The “Sad Charlie Kirk Died, But…” Crowd Is Not Worth Your Time

 

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination on a college campus in Utah last week, it has been nearly impossible not to think about Kirk and what his death means for American culture. This terrible act will be a defining moment in American history.

The most human side of Kirk’s murder is that he was a husband and a father, and now his wife and children must live on without him. This is enough reason to mourn his loss.

However, Charlie Kirk was also a renowned polemicist who openly and peaceably engaged in discussion and debate with those who disagreed with him in the public square—an activity with deep resonance in American political culture.

On the day Kirk was killed, he was doing what he did best, and he was doing it as a matter of his own career and calling. That he was murdered for debating political ideas should call forth in every American, even those who disagreed with his ideas, the same powerful moral clarity that his loss as a father and husband does. Any American and who cannot mourn the murder of a man killed for doing something so basic to the American identity will never be swayed by reason or facts, and discourse with such men is fruitless.

None of the online denunciations of Kirk’s so-called offensive language by leftists attempting to justify their ludicrously qualified regret over his murder (“Sad he died, but…”) deserves reiteration. Those making such statements, after seeing Kirk brutally murdered for expressing his political views, hardly deserve consideration.

If Kirk’s murder teaches anything about the radical left, it is this: They will not be convinced of anything through careful and respectful discussion. They made up their minds about Charlie Kirk without listening to or reading his words.

Or, when they have done at least some of that reading and listening—and it is always very little of it they have done—they reveal in the hysterical, totalitarian intolerance of their view just how little they see as utterable on the topics they consider sacred.

It is apparently a crime worthy of spitting on your corpse after your murder if you are dissatisfied with the full consequences of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or if you understand that George Floyd was a multiple felon ne’er-do-well, and MLK was a serial adulterer, or if you believe the vast majority of men who think they are women are in fact suffering from a psychopathology.

The “Sad he died, but…” people are, in every important way but one, indistinguishable from the gunman who killed Kirk. And they further reduce the difference between him and them when they pointedly suggest he may well have been provoked into his lethal act. They are not so far gone as those who unapologetically cheered Kirk’s death, but they are on the same road, just a little less far advanced.

Such people judge others entirely by their political views, reject any notion of common humanity, and never miss a chance to gloat about any victory over their enemies—including their death. 

They will never succeed in their nightmarish desire of getting everyone to believe precisely what they do, but they will settle for nothing less, and, therefore, these people will eventually destroy civil society. Of this, there is not the slightest doubt.

Expelling friends and relatives from one’s social circle for possessing divergent political views is not a particularly humane thing to do. A human being is so much larger than what he thinks about elections and government. But the reactions to Kirk’s slaying have made it clear that some people are beyond the pale in moral terms, and one does well to stop engaging with them, because moral pollution should be avoided and they are a source of such pollution.

Many within the “sad he died, but…” crowd assert that they could not feel much sympathy for Kirk’s grieving family because conservatives had shown no sympathy for George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or their families. Even if that were true—and it is not—there are differences in those cases sufficient to warrant thinking quite differently about them and about the role the individuals played in provoking their own deaths.

George Floyd had a heavy dose of fentanyl in his system, enough to kill a human being, according to the testimony of a physician. The 30-minute bodycam video of police trying to bring Floyd in shows him resisting arrest in myriad ways, including refusing to get into the squad car, which requiring police to use force to subdue him.

Breonna Taylor’s friend Kenneth Walker opened fire on police when they announced their drug raid on Taylor’s apartment, which provoked police to return fire, killing Taylor. A judge acquitted the officers who fired their guns of all charges.

None of the officers involved in the Floyd and Taylor incidents arrived on scene with the intent of murdering anyone, and it took extraordinarily foolhardy action from the suspects to produce the awful end of their deaths.

Kirk, by contrast, was talking to students on a college campus when his murderer, who had come there with the sole intention of killing him, acted. The cases are so different that anyone of even moderate intelligence can see it.

The “but” is legitimated when someone has acted—criminally—as to help bring on an unfortunate end, but not when all the person has done is speak, peacefully, to other people. This is obvious to anyone who is not being willfully obtuse, or who has not had his mind pickled by exposure to the poststructuralist lie that “words are violence.”

A proper parallel to Kirk’s assassination would be, say, someone in Black Lives Matter being shot dead in public for expressing the ideas adhered to by that group. Such a horrific episode—to be clear—would severely damage the American identity, demand outrage with the murderer, and warrant sorrow for that person’s family. A “but” simply could not be legitimated in such an instance.

Another tact taken by the “Sad he died, but…” crowd has been to label Charlie Kirk a fascist.

How did we get to this sinister place where self-righteous lunatics feel perfectly justified in killing people because they have decided that in doing so they are fighting a war against “fascism,” and many others gleefully get into their “Sad, but…” mode in the aftermath?

The first part of convincing young, idealistic, and morally unbalanced individuals like the one who murdered Kirk is to inundate the culture with hyper-radical apparatchiks, who drone on and on about the dangerous fascist regime that has fallen upon us and those who made it all happen.

This is not that complicated, at the end of the day, however difficult some might be interested in making it appear, precisely because they want to engage in the stupid and dangerous game of calling everyone they disagree with a Nazi. If people who write books and articles and op-eds call perfectly reasonable conservative ideas “Nazi ideas” long enough, and if they cry that the “Nazi ideas” are at this moment putting an end to democracy, and if they point at certain individuals like Charlie Kirk and write “He’s one of the Nazis who want to destroy us all” often enough, eventually some part of the youthful and relatively dispossessed element of their side of the political spectrum will take them seriously.

A central part of the Antifa message has always been about “eliminating fascists.” A society that tolerates Antifa—and similar types—will get what is coming to it. And a society that tolerates an intellectual class that will encourage the antifa thugs and murderers will, too.

One of the effects produced by this monstrous behavior is legitimate paranoia and fear within academia and the larger intellectual class. The response from people like Kirk’s assassin—who was apparently in a relationship with another man who believes he is a woman—is “Well, that is how the trans community has felt forever.” Maybe that’s true. But Charlie Kirk never physically harmed or threatened any trans person. Nor have the vast majority of conservative and contrarian academics.

They certainly have not done what the “MAGA is a fascist movement” scholars have done endlessly, which is to try to convince their audience that MAGA is out to kill them all. All they have done is express their views about the trans phenomenon as a cultural moment in America, while affirming that the people caught up in this, however confused they are, are still human beings meriting our care and our concern.

It really is this simple: It is an unspeakable moral atrocity to kill someone merely for saying things with which you disagree—no exceptions. Anyone who commits such an act no longer has a place in civilized society. Furthermore, it is a form of participation in such acts to refuse to condemn them without qualification, without the “but” that has so exercised reasonable men over the past several days.

You are either against such horrific acts, or you are not. A “but” indicates there are cases in which you are not. It also indicates that you are an opponent of the effort to save this culture from going off the moral cliff.

Anyone who wishes to save civil society should refrain from befriending—or even conversing with—those urging on the kind of disturbed souls who kill others over words.

Alexander Riley is a professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars. 

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-sad-charlie-kirk-died-but-crowd-is-not-worth-your-time/