an FB rant:
Apparently if you reject Charlie Kirk’s bigotry ; if you deplore his actual words; if you have a problem with his having devoted his life to advocating against the equality and humanity of pretty much every group except for cisgender heterosexual Christian white men; if you criticize his love of guns over people; if you have the temerity to state that he did conscious, active harm to others and helped unleash and normalize violence, YOU live in a “bubble” and YOU reject civil “discourse.” Just wow. The horrific murder of a rotten man is causing a whole lot of people to draw some disturbing conclusions.
I wish there were an actual bubble to live in free of the cruelty and bigotry, free of the racism and misogyny, free of the hatred of LGTBQIA people and of immigrants and of Muslims and of Arabs and of Jews, which the defenders of Kirk’s character accuse me of living in and blame for my (and your) disgust of him. I would love to live in that bubble! As if we are not inundated day in and day out with the onslaught of all the biases, whether overt or unconscious or structural, that define and cleave our society.
I am profoundly disturbed and sickened by the number of people I have seen who are bending over backwards to defend the character of a man whose idea of “discourse” and “debate” was to dehumanize and deny the rights of whole swaths of people by challenging their very humanity and right to exist as equal members of society.
I have chosen to defriend people, people I have known for years, as the full depth of their unexamined biases and now-belligerent defense of Charlie Kirk’s character has revealed who they are. The mental gymnastics, the dodging and weaving, the straw men arguments, the gaslighting and projection, the denial of the lived experience of the targets of Kirk’s bigotry, the denial that he was in fact a white supremacist misogynist bigot at all, the contention that his nakedly hateful remarks were “taken out of context”, the conclusions they draw from Kirk having been shot for his views by a white supremacist more extreme and violent than himself (eg, that people on the left or “both sides” are to blame) and the concomitant censure of people for calling out Kirk’s bigotry for what it was as itself being a problem, are excruciating to witness and endure.
On this last point, let me say this:
1. Most mass shootings and acts of political violence are committed by white, male, rightwing extremists, hard stop. MAGAs /white surpemacists and and worse are the ones who killed Kirk, Melissa Hortman and her husband and dog; the ones who tried to kill Trump, who tried to kill Paul Pelosi and Josh Shapiro, who shot up Black churches and various synogogues. Trump himself incited a maga movement to storm the capitol and kill people, and the Proud Boys and worse answered the call and mobilized. Almost all stochastic violence is by racist misogynist radicalized white men who go down internet rabbit holes where people like Kirk and others thrive.
2. The Trump /MAGA movement is step by step dismantling the rights and denying the humanity of everyone who is not a white male cisgender heterosexual Christian male. They routinely deploy the use of dehumanizing language and bigotry (“civil discourse” of the type Kirk trafficked in and for which my former friends and people like Ezra Klein defend his “character”) and that language becomes the basis for “policy” views.
Examples:
 the “view” that transgender people should not exist, so that they “will not” (poof! See all the laws banning the use of bathrooms or gender affirming care or pronouns);
the “view” that immigrants should have no rights or due process (poof, now they are being rounded up en masse in dragnets by thugs in masks who throw them to the ground and treat them like criminals — who BTW are also supposed to have rights— and sent to concentration camps; or deported for criticizing Trump or Israel);
the “view” that women should be denied their right to vote (time to repeal the 19th amendment, or poof! Push for a bill preventing anyone who changed their names from voting unless their names match their birth certificates) or their rights over their own bodies (poof ! no more abortion in many states ) or that they should “submit” to men (which if this is followed means legalized rape of women and their erasure as anything but chattel);
the “view” that the 14th amendment doesn’t apply to the children of immigrants (poof! Now on the chopping block before the SCt);
the “view” that Black women lack basic mental capacity (poof, Black women are fired in droves from their government jobs );
the “view” that anyone not a white male is unqualified (poof! everyone but a white man is a “diversity hire” and it is open season to attack and fire them).
And on and on.
3. When the left has occasionally engaged in violence, it has largely been in response to years or decades of oppression and violence by state actors: cops murdering a Black man on live TV over $20; cops killing Philando Castile or Sandra Bland or Freddy Gray or Eric Garner. Over and over, the systemic violence, with no improvement or change. People protested in rage and horror over the brutality and violence. Yes there was some looting (property damage) and violence but many of the protests were peaceful and yet cops responded with brutality. There were not demands for oppression but the end of it. Trump wanted to shoot the protestors. Republican governors and legislators responded —notwithstanding the murder of Heather Hyer by a MAGA Nazi by running her over in a counter protest against the Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017 — by making it legal to run over protestors. Just like they have responded to efforts to make it easier for people forced to stand in long lines to vote (because the GOP cut the number of polling places in Dem cities so that people would not be able to vote) by making it illegal to bring them food or water while they wait. In any event, my point is this : the non-right responds to systemic oppression with mainly peaceful protests and organizing. Yet protests in support of basic humanity are demonized, with property rights elevated over human life. On the non-right, our response to oppression is protest. On the right, the response to protest is more oppression.
4. Since Trump has been back in power , the all-out assault on DEI has had its desired chilling effect on speech as well as retributive viewpoint discrimination. The regime has inverted language itself: if you observe that Charlie Kirk said racist things, you are the racist and the hater. It is people like you — who refuse to let that racism and hatred go unchallenged — who are destroying “civil discourse.”
If only you would STFU when the regime and its supporters or mere “defenders of free speech” say and do racist things, say and do misogynist things, say and do antisemitic things , say and do anti-immigrant things , say and do anti gay and anti transgender things , say and do anti Isam things, if you and I would just STOP already because criticizing bigotry is the real BIGOTRY, whereas the actual bigotry that is then also used as the rationale for the eradication of civil rights is “discourse” —- if only that would happen, there would not be political violence !
Don’t you get it ? It is your fault and my fault that Charlie Kirk is dead; dont you know that objecting to bigotry encourages violence? If you say white supremacy is wrong or abhorrent, you are the problem.
So now you better get on board and laud Charlie Kirk’s hate speech and vile ideas as “civil discourse” and you better insist that he was a good man and pretend he did no harm. Get it in your head, please, that free speech is great as long as it means the right to spew hatred and bigotry without blowback; but if you got a problem with that, then know this: you will be accused of attacking free speech if you criticize the content for its bigotry or the man himself for that bigotry; you will be called the bigot; you will be labeled “divisive” for calling a white supremacist and Christian supremacist what they are. And then you may lose your job for exercising your free speech rights to call out the bigotry while being told you don’t “believe in” free speech at all.
P.S. I have multiple IRL friends who have contacted me over the kirk issue and even before, all of whom are afraid to speak out publicly. Privately they volunteer their awareness that this is Nazi/McCarthy level conduct; they know they should speak up ; but they are afraid. They know the fear is part of the point , and the more people are silenced, the more silencing there will be and the more at risk those who speak out will be. I can’t and don’t judge them for their decisions, especially given the craven complicity of far more powerful institutions throughout this country, including the newspapers firing columnists for accurately quoting him and the lawfirms and companies and schools scrubbing their websites of DEI content and worse, that jumped onto the anti-DEI fascist bandwagon from the minute Trump took office.
P.P.S/update—Though I had read multiple analyses indicating the shooter was a MAGA/groyper, I have edited references to him being a radicalized right winger based on the release of text messages that complicate that narrative. However, even if — and this does not seem to be the case — Robinson is a left wing radical, that would not change my assessment here. And for Trump and vance and Miller and the MAGA right , who have for months, indeed years, been attacking the left for taking issue with their bigotry and their hate speech, their embrace of violence, their attacks on the rights and lives of whomever they choose to demonize as “less than”, to use this awful assassination as an excuse to engage in further oppression, is just grotesque. Hmmm where will all those people defending Kirk’s character be when Trump accelerates his regime’s assaults on Kirk’s and Trump’s critics? Silent, or celebrating , or blaming the victims. |
