PROVE ME WRONG, HYPOCRISY, REALITY, TRN

Social media commenters, politicians, broadcast and printed media pundits of all stripes have had a field day following the shooting of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus. Many have echoed similar lines, such as Garry Kasparov’s on Substack: “I unequivocally condemn his killing. We understand that lawless violence at our universities, or anywhere else, shuts down vital forums for free speech and endangers all of us. Speech does not just justify violence. Period. I more than disagreed with Kirk’s actions and statements. I rejected much of his worldview. What happened today does not change my perspective. But my ideological opposition does not in any way qualify my condemnation of this horrendous attack. Violence harms not only the target, but society at large.” Kasparov discloses that he lost his own father when he was a teenager, and so mourns with Kirk’s two young children who will grow up without their father. He emphasizes that in our democracy, our rights and our institutions, not bullets, are what protect us from demagogues, yet the process is slow with no straight line to victory. Political violence threatens that order, and is a death spiral that some countries never escape from, with the strain on our democracy being a sign that we are giving up — the fight for civil order is over. At that point, politics becomes a question of survival of the fittest — a dangerous territory for us to inhabit.

Kirk founded Turning Point USA when he was 18 years of age, and had become one of the most influential young conservatives on the political scene, especially with many college-age students, challenging students who disagreed with him to debate at his ‘Prove Me Wrong‘ events. His influence with Trump and the White House was significant, with the president proclaiming, “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me.” Many were quick to revive a Kirk comment from 2023 at a Turning Point USA event, when he said, “We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. Fifty thousand people die on the road every year. That’s a price. You get rid of driving, you’d have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. We need to be very clear that you’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen, but I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Further, he suggested that efforts to stop shootings should include more armed guards at locations holding noteworthy events.

Elliot Kirschner posted on Substack, “There can be no place for political violence in a democracy. And there can never be a ‘but’ or ‘yet’ or ‘however’ that follows that sentiment. So let’s try a different conjunction. Let’s try ‘and.'” He continues, “AND, that is why the violent, cop-bashing insurrectionists on January 6th should have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and certainly never pardoned. AND, why the would-be king who stoked the riot to remain in power should never have been given immunity by the cowardly Supreme Court. AND, this is why the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a crazed man looking to harm the former Speaker of the House should never have been turned into a vicious punchline, as President Trump did. AND, why the lies spread by Rudy Giuliani, and echoed by Fox News, about the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss — who received death threats as a result — were so dangerous. AND, why it’s so provocative to inject heavily armed military troops into a city that doesn’t want them, in order to provoke confrontation. Kirk’s murder is a tragedy, and I am especially saddened for his young children. It is the facts of what occurred — the death itself and the presumed political motive — that should be the focus of the press and commentators. And the tragedy does not erase the long list of vile and harmful things Kirk said and did over his lifetime. And the final deed does not dismiss the threats of violence he injected into our politics and society. The condemnation of a political assassination, with all its implications, should not be used to turn someone who preached hate into a martyr. And it is instructive, as so many have noted, how selective the outpouring of official grief and press coverage can be depending on the politics of the victim.” Kirschner goes on to point out that the New York Yankees began a game with a moment of silence for Kirk, yet, they didn’t offer the same honor for Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, an elected official, and her husband, Mark, after they were assassinated the day before a Yankees/Red Sox game! “The GOP is is terrified to say the name of Melissa Hortman, because it shatters the narrative they’re trying to sell — that the left is violent and the right is peaceful. That narrative is a lie, and we need to call it out,” writes Mike Nellis on Substack.

Kirschner tells of his young daughters, who are becoming more aware of politics as they seek their own voice in such matters, questioning why other countries don’t have the same proliferation of weaponry as does this country, and how concerning the Kirk assassination is, happening on a school campus. His daughters have shared how they fear that masked, plainclothes federal agents will swoop into their own schools and remove friends and acquaintances, in an act of uncaring violence. Kirschner’s post pinpoints the appearance of the word ‘hypocrisy‘ in many commentaries, how Republicans who decry the Kirk attack, themselves calling for retribution, yet remain silent regarding threats to targeted political rivals — ignoring that most Democratic leaders denounced the Kirk murder. He references Trump’s own threat of violence toward an American city, with the ‘Chipocalypse‘ meme post as a call to civil war. “Certainly hypocrisy is part of what we are seeing. This regime, and the leader the MAGA masses follow with cult-like devotion, has built a political brand around political violence — in many forms. And here is what I think we all need to stop and consider how broadly we define political violence, especially in the press: Women die because they lack access to reproductive medical care — that is political violence. Immigrants being sent to inhumane prisons without due process is political violence. Congress giving billions to ICE, turning it into a personal domestic army acting with impunity is political violence. A polluted environment with toxins and natural disasters from climate change becoming increasingly deadly because of craven politicians is political violence. It is essential that our leaders and the press denounce political violence in all its forms, and in doing so continue to tell the full and truthful story of what is at stake. No one should be threatened with violence and certainly not killed for their beliefs in a democracy. And neither should those who stoke violence be excused from political responsibility, at the polls and be the press, for their words and actions. Because that is not democracy either.”

Political consultant, Jeff Timmer posted on Lincoln Square, “I have long argued that Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party are the greatest threat this nation has ever faced. Greater than Nazi Germany; greater than the Soviet Union; greater than al-Quida. That claim may strike some as overstatement, but it is not. None of those external enemies ever succeeded in capturing one of our major political parties. None had millions of Americans willing to surrender the rule of law, civic peace, and even basic facts to a single man. Trump has done what no foreign foe ever could: He has turned a major American party into an instrument of authoritarian power. From the beginning, Trump has governed not as a president, but as a strongman. The institutions of government — the courts, the military, federal law enforcement — he sees not as independent guardians of the Constitution but as weapons to be bent to his will. The Republican Party has not resisted this transformation; it has welcomed it. What once was a party of limited government and traditional conservatism has become a vessel for fascism, white Christian nationalism, and the normalization of political violence. I said these things before Charlie Kirk was murdered. They were true then. They remain true now. Kirk’s death has not changed reality — and Trump’s grotesque exploitation of the tragedy only underscores it.” Timmer calls the Oval Office response to the assassination ‘pure authoritarian theater,’ and with no factual evidence, blaming the political opposition, he uses the favored tool of scapegoating. By placing blame, Trump seeks to mobilize his MAGA troops, discredit his critics and justify further repression, a familiar tactic of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, and Pinochet. The very scenario many warned us about is now fact — Trump’s return to power in a second term displays precisely what authoritarian rules looks like in America.

Political columnist Ezra Klein of The New York Times wrote last week: “The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.” Klein enumerates many incidents in recent years to show how we are edging closer to complete loss: The plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer; the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the pipe bombs found during that period at committee headquarters of our two dominant political parties; the Pelosi home break-in when Paul Pelosi was injured; two attempted assassinations of presidential candidate Trump; Molotov cocktails thrown into Governor Josh Shapiro’s home; the murder of Minnesota’s Melissa Hortmann; and now, Charlie Kirk. Klein calls Kirk “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion, and though we may dislike what he believed, he was practicing politics in the right way.” He proved his hold on young voters with their sharp move to the right in the 2024 election. Klein did not know Kirk, admitting he is not the right person to eulogize him, but envied what he built — liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness, he says. In his Times column, he mentions seeing mostly decent and human reactions to Kirk’s fate, but also two forms of reaction that are misguided: One is from the left, attempting to wrap Kirk’s death around his views on the Second Amendment; the second from the right’s attempt to turn the murder into a justification for an all-out war, “a Reichstag fire for our time.” Klein calls political violence a contagious virus, which became endemic in the country in the 1960s and into the 1970s; and while American politics has sides, we are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — to maintain the viability of the American experiment. “I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. We are all safe, or none of us are,” he concludes.

Writer Elie Mystal in The Nation tore into some of the words surrounding the “canonization” of Charlie Kirk, cautioning that the “martyred mascot of racism” has distracted people from facing heightened racism and the country’s raging gun problem. Mystal wrote, “Before the shooting, the biggest story in America was the Supreme Court’s authorization of racial profiling against Latinos. After the white media is done celebrating their martyred mascot, I hope we can resume our conversation about how the rest of us are forced to live in this white supremacist state.” While Mystal offered condolences for Kirk and his family, he recounts how historically Black colleges and universities in Virginia cancelled classes after receiving threats in the fallout. “To recap, a white man was murdered by another white man for reasons we don’t know yet, but somehow that means Black people have to catch hell,” said Mystal. Calling out the Yankees baseball management for the moment of silence for Kirk, he also jumped on Ezra Klein’s “unconscionably” entitled ‘Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics The Right Way‘ in The New York Times, calling it the “worst argument of the week.” “Klein’s article goes on to condemn political violence,” Mystal wrote. “I agree with that, of course. But condemning political violence as an op-ed columnist is a little bit like condemning the French Revolution when you’re a member of the aristocracy. It is in our best interests to condemn the violent murder of public figures, because we all know we might be next. That doesn’t make us empathetic or graceful or more enlightened than the least common denominator on social media, it makes us self-interested.”

He feels that Klein missed the point, because Kirk attacked and denigrated Black people and threatened the existence of LGBTQ people. To him it is impossible to condemn political violence and mourn the victims of that violence without also lauding the political influence of the those victims — a basic test for Mystal. “Charlie Kirk represented the very worst American political discourse had to offer, and I wish he were still alive so I could tell that to him, to his face, over and over again. I wish he lived long enough to see everything that he worked to achieve crumble all around him. You see what I did there, Ezra? It’s really not hard,” he throws at Klein. Mystal claims he’s a New York Mets fan, and wants “people who practice politics to be better than Charlie Kirk. And Ezra Klein. All I can do is try to weather the storm. Violent whites have their blood up, and that usually means incredibly bad things for people like me. I’ve got public appearances that I probably need to cancel. I hope to survive this by staying as far away from white folks as I possibly can until this fever breaks.” The ammunition used by Kirk’s assassin had been etched with his anti-fascist messages, and because the ends of the bullets were stamped with initials ‘TRN,’ designating Turkish bullet maker Turan, MAGA in their trans-people fixation chose to interpret these letters as a trans community creation.

The Snopes website posted various quotes from Charlie Kirk, one from July 13, 2023 when he said some prominent Black women did not have “the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” He was talking specifically about MSNBC television host Joy Reid; former first lady Michelle Obama; US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee; and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “If we would have said three weeks ago that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and saying it for us! They’re coming out and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action,'” Kirk charged. A post on X from a year ago included a video clip of Kirk saying, “You have to go steal a white person’s slot,” that same clip being reposted to Instagram several times. Also confirmed are quotes when he said empathy is a “made-up, new age term,” and that “Jewish money has ruined US culture.”

The Common Dreams website has posted comments by Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler, advisor with FOR-USA and the founder and president of Faith Strategies USA, with his thoughts on the killing of Charlie Kirk. He says there are so many words and cliches condemning the murder and “none of the refrains are unique.” “We need to dial back our discourse. We need to be tolerant of different opinions. There is no room in American politics for political violence. Are people blind to the realties that have been swirling around us? The language has been violent. The discord has been great. There has been consistent room to dine at the table of heated racist discussion posing as legitimate political speech. The killing of Charlie Kirk fits within this arena of speech that is racist and hate-filled but is designed to pose as rational an logical political speech. In his rhetoric and so-called debate style this 31-year old evangelical firebrand of the right has stated that Black pilots were incompetent, gays should be stoned, ironically he was opposed to gun control, abortion, LGBTQ rights, criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King, Jr., promoted Christian nationalism, advanced Covid-19 misinformation, made false claims of electoral fraud in 2020, and is a proponent of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This Chicago-born suburbanite brought all of the racial innuendo to speech and rhetorically violated the safety and security of Blacks, people of color, the LGBTQIA community, perverted the history of race and racism in America, attempted to legitimize the nation as a white bastion of civilization and Christianity, and in general perfected the use of racial and hateful language and molded it into a form of acceptable and legitimate political debate and viewpoint.”

Reverend Hagler goes on to say, “But the legitimate debate aspect was far from legitimate historical benign speech, nor was it nonviolent in character. In fact, it touched all of the refrains of the vile language of the past that resulted far too many times in lynchings and other forms of racial violence and upheaval. Don’t get me wrong, I am sorry for the death, the killing of Charlie Kirk. I have stood over many coffins of many people I did not agree with, and words of comfort to the families during my 40-plus years of ministry. In doing so I have looked at a person’s life to find something to say about their character, worthiness, and contributions they have made in their lifetime. Sometimes the task is easier than at other times.” In examining Kirk’s life, Hagler notes that he was a husband, a father, but what else, he doesn’t know. He is sure he had friends, and he played a significant role in his connection with community that was personal and also collective, but the problem in affirming his life at an end-of-life ceremony is that he evidently did not care in his living about the security and comfort of others, showing no empathy. Questioning whether or not he believed what he espoused, or whether it was simply a marketing ploy for influence and money, the reverend doesn’t know, and no one will ever know for sure, but he expanded hatred, marketed the vile speech of old racisms in new wineskins, and further jeopardized the lives and security of others. Hagler ends his essay with, “Trump talked about lowering the temperature of the political language that is used, but in the next breath criticized ‘the radical left’ for castigating the hate language of Kirk. If we are going to be truthful in this moment, the hate that Kirk put out came back on him, and the violent political language that continues to fly in this country will continue to manifest itself in ways where we will continually be praying for victims and their families.”

As Elizabeth Spiers writes in The Nation: “There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins ‘Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.’ His entire business was simply performances, and he could not have an entertaining public fight without opposition. Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome. I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.”