In the days since Charlie Kirk was shot to death in Utah, allegedly by a 22-year-old white man with possibly a severe case of Internet irony poisoning, there has been a solid effort to whitewash — pun intended — much of the dialogue of confrontation he used to obtain incredible wealth and fame. We have been told that Kirk was simply controversial, that he loved to debate people, that he was “doing politics the right way” by going to college campuses and talking to students, and so on. Our own opinion is that he went to college campuses to provoke students and get some nice clips for his daily podcast so he could hold on to his fame and fortune, but we’re not Ezra Klein, thankfully.
But the whitewashing hit its nadir at the end of the press conference announcing the arrest of his alleged killer on Friday morning. That was when Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, tried to play the part of the adult in the room and lower the temperature of the discourse. Somebody has to, since the American president sure isn’t. In fact, Cox has been begging people, like the American president, to lower the temperature for a while now, and notably was the only conservative all week to include in the long litany of recent political violence the murder and attempted murder of Democratic Minnesota legislators, their families, and their dog just this summer, as well as the arson-bombing attack on Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. We think that’s important, and we’re glad he did.
Cox told the audience in the room and watching online and on TV that he thought it very important to “understand with eyes wide open what it is that’s happening in our country today.” His way of understanding involved mostly reading quotes from Charlie Kirk, quotes that would indicate Cox has blinders the size of Rhode Island on when it comes to the dead man’s past discourse.
Here is Cox’s list of Kirk quotes that the governor used to showcase the man’s legacy:
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. Welcome without judgment, love without condition, forgive without limit. Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.
“When things are moving very fast, and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read Scripture, spend time with friends, and remember Internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be okay.
“When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to commit violence. What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable agreement where violence is not an option.”
How incredibly ironic to tell people that “internet fury is not real life,” when it was the nonstop harnessing and stoking of internet fury that brought Kirk untold wealth, fame, and a multi-million-dollar mansion in Arizona with a huge en suite bathroom and a kitchen roughly the size of the deck of an amphibious assault ship.
Luckily for the historical record, Charlie Kirk said a lot of stuff in public in his hundreds of hours of podcasting and speech-making, his active social media feeds, his many interviews, and in one of the half dozen or so books he published in the last decade. And while we understand that it is Spencer Cox’s job — or he at least thinks it’s his job — to project the image of a sane and rational leader, we think it does a disservice to the public to clean up Kirk and canonize him.
Or, as we yelled at our laptop while watching the press conference, Did Charlie Kirk ever say anything else that might have some relevancy here????
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So here is just a small sampling of shit Charlie Kirk said that, to put it mildly, might clash with Cox’s vision of someone who just wanted to find “reasonable agreement” with his ideological opposites.
On empathy: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up New Age term that does a lot of damage.”
On famous Black women, at least those of a particular ideological bent: “[If we said] Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheilia Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us. They’re coming out and saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. You don’t have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.”
On Great Replacement Theory, that charming racist trope that claims Democrats and leftists want to import illegal immigrants from browner countries to dilute the voting power of white people. This theory is beloved by neo-Nazis and was the justification someone used to shoot up a Pittsburgh synagogue and kill 11 people a few years ago: “The Great Replacement is not a conspiracy theory, it’s government policy.”
On the idea of Great Replacement Theory, Kirk was also known to say that immigration had to be stopped because Western civilization was on the line.
Uh Oh, Charlie Kirk Is Oppressed By Sign Language Now
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On Zohran Mamdani, the leftist Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City: “He’s a self-righteous, narcissistic parasite on New York City and should be expelled from politics.”
And at the same time, on why legal immigration sucks because you wind up with Mamdani or Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib in America: “It’s legal immigration that is also the problem. When you allow a bunch of people into your country legally and they don’t share your values, turns out they don’t always assimilate.”
And this is just a small sampling! We haven’t yet gotten to Kirk’s thoughts on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“a huge mistake”), transgenderism (“the gender equivalent of black face”), George Floyd (a “scumbag”), or his claim that female supporters of Kamala Harris wanted to die alone and childless. Charlie Kirk was so damned racist that he blamed the flood deaths in Texas hill country on the fact that Austin had a Black fire chief 130 miles away. And that wasn’t a one-off. Everything you can possibly blame on Black people or women, he blamed on Black people or women (or when he was lucky, both).
Nor have we gotten to his comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to Hamas, or his incredibly ironic belief that having the Second Amendment was worth a few people murdered with guns here and there. Presumably he didn’t mean him.
We would submit to Spencer Cox that Kirk’s dehumanization of ethnic minorities, religious minorities, gay and transgender people, and all the rest was not simply a case of “not having a human connection with someone you disagree with.” Charlie Kirk demonized people he disagreed with in the foulest and most aggressively insulting language possible. He did it because it made him famous. He did it because it made him money. He did it because it made rooms full of young conservatives chant his name and stroke his ego.
Charlie Kirk was as much a part of the problem in our current toxic political state as anyone. In fact, he was much more a part of the problem, given his visibility on the Right. The man was a guest at the White House how many times? He had the president’s ear. Donald Trump considered him a close friend, although perhaps not as important as the new White House ballroom he’s building.
Yr Wonkette’s position on Kirk’s murder remains that political violence is a moral atrocity and should be condemned at full volume. But our position on Kirk is that politicians like Spencer Cox do an enormous disservice to the public they serve when they soft-soap the life and words and legacy of a provocateur with his reach.
So before the Right just shrugs and moves on because the shooter didn’t turn out to be a gay Black anti-gun pro-abortions-for-all leftist with gender dysmorphia and a hard-on for replacing white people with Central American migrants — and oh, they’re moving along all right! — we want to note our belief that it is irresponsible to ignore who he was to anyone outside Kirk’s very, very small tent. A huge number of Americans had never even heard of Charlie Kirk before Wednesday, and this bullshit “Charlie Kirk loved everyone and wanted us all together in harmony” is WOOOF. SOME BULLSHIT.
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