I can say, with complete and total confidence, that I never, for even one second, bought the Right’s “we just really love free speech!” bullshit. It was never about free speech and was always about keeping people in their place. It’s not that they had any great love for humor, “edgy” or not. They just didn’t want to live in a world where rape jokes were socially unacceptable, because a world where rape jokes are unacceptable is a world where rape is taken more seriously. They didn’t want to live in a world where slurs were socially unacceptable because a world where slurs are socially unacceptable is a world in which people take discrimination more seriously.
What they wanted wasn’t free speech. What they wanted was a situation where they got to say all of the horrible things they thought and felt and no one could call them an asshole for doing so. Indeed, the thing so many of them remain most angry at all these years later is that people called them racist on social media after they said racist things on social media. How rude!
Free speech, as many of us repeatedly explained, means that the government can’t restrict your speech, not that “everyone is legally required to believe that you are wonderful, regardless of what kind of bile spews forth from your mouth.” Because “Hey buddy, you’re kind of an asshole” is also protected speech, as is “I will not continue to use your product, because of how you are an asshole.”
And yet, they have spent the last week doing the thing they claimed was so very egregious. They have been trying to “cancel” Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, hosts of the “I’ve Had It” podcast for laughing at a joke about Charlie Kirk, and Dave Chappelle (who they notably loved when he was telling transphobic jokes) for telling one.
The thing is, neither of these jokes were actually about Charlie Kirk personally so much as they were about the conservative movement itself. In the case of Welch and Sullivan, they were reading off jokes from people exaggerating the ridiculous things they were going to do to torture conservatives now that Democrats have taken over the House and Senate — things like “We’re gonna come up with pronouns you’ve never even heard of” and “We’re gonna trans all your kids!” that were largely based on the absurd things that frighten them so badly. Like, really, what kind of sad, pathetic people are afraid of “pronouns”? The joke tweet they shared was “We’re gonna dig up Charlie Kirk and do it all over again.” The joke there was not actually about Charlie Kirk. It mentioned Charlie Kirk, but it wasn’t about Charlie Kirk. It was about the insinuation that the Left had anything to do with his murder in the first place, which we didn’t, as well as about the Right’s quest to turn him into a sainted martyr.
Chappelle’s joke was also not about Charlie Kirk. Rather, it was, quite pointedly, about the fact that conservatives will aggressively defend horrible jokes about people like George Floyd, while insisting that Charlie Kirk is somehow in some special “do not touch” category.
“I feel fucked up saying this,” Chappelle said during a performance at Madison Square Garden last weekend. “It’s scary being a public speaker. And I mean, look, ever since that guy Charlie Kirk got murdered — and I shouldn’t say this publicly, but — I feel better.”
Then, after setting it up, he said, “I’m sure he’s looking up at us right now, laughing so hard he can’t breathe.”
Now, that last part would be the first clue as to what this joke was really about, at least for those clever enough to pick up on these things. That joke, actually, was not Chappelle’s. It was originally told by MAGA comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, at a roast for the Black comedian Kevin Hart, back in May of this year.
"The Black community is so proud of you,” Hinchcliffe said about Hart. “Right now, George Floyd is looking up at us all, laughing so hard he can't breathe.”
So much classier, right?
So, you see, that joke was not about Charlie Kirk, it was about the fact that the Right finds it acceptable to laugh at a joke about man who was killed by the police, but not at a joke about Charlie Kirk. It was a joke about the very obvious hypocrisy we can all see with our eyes but which they insist upon denying. Duh.
It’s also worth noting here that Trump made a similar comment in 2019 about US Rep. John Dingell of Michigan. “Maybe he’s looking up,” Trump said, angry that Debbie Dingell, who had taken over her late husband’s seat, had voted to impeach him. This is, of course, in addition to the many other deaths he has mocked over the years.
Back after Floyd’s murder, the American Right wanted so very, very badly for it to have been okay for Derek Chauvin to have killed him. Because they saw how it became a rallying point for Black people who were sick to death of being brutalized by the police, for anyone who was sick and tired of seeing unarmed Black people being killed by police, as well as clear evidence that these things are a serious problem and something that desperately needed to be addressed in our society. They didn’t want that to be the story. So they tried so very, very hard to make it about the fact that Floyd was an addict, that he had had other legal troubles in his life prior to his murder, that he “wasn’t a saint,” as if there were some way that Chauvin could have known any of that when he was kneeling on his neck and suffocating him to death — something that makes it quite difficult to obtain any biographical information whatsoever. Additionally “not being a saint” is not traditionally something for which we implement the death penalty.
The protests following Floyd’s murder were the world’s way of telling the police “Guess what? This shit is over. You don’t get to do this anymore, not without consequences.” But the Right didn’t want that. They did not want to live in a world where what Chauvin did was that unacceptable or where people felt empowered to put a stop to it. They feel safer in a world in which cops kill can unarmed Black people without consequence.
They wanted to be able to say “The anger everyone feels about this would only be justified if Floyd had led a perfect, sinless life, and the fact that he didn’t actually justifies what Chauvin did.” This is a trap, because no one leads a perfect, sinless life.
Which takes us back to Charlie Kirk.
The Right’s real anger here is not about “edgy” jokes, but rather that they did not get what they felt they were entitled to after he was killed.
When a major tragedy occurs, the social contract has traditionally provided for a kind of grace given to those most directly affected by it, a certain “too soon” taboo against criticism or jokes, a moment during which we put our differences aside to give people the space they need to grieve. The space they did not want to give Black people after Floyd was killed, or anyone after Rob Reiner was killed and Donald Trump felt free to mock him, or Robert Mueller’s loved ones after he died and Trump mocked him, or Debbie Dingell after her husband died, or the families of the fallen service members he called “losers” and “suckers.”
They expected to get this after Kirk’s assassination. They expected a period of grace. They expected a halo effect. They expected that Kirk’s disturbing, vicious rhetoric would be politely brushed aside in favor of anything he may (rarely) have said or done that was more neutral and less hateful — things like “pass the salt” or “I have a bit of a headache, think I’ll go lie down for a minute.” They thought he would get a little bit of a posthumous glow-up that would cast him as a hero to all. That more people would go the Ezra Klein route of bizarrely claiming that he “did politics the right way.” That people would look at what happened to him and agree with their assessment that, despite all available facts and statistics and reason, the Left has more of a problem with violence than they do.
They pushed to make it happen. They went after and tried to “cancel” anyone who dared disparage Kirk after his death, contacted their employers in hopes of getting them fired, named streets after him and tried to put up statues of him everywhere, and, of course, who among us can ever forget the endless AI tributes to him, including quite possibly one of the most hilariously bad songs to ever exist.
They really thought he was going to be their Martin Luther King Jr. Someone who all sides would try to claim for their own purposes, someone for whom there would forever be a social taboo against criticizing or mocking.
Well, unless you were Charlie Kirk, who actually did have some pretty horrible things to say about Martin Luther King Jr.
But they did try, pretty damned hard in fact, to make the comparison. Even after King’s own son came forward to tell them to quit it.
They had also clearly hoped that there would be something of a reevaluation of his and their views, that they would perhaps be given a more charitable reading or even a reconsideration. That some of these hateful views might become mainstreamed and normalized.
Now, it is entirely possible that, maybe a decade ago, back even before Kirk was in diapers, things might have gone that way, at least to some degree. But thanks to Kirk, thanks to pretty much everyone on that side, the social contract that allowed for such grace has been torn to shreds. Kirk himself burst on the scene, in the aforementioned diapers, mocking the students of Kent State for not wanting to have to deal with their cruelty. For simply wanting “safe spaces” in which they could have a break from racism or sexism or rape culture or other things that can really be a drain on one’s psyche after a while. What Kirk and others like him really wanted was for the world to be their very own safe space — one in which they could say any awful thing they wanted without anyone criticizing them for it. What they hated about the “safe space” thing was that they believed they deserved to be sheltered from learning that their rhetoric and behavior actually hurt people enough that those people would need a break from them.
It has since gone much further than that. Kirk and his acolytes have been out here trying to normalize slurs, normalize a president who says vile, disgusting things about people, going after society’s most vulnerable, declaring empathy to be “toxic,” constantly pushing to break various social taboos around basic human decency. And now they are mad that those taboos do not exist when they are the ones who would benefit.
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Much of the Right’s anger has always come from their belief that the Left gives grace and compassion to other groups that it does not bestow upon them. This is evident in their endless whining about “the tolerant Left” — the supposed hypocrisy of being fine with people with different races, ethnicities and cultures, people of different sexual orientations and gender identities, while not being “tolerant of their intolerance,” or of their desire to discriminate against or be hateful towards these groups. Sure, this only makes sense in a world where we said we tolerate everyone and everything, which no one ever did, but they can’t help but think of how warm and fuzzy it would feel for those who stand up to racial injustice, to sexism, to homophobia and transphobia to also stand up for them and their right to do all of that shit. To treat them with the same compassion we have for people who aren’t, you know, hateful bigots. It’s why they’re obsessed with “white genocide,” with trying to claim that DEI is somehow a civil rights injustice against them, with claiming that white Christian men are the most discriminated against group in America. They want that grace. They want it for Charlie Kirk and they want it for themselves.
But the fact is, they can push a few advertisers who don’t know enough about what the deal is to back out of sponsoring liberal podcasts that laugh at jokes involving Charlie Kirk, they can try to get people fired (people did get fired, and then they got wrongful termination settlements!), they can try to be everything they pretended that we were at the height of “cancel culture,” but they’re never going to get the grace and compassion they so desperately want, so long as they refuse to have any for anyone else.
And that, for damn sure, is never going to happen.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Literally the day after Charlie was killed, a former acquaintance of mine abruptly unfriended me, prompting me to message her asking, basically, WTF? To my surprise, she responded, but informed me that I had posted on social media how "happy I was" that Kirk was dead. I replied that I did no such thing and challenged her to show me anywhere on my social media pages where I had said ANYTHING about him. After a while, she came back and said "Well, you may not have ever said it, but I know you thought it. And that's why we can't be friends."
OKAY THEN. Girl bye.
As seen on the internet:
"If firearms are so bad, then why am I dead? Checkmate, liberals."
~ C. Kirk