This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
Previously on this channel, last month I said, “Considering the fact that Trump is now redirecting federal agents to patrolling the mean streets of Washington, DC, we can expect to see more homegrown terrorists like last week’s CDC shooter.”
I must be some kind of psychic, or just an average person with common sense, because as I’m sure everyone knows, on Wednesday September 10th far-right conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed by a sniper while at an event on a college campus. This is an enormous tragedy, because this is exactly the sort of event that would translate to loads of lucrative content for Charlie Kirk, were he still alive.
A lot of people are saying that it’s terribly ironic that Kirk died to gun violence, because he has long been a proponent of gun violence, saying once that gun deaths are worth it to keep the 2nd
Amendment. It’s considered ironic because people assume that the deaths he was dismissing as necessary were those of small children trying to learn their times tables and not, well, himself. But in reality we cannot know what was truly in Kirk’s heart, and now it’s too late to ask him if he thinks his own murder was “worth it,” unless of course the afterlife does exist and someone has a supernatural way to summon a demon and ask her to take a minute away from peeling Charlie Kirk’s skin off with a razor blade to ask him about it. So it’s possible that it’s not ironic. It’s possible that Kirk really was happy to die for the cause of continuing to allow people to own guns that serve little to no purpose besides murdering people you don’t like. Let’s give him that.
There’s been a hearty debate over the “right way” for people on the left to respond to the news of Kirk’s death, with conservatives and moderate liberals chiding anyone who “celebrates” the event. “Celebrate” can mean different things depending upon who is doing the chiding: dark humor like how I opened this video, posting memes about what an awful person Kirk was, or simply amplifying the horrendous things he said, like that time he said that empathy is a “made up new age term” that he “can’t stand” because “it does a lot of damage.” Oh, one second, I recently heard conservatives say that this quote was taken out of context, so in the interests of fairness let me play the full clip:
“So the new communications strategy for Democrats, now that their polling advantage is collapsing in every single state… collapsing in Ohio. It’s collapsing even in Arizona. It is now a race where Blake Masters is in striking distance. Kari Lake is doing very, very well. The new communications strategy is not to do what Bill Clinton used to do, where he would say, “I feel your pain.” Instead, it is to say, “You’re actually not in pain.” So let’s just, little, very short clip. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It was all about empathy and sympathy. I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That’s a separate topic for a different time.”
You might notice that what he actually said is not what is written on the meme conservatives are sharing, but it doesn’t mean they’re lying or hypocrites. They also might be illiterate and we should hold space for that.
But I’ll continue to be fair and offer even more context for Kirk’s remarks: Kirk was a Nazi.
“OH nooooo, the leftist just brands everyone she doesn’t like as a ‘Nazi,’ what an asshole!” Okay, here’s some more context: I say the word “Nazi” because I simply do not have the time to call him a white supremacist fascist nationalist racist transphobic misogynistic bigot who called for the violent murders of his ideological enemies and provided support for the ongoing genocide of a marginalized people. That’s pretty much my definition of a Nazi, and I think it’s a fair one. Here are clips that support every single label I just put on Charlie Kirk.
Additionally, fun facts, Kirk bussed people into DC to storm the Capital on January 6th and he created a Professor Watch List with the names of instructors who said things he disagreed with in order to get them fired (or worse).
Still don’t think he was a Nazi? Well, it’s not just my opinion. It’s also the opinion of these self-professed Nazis, who took to the streets of Huntington Beach to chant “Say his name: Charlie Kirk” and hand out Nazi recruiting pamphlets to children, exactly as Charlie Kirk would have wanted.
So there, that’s the context. To reference my opening point, did Charlie Kirk truly believe all the vile things he said? I’ve been watching him for many years, and I’ve seen him move from Libertarian to Christian nationalist, I saw him get more openly fascistic when Nick Fuentes and his “Groyper” army started criticising him from the furthest end of the right wing, and I recently saw him start to realize that even his own brainwashed audience was pushing back on the Israeli genocide (due to the obvious horror or abject antisemitism) so he was talking about it less. I don’t think it’s a mere coincidence that over the years, his views changed in exactly the way that the far right rewarded with money and views.
But it doesn’t really matter if he really believed all the Nazi talking points. He ran the propaganda wing of the Trump administration that had the primary goal of radicalizing young white men into the fascist hate machine.
For these reasons, I do not see why it’s necessary to join the conservatives in the performative grieving of Charlie Kirk. It’s fine to state outright that we should never murder someone over their speech. Personally, I think it’s absolutely disgusting that a man with that little respect for human life was able to own a gun capable of taking a human life, much less to then be able to carry it onto a college campus and kill someone with it. America’s gun laws are completely anti-humanity, and America’s gun culture is stomach churning.
But beyond that, Libs online, particularly my fellow cis white people, are insisting we not just condemn gun violence but also to feel bad about his death because “his life mattered no more and no less than any other life lost,” which is a nice idea that literally no human actually believes. Like, I’m sure you believe you believe it, but if someone showed you those clips of Charlie Kirk being a white nationalist bigot and then Sophie’s Choiced you and you had to choose to kill Charlie Kirk or, say, a random 6-year old, I think you’d know immediately who to pick. I’m a humanist who does believe that humanity is good and that people can change and that we deserve to make this a better planet for everyone on it, but I also believe that a Nazi’s life is worth less than other lives. Any other lives, to be honest. And I’ve made that decision because Nazis first made the decision to place little to no value on the lives of people of color, of immigrants, of LGBTQ people, and of women. It is the paradox of tolerance: we cannot tolerate people who will use that tolerance to enact statewide intolerance. I will not mourn someone who died violently after spending his life encouraging violence against marginalized people.
And I refuse to accept the dishonest framing that “refusing to mourn the death of a Nazi” is equivalent to “celebrating the use of a gun to murder someone,” or the even more ridiculous idea that it’s akin to encouraging further violence. It isn’t. Rightwing terrorists have been murdering people on the left for decades now, actively encouraged by the rightwing media. For years, Bill O’Reilly went on Fox News and told his huge audience that George Tiller was a “baby killer” for providing women with necessary healthcare, before one of his fans finally succeeded in murdering Tiller in 2009. That served as a real wake-up call for conservative pundits–they realized the power they had over the unthinking bigots in their audience and they doubled down, with O’Reilly straight up lying and saying he never even called Tiller a “baby killer” and that anyway everything he said was true, and the whole world just accepted that and moved on. And now the vast majority of mass shooters is revealed to be a terminally online white man with easy access to guns and an internet history that shows rightwing bigotry that precisely mirrors that of Charlie Kirk and Tim Pool and Candace Owens.
And yes, despite the lies that Republicans are telling themselves right now, every statistic available shows that domestic terrorists are overwhelmingly rightwing.
Is my refusal to mourn Charlie Kirk a lack of empathy, as many liberals have told me in the past week? No. I watched the close-up video of Kirk being shot, and despite the fact that I loathe him and his views, and despite the fact that he had literally JUST downplayed domestic terrorism as misidentified “gang violence” in a racist dogwhistle, I was absolutely horrified at the video. If you haven’t seen it, I really must insist you not seek it out. I had a visceral empathetic reaction. It was empathy for seeing another human being die horribly and pointlessly in a way that no human should. But it was not empathy for one Nazi that the planet is better off without. So much gun violence goes unseen, and seeing it happen right there in high def instantly called to my mind what it must have looked like when the gunman shot George Tiller in front of his church’s congregation. It was what it may have looked like when a bullet tore through the body of 7-year old Daniel Barden of Sandy Hook Elementary. How it might have looked when just over a month ago a rightwing Trump fan gunned down Minnesota Democratic Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. All these people who no one on the right cares about, because their violent deaths weren’t convenient excuses for them to further the agenda they’ve been steadily advancing all these years: to install a fascist strongman who will brutally repress, deport, and kill the liberals and progressives who have been standing in the way of their White Christian paradise.
My lack of mourning for Charlie Kirk, as well as my lack of interest in shaming anyone else for however they use their free speech in reaction to his death, is, in fact, due to an abundance of empathy: empathy for the Black people who have had to argue in good faith with Charlie Kirk’s bad faith rhetoric that tells the country’s youth that Black people are less intelligent, less able, less deserving. Empathy for the trans people who have had their lives threatened because of Charlie Kirk’s insistence that they are an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God.” I have empathy for the still-living victims of gun violence, who not only had to lose their children and siblings and friends, who not only had to then watch as an entire country did nothing to prevent it from happening again, but who then had to see Charlie Kirk announce that those murders were an unfortunate cracked eggshell in the great omelet of America, something we all have to learn to accept.
And even worse, they now have to hear about how by not properly mourning Charlie Kirk’s murder, THEY are the ones who bear responsibility for the far right and the Trump Administration’s coming “retribution” –violence that, to be clear, was always in the works. They were always going to find some excuse, and now many mainstream voices are helping them pin that excuse on Charlie Kirk’s ideological opponents who are simply exercising their freedom of speech while they still have it.
So yes, the reason why I feel abject disgust for Charlie Kirk and his viewpoints and have no interest in hiding it even now that he’s dead? That’s empathy. And just like most if not all of the other things Charlie Kirk hated, empathy is one of the best things we humans have and I embrace it with my entire being. And that’s why I can say that this kind of terroristic gun violence is unacceptable, and also Charlie Kirk made the world a worse place for everyone in it, including himself.
