Reacting to the Reactions about Charlie Kirk's Assassination

A few quotations from the Dear Departed

Curmie was going to write about the assassination of Charlie Kirk as part of a larger discussion about the rule of law, also discussing things like the attack on that Venezuelan boat, the co-opting of the National Guard to <checks notes> spread mulch and pick up trash, and the absurd SCOTUS ruling allowing ICE and DHS to forgo anything in the same area code as obeying Fourth Amendment protections, enabling those assholes to engage in practices that far exceed mere racial profiling and would be called unconstitutional by anyone except a political hack supporting authoritarianism.

That essay may yet be written, but the response to the killing of Kirk has taken on a life of its own, both among the yammering politicians and the complacent media.  We haven’t seen this level of coverage since the murder of another loathsome rich guy, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson… and most of that was about how Luigi Mangione, the (technically still “alleged”) killer is a rather handsome young man.

Noteworthy in the previous paragraph is the fact that the intervening attacks on Minnesota legislators and their spouses, leaving two people and a family dog dead and two other people seriously injured, received far less coverage: some, but nowhere near as much.  Those murders were, of course, clearly politically motivated, and we knew that early on.  The relative lack of coverage is attributable at least in part to the fact that the victims weren’t obscenely wealthy.  However liberal the media are alleged to be, the fact is they’re all controlled by the uber-rich, and those folks think wealth translates into importance… and that killing a rich dude is far worse than killing a poor one.

Please note, Gentle Reader, that Curmie is in no way endorsing any of these murders.  He is not “celebrating” the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.  Well, at least until and unless the right-wing ideologues are successful in their attempt to make Kirk into a “moderate” and therefore even more of a martyr.  He was neither, of course.  His sole attribute was his ability to sell every conceivable variety of hatred as if it were a heavenly elixir.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of murder mysteries, and we not infrequently watch a film or a TV show in which the victim is a truly horrible person, thereby providing potential motives for a number of suspects.  When this occurs, one of us (usually Curmie) sometimes adopts an exaggerated Texas drawl and proclaims that the deceased “wanted killin.’”  But we’re well aware of the fictiveness of what we’re watching.  Real life is different, and no one, not even Charlie Kirk, deserves to be shot in cold blood.  There may be little in the way of mourning at Chez Curmie, but there is precisely zero celebration.

It now appears that the suspected shooter, Tyler Robinson, did have a political, or at least quasi-political, motive.  He disagreed with Kirk on some issues.  But no one knew that when the invective started to fly.  To be fair, it was a reasonable guess, but it didn’t at the time come close to a certainty.  Moreover, although Robinson is said to have become more political of late, he is not registered with a political party and has not voted recently.  He seems to have grown up around guns, and he comes from a Republican family.  [EDIT: It now appears that Robinson may have thought Kirk was insufficiently right-wing for Robinson’s taste.  Yes, the shooting was political, but not in the way it was described by Trump, et al.  Go figure, right?]

Curmie has long decried the media’s prioritization of getting the story first over getting it right.  One example was that attack at a cinema in Aurora, CO; another was the (perhaps staged) attempt in Butler, PA, about which Curmie suggested that the motive may never be known, but “perhaps there’s a latter-day Jodie Foster to impress out there somewhere.”  And, of course, DJT has always been quick to blame someone unlike himself, evidence be damned: witness his screed on New Year’s Day against “criminals coming in” when the New Orleans terrorist actually turned out to be a Texas-born Army vet.

Let’s take as given that Robinson was the shooter and that the reason for the attack was that he objected to Kirk’s politics.  That rationale would have been a reasonable, even probable, surmise before Robinson’s apprehension.  But it was certainly insufficient to claim as fact.  There was the possibility of a “false flag,” of an internal division in the right-wing power structure (Kirk had been accused of insufficient obeisance to Dear Leader, after all), or the gunman had some other motive altogether.  Curmie even saw a post that suggested that since it would take military-style training to be able to shoot that accurately, and since the military is comprised mostly of conservatives… well, you get the point, Gentle Reader.  Yes, that’s a rather strained argument, but until this morning it was at least possibly accurate.

Of course, the vituperation started emanating from the White House long before any real information became known.  Donald Trump, in his usual reckless manner, bypassed any attempt at national unity and blithely accused the “radical left political violence,” and deplored “demonizing those with whom you disagree.”  A more ironic and hypocritical utterance has seldom if ever occurred in all of human history.  Demonizing political opponents is, of course, Trump’s stock in trade, to the extent that when someone else does it, we’re surprised he doesn’t sue them for copyright infringement.

Of course, all this hand-wringing and pearl-clutching casually ignores the attacks on Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, and Melissa Hortman, and the kidnapping plot aimed at Gretchen Whitmer.  But it’s only those on the left we need to worry about, correct?  What utter bullshit!  True, we expect this kind of crap from the usual suspects: Trump, Vance, Miller, Musk, Loomer, Mace, et al.  They are uniformly devoid of actual ideas (or at least good ones) and have nothing but rage and self-righteous hypocrisy to offer.  But it is terrifying that even once reasonable conservatives are buying into this nonsense.  (There’s a reason Curmie abandoned Ethics Alarms, for example.)

Name a nationally-known Democrat—Obama, Biden, Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdami, the list goes on and on—and you’ll find a message of sorrow, empathy, and sometimes outrage about the murder of Charlie Kirk.  Of course, some of them may have been pro forma or even insincere, but Curmie’s challenge on his Facebook page remains: name a prominent Republican who offered similar sentiments over the death of Melissa Hortman, who was an actual legislator as opposed to a talking head. 

One more thing crossed Curmie’s mind when he woke up in the middle of the night.  A little over 50 years ago, Curmie was a freshman in college, taking a course called “Political Ideals.”  One of the key differences identified in that course was the tendency of conservatives to think in terms of the individual and liberals to think of groups with something in common (race, gender, economic class, etc.).  It’s an over-simplification, but it isn’t, or at least wasn’t, inaccurate.

But when it comes to these attacks on politicians or quasi-politicians, those characterizations no longer hold.  There is little if any attempt by liberals to blame all conservatives for the deaths of Hortman or the torching of Shapiro’s home, but all of a sudden all liberals are responsible for Kirk’s death.  There are even insane, and yes, Curmie does mean that term literally, rantings from the likes of Congresscritter Clay Higgins, who wants to violate the First Amendment and censor both individuals and corporations because some people think Charlie Kirk wasn’t all that great a guy, after all. 

We’re already seeing a variation on the theme, as the list of people—teachers, state university administrators, restaurant employees, writers, coaches, even firefighters— fired or suspended for what clearly should be protected speech is long and growing.  FIRE, which Curmie criticized only yesterday, is actually all over this one: here’s a list of literally dozens of incidents, already (!).  This is, as FIRE’s headline rightly points out, the embodiment of “cancel culture”: you know, Gentle Reader, that horrible plague the right always complains about… except, of course, when they’re the ones doing it.

But we aren’t talking about the jobs report, or Russia attacking Poland on Trump’s watch, or the Epstein files, so at least there’s that.

There are problems here, and the solutions aren’t easy.  The political right will cheerfully abandon the 1st and 4th Amendments to bolster the 2nd, but the kind of gun control labelled by liberals as “common sense” wouldn’t have saved Charlie Kirk, at least if, as seems likely, Tyler Robinson was indeed the perpetrator.  He had no record of mental illness or criminality, and the weapon was neither a handgun nor a semi-automatic rifle. 

It is sadly ironic that one of Charlie Kirk’s most famous lines was “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.”  But even calling attention to that quote is seen by some of the more fragile snowflakes of the right as a firing offense.  Yet another reason Curmie is glad he’s retired.

Note: one particularly unfortunate outcome here is that the Tyler Robinson Foundation, named for a different young man, will probably take a hit because of this because, in the words of a beloved former student, “people are stupid, y’all.”  The TRF is a charity offering support to families dealing with pediatric cancer.  Seems like a great cause, especially if you’re also a fan of the band Imagine Dragons, who have been involved with the foundation since its inception. Maybe send them a few bucks if you’ve got some to spare, Gentle Reader?