Murder Most Foul

Reflections on this precipice

I wonder how many of you share my sneaking suspicion about Charlie Kirk’s murder? I will get into that at the end of this piece. It seems obvious that many on the Right — including Trump and Elon Musk — hope to use this as their Reichstag fire moment. I’ve written about how Right Wing rhetoric increasingly demonizes not just radical Leftists but Democrats as a whole — in a country where Democrats actually outnumber Republicans by a considerable margin (44.1 million to 37.4 million).

Donald Trump (who was a Democrat for most of his life before he found it politically expedient to shift allegiances) has openly declared, “I hate the Democrats.” He said that last summer, in an Iowa speech celebrating Independence Day, as The Hill reported: “You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country, you want to know the truth.”

Stephen Miller (American Goebbels) recently called the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.” Miller continued his ferocious attack on the milquetoast establishment party that is awash in corporate money, which, when in power, was unable to raise the minimum wage or indict any Wall Street investors for their role in the 2008 financial meltdown: “It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists.”

The Nation notes that the goal of the Trump regime’s “accelerating addiction to outrage upon outrage,” is to “flood the zone” so people stop paying attention or feeling outrage. I recently wrote about Neal Gabler’s useful essay in which he explores how Trump applies the techniques he learned in Reality TV: Constant stunts, scandals and spectacles allow him to keep control over the media. Recently, the Epstein scandal has threatened his ability to control the public narrative.

Although no shooter has been apprehended and we have no idea of the motive for what seems a very professional assassination, Right Wing influencers have gone apeshit on Twitter with extremist calls for violent reprisals against Leftists and Democrats. “The Left is the party of murder,” Tweeted Elon Musk. Also: “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die.” The public dissemination of videotapes of the murder is shocking on the one hand, but it also has the effect of normalizing this level of violence — getting people used to it and anticipating more of it. We’ve already become numb to school shootings; another school shooting happened the same day as Kirk’s murder, in Denver, but these are now so frequent (almost daily) that we barely pay attention.

Here is some background on Kirk, who I admit I never followed closely. He rose quickly from suburban, Illinois teenager to a central figure in American conservatism. His father was the project architect manager at Trump Tower in New York for the real-estate developer John Buck Company. He grew up in a Conservative Christian household, In 2012, at just 18, Kirk founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a campus-based conservative group that positioned itself as a counterforce to what he framed as “leftist indoctrination” in schools and universities.

The Koch network embraced Kirk as an ally in their efforts to promote free-market orthodoxy among young people. By 2014, TPUSA was operating on a $2 million annual budget. Within a few years, that number had grown to over $30 million, with the funds coming from a small circle of ultrarich patrons who also supported the Tea Party.

He became a regular guest on Fox & Friends and The Sean Hannity Show in his early twenties. In 2016, he joined Donald Trump Jr. on the campaign trail, and developed close ties with the Trump family. Trump called Kirk “a great warrior for our movement.” Turning ideology into spectacle, Kirk exemplified the Right’s shift from policy-driven activism to media-driven populism.

The best analysis of Kirk’s murder I have found so far comes from Daily Beast journalist Wahajat Ali on his Youtube channel:

Ali proposes that we oppose political violence categorically; it endangers everyone in a nation saturated with 400 million guns. But we must also refuse to cede rhetorical ground to bad-faith actors on the Right. The proper response is to both condemn Kirk’s murder and speak plainly about his harmful legacy and the broader right-wing ecosystem that excuses “our” violence while weaponizing “theirs.”

Ali notes that every Democratic and Leftist influencer immediately condemned Kirk’s murder as a tragedy. However, when liberal politicians — like Minnesota State Representative Melissa Horton, gunned down in an act of “stochastic terror” with her husband — get killed, Right Wing influencers and politicians have been callous or vicious. Yankee Stadium held a moment of silence for Kirk. They didn’t honor Horton in a similar way. The double standard is intense and creepy.

Ironically, along with Kirk’s now widely-circulated statement about the Second Amendment (“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”), he also said: “I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.” While the Right Wing is now seeking to turn him into an All-American martyr, Kirk was an extreme misogynist and racist. He supported the Great Replacement Theory, wanted mass deportations, wanted to revoke birthright citizenship, expressed contempt for Martin Luther King, and thought young white women should give up their “meaningless careers” to make Christian babies. Here is a typical sample, where Kirk argued that black women “do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.” They “have to go steal a white person's slot.” Kirk promoted Christian nationalism: the idea that their twisted, regressive version of Christianity should dominate the U.S. Government and control all aspects of American life.