Do You See The Hate They Breed?
The authoritarian government is using Charlie Kirk's death to breed hate and destroy any dissenter with a platform.
What if this whole crusade's a charade
And behind it all there's a price to be paid
For the blood on which we dine
Justified in the name of the holy and the divine
Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you wanna change it?
—Nine Inch Nails, “The Hand That Feeds” (2005)
Charlie Kirk did not lead his public life with grace, to put it mildly. I detested his politics, detested that he became wealthy by spreading lies to benefit white supremacy, detested that he told people that empathy was bad.
I can believe all of those ideas above and also believe that his murder was atrocious. It was an assassination, a single targeted shot at his carotid artery that killed him as surely as Oswald’s rifle shot to John F. Kennedy did on November 22, 1963. Just like Kennedy, Kirk may have made it to the hospital, but there was no saving him. Despite how many times that assassinations or near assassinations have taken place in this country, directed at politicians and public figures, we continue to do nothing of substance.
We are currently enduring a two-year period in which two attempts were made on the life of Donald Trump, in which a conspiracist shot up the Centers for Disease Control, in which a conservative activist murdered two Minnesota lawmakers and family members, and now in which Mr. Kirk is now dead, almost simultaneously with a school shooting in Colorado by a teen boy radicalized by far-right provocateurs like…Charlie Kirk. Mr. Kirk himself helped organize the “protest” in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, before it morphed into the violent insurrection. He praised the attempt on the life of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. He recently called for violence upon transgender people. He said that gun deaths are a regrettable part of the right to own guns.
I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t violent rhetoric from corners of the left. I know it’s out there. But it was nonetheless astonishing to see two completely different worlds out there in the immediate aftermath of this shooting. On Bluesky, a largely center-to-far-left platform, my entire timeline was people saying, “Don’t cheer, don’t post anything violent, don’t say anything you’ll regret later.” It took at least an hour for something vaguely resembling celebration to show up. Meanwhile, on the platform formerly known as Twitter, violent threats to destroy the left and transgender people flourished immediately. Posts went around saying that everyone on Bluesky was celebrating (again, not at all true). Jason Chaffetz went on Fox News before Kirk’s heart had even stopped to say it had to have been a transgender shooter. That has proven wrong, as Tyler Robinson, a Mormon from a MAGA-supporting family that soured on their politics, is apparently the assassin. This has not prevented the same bad faith actors desperately portraying Robinson’s roommate as transgender and his lover…something that has no independent confirmation (it’s hard to take the FBI, run by a cross-eyed troll who helped build the MAGAsphere, at its word these days).
That night, Donald Trump went into the Oval Office and joined his old aide Steve Bannon’s online show to declare "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we're seeing in our country & it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity." The same man was silent when conservatives murdered people on the left, including the Minnesota lawmakers murdered by a MAGA supporter in June. He cheered on the insurrection four years ago; indeed, he helped stoke it. He has used violent rhetoric for a decade, but blames the left for violence now.
The irony is palpable.
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Since that night, neo-Nazis and other far-right scumbags have been getting people fired from jobs across the country for the crime of…repeating Kirk’s words in social media posts. An Office Depot employee was fired for refusing to print laudatory flyers for a Kirk memorial. The Justice Department began openly threatening any left-leaning organization with terrorism charges, and today the chairman of the FCC went on another far-right podcast to blatantly threaten ABC with fines and license removals if they didn’t remove Jimmy Kimmel from the air. Kimmel has long been a scathing critic of Trump, just like Stephen Colbert, and just like CBS did to Colbert, ABC capitulated.
Within four hours.
Kimmel has been suspended “indefinitely,” which is PR-speak for “until we figure out how bad our exposure is legally by violating our contract.” Sinclair Broadcasting, yet another far-right conglomerate of which there are far too many of in this country, said that its ABC stations would air a tribute to Kirk on Friday in Kimmel’s usual spot, and said that they would not air Kimmel ever again unless he apologized and donated to Turning Point USA, Kirk’s advocacy group.
You might think, boy, Kimmel must’ve said something truly awful to get this sort of overkill, and you would be sorely mistaken. Kimmel uttered an incredibly mild condemnation, not even of Kirk, but of the fascists using his death as an opportunity to turn to violence against the left and crush dissenters. He said that in between all of the finger-pointing, they even found a little time to grieve for Kirk. That is it. That is all that Jimmy Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk, and the FCC acted as if he’d uttered about a dozen f-bombs on broadcast television during a children’s show.
I won’t reiterate what has become an incredibly worn-out maxim about not capitulating in advance. It is clear that, despite an unpopular president enforcing a deeply harmful agenda and creating his own personal Gestapo, corporations have chosen to throw in with fascism. The cowardice reeks like New York’s Fresh Kills landfill. These people have seen Trump repeatedly renege on his agreements for a lifetime, let alone this year, and believe they can somehow come out on top. This bloated fascist gasbag, who has recklessly driven the economy to teeter for months with his lunatic tariff policies, who is squeezing the rest of us in the workforce out of being able to afford to live, and who could cost these corporate cowards everything with one ill-considered tweet, is somehow winning against people who have the upper hand.
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It’s unsurprising, of course. The corporate monoliths couldn’t even keep their pledge to not donate funds to election deniers after the failed insurrection. They could have prevented the fall of democracy by simply choosing to not support the politicians destroying it, because it is only through the grace of those corporate donors that the airheads dominating Congress can outspend more qualified opponents to reach that particular hall of power. The lobbyists for those corporations decided after a year, after normalcy began to return to governance, to turn funding back on as if the people they’d stopped funding had changed their ways when every public statement they made demonstrated their commitment to the Big Lie. The lobbyists believed Trump was headed to jail, so they could return to the old ways, dangerously ignorant of the fact that those ways had been burned to the ground by far more people than just Mango Mussolini.
The less charitable opinion of these lobbyists would be that they preferred fascism, and I’m sure at least some of their paymasters (see: Sinclair, Miriam Adelson, Stephen Schwarzman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk) do think that way. One only need look at Target, though, to see the dangers for these corporations. Target deeply angered much of their core shopping audience by bending to the racist administration demands to remove all diversity programs and products, and has been losing money since as a result of a coordinated and sustained boycott taking place completely under the radar. Other large companies and retailers are also likely to suffer. I imagine the cancellations of Disney+ will be substantial, and Disney/ABC is deeply invested in that platform’s success.
In other media, Twitter/X has lost an immense amount of users since Elon Musk steadily turned it into the Daily Stormer after buying it in 2022. The Washington Post has lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers since they began their purge of Black voices this year from their op-ed section and driving out quality journalism to kiss up to the molting President.
Enough is enough.
Constitutional rights, human rights, they are not privileges to be bestowed upon us by a ruling class. They come to us from the rule of law, from centuries of human advancement, and depending on one’s belief system, derive from Yahweh/God/Allah/Jesus Christ. The very definition of a right is that it is immutable, not to be bargained, traded, or stripped. It was the literal basis for founding this nation, and far too many have utterly debased its meaning and our principles by forgetting it.
Furthermore, there has to be some degree of decency for society to function. Running around murdering each other only leads to civil war. We have been here before, in the late 1850s, and it was bad enough that James Buchanan sat passively by and did nothing to stop it. Now, 175 years later, the president is a man who is throwing gasoline on the fire. Maybe he thinks that he won’t get burned. I’m sure Charlie Kirk thought he’d never be shot by a sniper, either. The irresponsible incitement to violence has to stop, and by every quantitative measure, it is incitement driven by the right wing. You know, the people who built gallows on January 6, 2021 outside of Congress. The people repeatedly being arrested for threats on the lives of Democratic politicians. The people murdering legislators. The people who tried to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer here in Michigan. The people responsible for the overwhelming majority of political violence and terrorism in this country for the past two decades. You know that set of facts is true because the Trump administration deleted the report from the DHS website. Can’t have that pesky evidence lying around, right?
The vast majority of us on the left are more than happy to be nonviolent, because we condemn murder irrespective of who is the victim of it, you know, the way God commanded. The right has, repeatedly, loudly, and publicly refused to do the same, despite their equally loud claims to be true Christians. I could cite all sorts of Scripture to demonstrate what charlatans they are, but it’d be a fool’s errand. It won’t change their behavior. The only way America finds its way out of this spiral of violence is to refuse to partake in it. My fear is that is far easier said than done.