differently. Many of the professors who get added to this list are not white and often advocate for other perspectives in the country. This wouldn’t be the first time Kirk attacked someone’s competency at their job as cover for racism, such as when he spoke about how he feels less safe when a black pilot is flying the plane. There is nothing to say that the skin color of a pilot means they do not have to fulfill all requirements to be licensed as a pilot or qualified for the aircraft that they fly. To suggest otherwise is racism, plain and simple. It feels especially insidious for Historically Black Colleges and Universities to be receiving threats in response to his death when he was a white man killed at a predominantly white university in a state where white people making up a high percentage of the population and the chief suspect is a white man. I feel that it says quite a lot about what Kirk believed, or at least encouraged others to believe, when it comes to race in this country.
Charlie Kirk’s commentary on women’s roles in society was similarly regressive. He said that women must prioritize marriage and children before a career. That their choices did not matter, but it is what he as a man says they should believe. The beauty of the American ideal is that anyone can be anything they choose and live life according to their beliefs and desires. It is equally as American for a woman to focus on her career and never get married as it is for a woman to get married and be a homemaker. Or even for a woman to get married so her spouse can be the homemaker. Even if that spouse is another woman.
The best part about building an open society is that the systemic barriers to people being unable to choose their path freely are being dismantled to give everyone that freedom. Someone is free to work, live, love, worship, vote, and believe freely according to what feels truthful to them as a person. That kind of a society, by definition, has to be accepting of all different stripes of people. To that point, Kirk said, “empathy is a made up term.” In a multicultural society, as in the way America has always portrayed itself as the great melting pot, empathy for people who are different than you is the societal lynchpin. It is the only way a society like America can function sustainably and its degradation is the reason for our recent instability. We are no longer moving towards a more equitable and empathetic society, but away from it. That empathy at the core of the ideal version of America is why we saw people from all political walks express their horror and outrage at Kirk’s death. Kirk’s full quote talks about how sympathy is better than empathy but never went back to explain exactly what he means. A comment on Reddit best summarized why I disagree with Kirk’s perspective: “Empathy is supposed to inspire action. Sympathy is just thoughts and prayers.”
Kirk’s positions opposing all of these things that make America the society that it is striving to be show him to be someone who hates this country to its core while masquerading as a patriot. On his last full day as President, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in the State Dining Room of the White House. In this speech, he quoted a letter which was sent to him, conveying the author’s words, “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” This nation’s diversity is its strength. The wealth of perspectives afforded to us by our own citizens are why America helped lead the world for decades. Such a sustained, coordinated, and overwhelming attack on that diversity of people and opinions which the right has been enacting using people like Charlie Kirk puts our country in grave danger.
I did not want to see Charlie Kirk killed. It fills me with no joy that he is dead. However, I have less sympathy for him than I do for victims of gun crimes that did not make it their mission to preach hatred. Victims like the school children in Colorado who were also shot on Wednesday around the same time Kirk was. While the Colorado shooting has yielded no fatalities other than the gunman as of the writing of this piece, it is the latest in a very long bloody line of mass shootings which have claimed scores of lives over the last several decades. The kind of lives Charlie Kirk said were worthwhile sacrifices in order to secure the continued access to firearms.
Let me be clear, my heart breaks for Kirk’s family. No child should grow up without a parent. No parent should have to bury their child. No spouse should cry over the person they married laid out in a casket thanks to gunshot wounds. I disagree with the gun violence that has become so agonizingly common in this nation. I don’t believe that Kirk should have been killed despite thinking that his beliefs were hateful and dangerous. His name is another in the long and tragic list of gun violence victims. I have been one among the millions begging for systemic change for over a decade now when hearing news story after news story of shootings in schools and supermarkets and churches and nightclubs. Nothing happened and the piles of bodies kept rising. Those requests for action were roundly rebuffed by the conservative movement, by people like Charlie Kirk. So yes, his death in another senseless gun crime angers me to no end. He should still be here. Just like the kids at Sandy Hook Elementary, or the people at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, or the patrons of Pulse Nightclub.
However, I don’t think Charlie Kirk is a hero. I don’t think we should be lionizing him or painting him as a Christian martyr, especially when the hatred he preached does not align with the basic tenets of Christianity. I don’t think he is some purely innocent victim either. This was not a gentle soul who only ever tried to do good in the world. This was a man who used his platform to preach hatred. He used aggressive rhetoric to paint targets on people he disagreed with and used charged language to encourage people to carry out actual violence against them. Charlie Kirk’s last moments on earth were lying about transgender individuals in an attempt to paint the trans community as evil killers as relating to gun crimes. I abhor the fact that he was killed. I will not mourn his loss.
The conservative outrage over Kirk’s death as a potentially politically motivated killing rings hollow due to the right’s silence when Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated in her home alongside her husband, Mark, and their golden retriever. When the Hortmans were assassinated in Minnesota, President Trump said calling Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would have been a waste of time. In contrast, he made a speech from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office mere hours after Kirk’s death condemning demonizing political opponents moments before blaming the ‘radical left’ for shooting Kirk before a suspect was even identified. It is an institutional hypocrisy within the conservative movement and the Republican party.
The right wing’s speed to blame the “radical left” when their own followers have committed the overwhelming majority of politically motivated violence, including storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, is abhorrent. This latest killing follows years of conservative rhetoric that violently targets people they do not like. When that becomes an acceptable manner with which to speak from positions of authority, and acceptable opinions to hold as part of a political movement, it means that the core concepts are acceptable for anyone to hold. It means that the norms are broken and calling for violence against anyone is now on the table for everyone. It means that celebrating violence against anyone is now on the table for everyone.
My great-grandfather liberated Dachau. The man who returned home from his tour in Europe was broken by what he witnessed. It led to his alcoholism for the rest of his life. Because people who followed the ideology that Charlie Kirk would come to preach believed it was their natural right to exterminate those they deemed lesser. They justified their actions using the same kind of extremist language Kirk would. They cloaked themselves in religion and national pride while creating nothing and destroying everything. Charlie Kirk’s ideology cost millions of lives less than a century ago. That kind of absolutist supremacist thinking represents a clear and present danger to the stability of a society which has more than enough room for all walks of life.
Making this out to be “the man was killed for speaking his opinion” is disingenuous at best and outright lying at worst. Inspiring violence through your rhetoric makes you culpable when somebody gets killed, especially if they look to you as a source of truth, guidance, and ideology. Inspiring lone actors to commit terrorist attacks is known as lone wolf terrorism, which is the dominant form of terrorism in the west. This allows prominent figures in a political movement to use veiled language and tacitly encourage attacks without explicitly ordering them. Social media only accelerates the process, with individuals who would commit an attack being shown material that radicalizes them in much greater volume and intensity. The idea is that the leaders and opinion makers can call for certain people to be seen as the enemy while not advocating specifically for violence against them. Simultaneously, they can paint people they disagree with as threats that need to be stopped for the betterment of whatever cause and encourage a lone wolf actor to connect the last two dots before taking action in service of “the cause.”
It’s not a new phenomenon. Sarah Palin, who was a dominant conservative figure in 2010, created a website with pictures of multiple Democratic politicians overlaid with crosshairs as if from the scope of a rifle in a “target list” of people to prioritize in the midterm elections which took place that year. This saw increased criticism when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was on that list, was shot at an event in Tucson, Arizona on January 8th, 2011. Nobody said that Sarah Palin ordered the shooter to attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords. However, when using charged language and visuals, casting Giffords as a target, and painting Democrats as an existential threat meant that the shooter believed they were doing a service by attempting to kill Giffords. They were doing their patriotic duty because a former governor, one-time Vice Presidential candidate, and prominent political figure told them that this individual was a threat to the nation.
It is the same logic which led America to war after 9/11 against Saddam Hussein. Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. However, the assertions by George W. Bush’s administration that Iraq was an existential threat that would create WMDs and supply them to terrorists were enough to make the nation agree with the administrations invasion plans. I have studied, as a matter of personal interest, dictatorships and autocracies for the last several years. Understanding how Hitler rose to power in Germany, or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or Stalin in the Soviet Union helped me understand what all power-hungry leaders have in common. Studying the extremism of terrorists such as ISIS or Al Qaeda has helped me recognize when the same hate is being used by people making up quotes to justify it from a different holy book. I can recognize the words of an actor intending on fomenting division and strife.
This was not an attack on free speech if the attacks on synagogues, black churches, newspapers, reproductive health clinics, etc. were not attacks on free speech either. More to the point, the right to free speech in this country is that the government cannot throw you in jail or silence you for speaking your opinion. It is not a blanket guarantee that you can profess whatever you want and be free of consequences. The conservative movement today has made saying things they don’t agree with worthy of punishment. Not by the government or the courts necessarily, the conservative movement is fine with extrajudicial punishment so long as they agree with the political ideology of the one doling it out. More than that, they believe that they are able to peddle whatever hateful lies they can, and speak whatever poison they wish free of consequences. It’s why so many were incensed that they lost their jobs or were banished by their universities in the wake of the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA where demonstrators chanted Nazi chants and ran over counter-protestors.
This is the exact same logic that Osama bin Laden laid out in his writings and teachings which led to nineteen people fly planes into buildings to kill Americans. The jihadists believed they were on a holy quest to exterminate the infidels. That by killing ordinary Americans, they were fulfilling the will of Allah and building a better world to the point of hijacking planes and flying them into buildings in defiance of all sense of self-preservation. On top of that, their actions spat on the actual teachings in the Quaran which demand peace, much in the same way today’s Christian right movement keeps making up teachings of Jesus and God which have no background in the text of the Bible to justify their own atrocities. I have seen this extremist hatred grow and grow and grow in this country my whole life. How do you reason with people willing to believe any lies told to them so long as certain people are the one telling those lies? How do you reason with fanatics? With zealots who believe that their mission in destroying their enemies is a holy quest and there is no reason which can dissuade them?
Charlie Kirk’s message can be boiled down to, “empathy for the undesirables makes you an enemy of America.” How can you reason with people who take such an absolutist view? I’ve been trying to figure out how to use logic and reason to get through to someone who fervently believes “If you stand with the LGBT community, if you stand with the nonwhites, if you stand with people who oppose Donald Trump, you are an enemy of America and must be exterminated” and I’ve had no luck. I don’t know how to tackle the idea that caring about someone different makes me a fundamental threat to this country which I truly love. The heat’s turned up pretty high when such dramatic lines are being drawn in concrete. I’m branded dangerous just by associating with the ‘wrong’ people and it is perfectly permissible to destroy them and me because somebody else decided that we have ‘wrong’ opinions or ways of life in what is supposed to be a multicultural society.
The great fear that sticks in my mind is that we are beyond the point of combating these world views with intelligence and knowledge. We’ve been trying for years and the problem is only getting worse. I believe that this situation is extremely dire and that we are facing a period of serious political violence not unlike that of The Troubles in Northern Ireland or the Years of Lead in Italy. And I say this, not with excitement and glee at the violence which I believe is inevitable in this nation. I am not pleased that our willingness to use violence as a first resort has become so ubiquitous throughout society. It frightens me. It makes me fear that the future of America is one where we are spilling our own blood instead of learning how to care for each other. And I am begging the conservatives who are saying that we need to “turn down the temperature” to look at their own house and challenge their own compatriots to do the same. I beg of everyone to hold themselves and their allies to the same standards as they hold their opponents. I want for us all to commit to truth above ideology, even when it makes it more difficult to advocate for a specific position. Our society needs open minds, compromise, and genuine care for each other regardless of race, religion, sexuality, creed, or political leanings.
I don’t like that this is where we are as a nation. I’m not happy about it. And I am a hypocrite. I am willing to be a hypocrite because if our power gets turned on the world because of people like Charlie Kirk, then we will see oceans of blood the likes of which the worst conquerors throughout history couldn’t even dream. We are Germany in the 1930s. That, frankly, scares the hell out of me. The idea that we have become so tolerant of intolerance that it will destroy everyone keeps me up at night. So I am a hypocrite in abhorring violence but believing that if we must use force to contain our own issues which debate has failed to contain, then we should use it. That is my cross to bear. I will not claim to be a good person. I will not claim to be a righteous person. Perhaps I’ll be damned for even thinking it. I’m an imperfect person trying his best to make sense of a completely chaotic and messy world, and to best fulfill the promise of America as it was taught to me.
Figuring out where to draw the line of acceptable things to say in a society built on free speech is one of the messy contradictions of democracy. To me, a supremacist movement is diametrically opposed to the idea of a democracy in which all people have an equal voice. Our republic offers us the incredible power of our opinions: we have a voice through our vote, through our ability to say and write what we think and feel. With that power comes the responsibility to be thoughtful, articulate, and empathetic with what we say. Our words have power. Their targets have feelings and the right to exist too. I believe that if your platform advocates for the erasure of someone else, you are not participating in our society in good faith and you forfeit a measure of your validity. What kind of person wants to win by eliminating all of the opposition? Is destroying anyone who thinks otherwise truly the way to make your ideas the best that you can?
In a pluralistic society like we live in, someone like Charlie Kirk who advocates for a supremacist movement puts the very fabric of our society at risk. Because people like Charlie Kirk are seldom held accountable for their lies and hatred in non-violent manners, violence becomes the last resort. That is his legacy. When you formalize acceptable targets of violence, you will find them striking back out of self-preservation. Had Charlie Kirk stopped to think that maybe others who disagreed with him were not the enemy, and that it is completely okay to advocate for Christian beliefs, gun rights, small government, etc. without trampling over those who disagree. Without calling for their heads.
We live in a violent nation. A nation wherein conservatives have continually said that it is acceptable to solve political differences with violence. Killing is a two-way street. With decades of conservatives calling for violence against increasingly battered and marginalized groups, the idea that the abused will finally lash out is such a horrid thing is bafflingly hypocritical. Mistreat a dog for too long and it will attack you because it feels like it has no other options. Many people in America have been under a sustained assault from conservatives for years and are beginning to feel that they have no other options. I cannot say I blame them. We are living in a nation where the elected leadership is echoing Hitler’s Germany in frightening ways: attempting a violent overthrow of the government (Beer Hall Putsch), building camps for the ‘undesirables’ with horrid conditions (concentration camps), altering the laws to destroy the idea of due process (Enabling Act of 1933), threatening war with neighbors for their territory (occupation of Czechoslovakia), demanding aggrandizing tribute for a leader who is above reproach, in addition to destroying people’s rights. The first, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth, and tenth amendments in the Bill of Rights have been directly attacked by this administration and enabled by a Supreme Court using every trick it can to avoid coming out and publicly declaring that they see the President as an autocrat. This is the legacy of the Republican party. This is the legacy of conservative opinion makers like Charlie Kirk.
Personally, I found Charlie Kirk to be a smug, ill-informed, spineless, hateful person based on his public statements. I didn’t wish him dead. However, I also recognize that after so long of spreading hatred and stoking violence, it is inevitable that one will see it in return. This prompts me to ask why so many people ideologically aligned with Charlie Kirk who embraced jokes, levity, and public calls for violence against those they disagree with are now so offended by the same happening to someone on their side. This is not the beginning of violent rhetoric in America just because the left is getting some laughs in too. This is a depressing evolution of a deadly trend which has been underway in this country for far too long. Where does it end?
I think that the hypocrisy is what bothers me the most. I am now being asked to treat the death of this man with extreme reverence, and to denounce his shooting as something barbaric by people who could not do the same hundreds of school children in the last few decades have been killed by guns, including inside a church in Minneapolis. It actively enrages me that I have seen more conservative anger and grief over Charlie Kirk, who was an ostensibly Christian adult man that preached about how gun violence victims were necessary to maintain access to firearms than I did over literal school children who were gunned down inside the house of God. And it enrages me even more so to see the Vice President of the United States refuse to attend the memorial ceremony on the anniversary of September 11th to transport the body of a media personality on Air Force Two. I refuse to believe that any Democratic administration would have done the same for Hassan Piker or even Rachel Maddow. September 11th is a solemn day in American history and using it as a political cudgel has been a favored pastime of conservatives for almost my entire life. I have often heard that we must respect September 11th above all else, only now for there to be no presence from the highest elected leaders in the land at the site of the absolute deadliest attack on America in its history. It offends me as an American that one man’s death is more important than one of the darkest days in our nation’s history.
My initial reaction was to treat Kirk’s death with smug disdain for who he was. Others whom Kirk targeted with his rhetoric are having similar reactions to his untimely death. That’s not the kind of person I want to be. I truly don’t want to be a hateful person in my heart. But I am in my late twenties now, and by the time I started school when I was a child, we had “Dangerous person in the building” drills. Only much later in life did I realize that meant we were practicing on staying alive if someone was shooting up the school. Had it been my school, I could have easily been one of those statistics that Kirk said are a necessary sacrifice to secure the second amendment. Kirk is only a few years older than I am, meaning we were going through school at roughly the same time, thus experiencing the same childhood safety drills. Based on his public statements, I can’t tell if he ever grappled with what that meant and had the moment where his own childhood was recontextualized the way it was for me. I mean, he could have been one of those ‘necessary sacrifices’ himself, before he even had to contend with his stance on issues beyond what his mother packed him for lunch that day.
More to the point, the kind of people his rhetoric has actively targeted since he became a conservative pundit encompass people I care about deeply. I have dear friends, former girlfriends, and family that are disabled, racial minorities, members of the LGBT community, immigrants, liberal, poor, in academia, practiced religions other than Christianity, who have needed medical care afforded by reproductive healthcare, and so on. For him to target these people that I care about and for me to say nothing would be morally unconscionable. I’d like to think I was raised to have the empathy he deems so completely useless to human society. In fact, because I was raised with that empathy, I took issue with his stances on just about everything before many of the people belonging to those targeted categories entered my life.
Make no mistake, they are being targeted. The same way Sarah Palin targeted Gabrielle Giffords. The same way that Adolf Hitler targeted Jews, Catholics, Romani, communists, and so on. If Charlie Kirk truly was so principled in his beliefs, then he should have no problem being a victim of a gun crime because he has become one of the necessary sacrifices to protect the right to own firearms. Despite being against violence myself, and despite believing in earnest cooperation and communication, I am not heartbroken over the fate which has befallen this man.
So yes, I am a hypocrite. But so is Charlie Kirk, a self-professed Christian who cannot grasp even the most basic of Jesus’ teachings in the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). That’s to say nothing of caring for those from other lands (Luke 10:29–37), feeding the hungry and clothing the poor (Matthew 25:37-40), practicing one’s faith for their own sake not publicly so others can see (Matthew 6:1-4), to practice humility (Mark 9:35), and accept that everyone sins and therefore nobody had the right to judge anyone else (John 8:7-11).
I grew up Catholic. I no longer practice, but I read the Bible when I studied it in school for the first eighteen years of my life. I spent hours in class dissecting the meaning of Jesus’ teachings. That Catholic background definitely informed my sense of morality, but it does not comprehensively define it. And while I don’t know enough of Charlie Kirk’s particular denomination of Christianity, his actions do not seem to be rooted in the word of Jesus Christ to me. Therefore, I feel quite comfortable calling him a hypocrite. I feel even more comfortable refusing to openly mourn or rehabilitate his image now that he’s dead. Again, he should never have been killed, and I would have preferred the opportunity to call him a liar, a hypocrite, and a poor representation of his faith to his face. That being said, I will cry no tears for a man who dedicated so much of his time in this world to sowing hate and reaping violence when he could have been a true force for change and unity. With such an ability to communicate with people, it’s disappointing to see those skills used for destruction instead of living up to the promises he claimed to have been making.
Should his views on the afterlife be true, may he find the eternal reward he earned through his actions on earth.
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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