Why Isn't The Right Honoring The Way Charlie Kirk DESTROYED So Many College Students?
Let's not pretend this was something other than it was.
It’s been about two weeks now since Charlie Kirk was killed. Just to be clear, because apparently we have to be very, very clear now or conservatives will interpret everything we say as “And now I want to kill all of you” — I do not condone murder. In fact, I also believe, very much, in gun control and I do not believe in the death penalty.
That being said, I’ve been thinking about a few things, especially after the nonsense this past weekend.
The first thing I’ve been thinking about is that the Right is spending a lot of time accusing us of “cherry picking” things that Kirk said in order to make him look bad. Multiple voices on the Right, including Sasha Stone, a former Democrat and film blogger who has been making the rounds as a MAGA convert in recent years, and Matthew Hennessey of the Wall Street Journal have attempted to castigate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her very thoughtful and fact-filled statement explaining why she refused to sign on to the resolution “honoring the life and legacy” of Kirk.
Stone was particularly angry that AOC used words Kirk “may have said one time” (or many, many times, as is the case) to condemn him, instead of honoring the fake version of him that she and others on the Right have invented over the past two weeks:
We know that on the Left, they do not believe in any kind of presumption of innocence when it comes to words. Words are harm. Words are violence. Most of all, words define who you are. They found some words Charlie Kirk may have said one time, but they strip them of context and refuse to confront the whole human being. But that’s what they do, right? That’s why so many of us have fled.
Yes, it sure is terrible that we judged Kirk for what he vehemently believed, as well as for his actions as a human being, instead of being classy and pretending he didn’t believe any of those things in order to secure him a spot as a hero to all Americans.
In the Wall Street Journal, deputy editorial features editor Matthew Hennessy published an essay plaintively titled “A Kind Word for Kirk is Too Much for AOC” in which he claimed that no one would have even noticed if they had all just gone along and voted for the resolution because no one would have noticed anyway.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Most of our parents taught us that. Some Democrats in Congress seem to have forgotten the lesson. […]
“Condemning the depravity of Kirk’s brutal murder is a straightforward matter,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), before denouncing him as “ignorant” and asserting that he “sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans.” The GOP resolution, she said, “brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.”
It does no such thing. Hardly anybody would have registered the resolution’s passage had AOC and friends not immediately mounted soapboxes to declaim against it. These bitter partisans saw greater political value in spitting on a man’s grave than in respectfully keeping faith with their parents’ good advice.
Well, if Charlie Kirk had stuck to that advice, perhaps more people would have been interested in honoring his life and legacy.
Notably, neither Stone nor Hennessy mentioned a single thing that Kirk believed, offered up no counter to anything that AOC or anyone else said — their primary angle seems to be “Well it’s just rude to bring up the things he actually said and believed that were extremely insulting to other people.”
Indeed, the supposedly “cherry-picked” quotes from Kirk highlighted by AOC, the Congressional Black Caucus, and, well, the rest of us, are the things that Charlie Kirk ardently believed. The things highlighted by the Right are empty platitudes as noncontroversial as “pass the salt, please.” They want to remember a person who did not exist.
To be fair, this does honor one thing he stood for above all others — ignorance. I don’t mean this in a snide way. I mean that when he and the rest of the Right demand an end to “woke,” what they really demand is ignorance.
During his speech at Kirk’s memorial service, Donald Trump said that he really differed from Kirk in that Kirk “wanted the best” for his opponents and Trump did not. Except Kirk did not want the best for his opponents, he wanted the best for himself and his compatriots. He wanted to live in a world with no LGBTQ+ people, in which women stayed home to raise children and men ruled the public sphere, in which everyone practiced his religion or at least pretended to for his sake, in which we all politely ignored racism and other forms of prejudice so that people like him never had to feel uncomfortable about it.
That is what he wanted. He may have claimed that what he wanted was what was “best” for people, or that he at least believed it would be, but it was ultimately about his own comfort and desire to live in a more homogenous world.
Kirk did not care what people wanted for themselves, or what they believed in or valued, that they wanted to perhaps live their lives without endless harassment and judgment from him and people like him, that they didn’t want their children to have to live in fear of being bullied by people like him. He didn’t care that women might have dreams for themselves that might not be the one thing he decided they were good for. He told them “No.” He told them to “submit themselves to a godly man” and to “have more children than they can afford.”
Not that he, a multi-millionaire, wanted any of his tax money to go to taking care of those children. In fact, here he is, DESTROYING a college student who thinks it’s important that all kids be able to have food and eat, denying the existence of hungry children in America, and suggesting that children whose parents cannot afford to feed them … get jobs.
Would you just look at that healthy dialogue?
His friends and fans (and whatever Ezra Klein is meant to be) keep harping on this idea that he went on these college tours because he wanted to share his ideas and talk about things with those who disagreed with them, because he was just such a lovely, open person who wanted to bridge divides.
That is not what happened — and of all the ways they are trying to rewrite his story, this is certainly one of the most perverse. There are still endless videos all over the internet, from both Kirk and Talking Points USA, with titles like “Charlie Kirk SHUTS DOWN Student Who REFUSES To Believe That College Is A Scam” and “Charlie Kirk DESTROYS Man Bun ‘Idiot’ With Facts And Logic” and “Charlie Kirk Explains Why Liberal Women Are MISERABLE” and “Charlie Kirk TRIGGERS Softy Leftist Who Thinks Antifa Shouldn't Be Called Terrorists.”
Clearly, this is one of the things of which he was most proud. Otherwise, he would have titled his videos “Charlie Kirk Participates In Thoughtful Exchange Of Ideas, Finds Common Ground.” That never happened. That was never what he was going for. He wasn’t looking to convince anyone, either. What he was going for was catharsis for people who were angry at the Left for making them feel bad in some capacity, or for depriving them of a world in which they’d be superior to others simply by virtue of having been born with their particular skin color or naughty parts.
He wanted to be celebrated for this — for telling women to stay home, for calling Martin Luther King Jr. “a bad guy,” for calling the “Civil Rights Act of 1964” a “huge mistake.” One assumes that is why he wanted it noted that “once a week, we talk about why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake” on his show. This is what he wanted his legacy to be, and people should honor that wish.
The Right tends to complain, a lot, that there isn’t enough “debate” on college campuses. They want “debates” because they want to “own” their opponents, they want to win, they want to DESTROY. But not only does it not make sense to teach a subject that way, it’s not a productive way to discuss … pretty much any issue on earth. That is why scientists stopped “debating” Creationists. It was not productive.
The Left argues amongst itself a hell of a lot more than the Right does, which is why I’ve always found the idea that we’re in an echo chamber to be pretty freaking hilarious. We have discussions, we have arguments — sometimes very heated arguments — but we don’t have “debates.” “Debate” is not a great way to learn about what people believe, it’s not a great way to explain why you believe what you believe. “Debates” are more about winning than coming to an understanding. Most of the time when I argue or discuss things with people, I consider points I hadn’t before. I don’t think that ever happened for Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to DESTROY, he wanted to OWN, he wanted to HUMILIATE, which is why Republicans don’t have a hell of a lot of quotes from him that don’t sound cruel or vicious or judgmental.
If they really love Charlie Kirk, they ought to celebrate the man he was and wanted to be, not a sanitized version they think everyone could love. They’re not honoring him, they are using his death to further their own ends. While I think we can be sure that’s what he would have wanted, no one is under any obligation to stand back and let them get away with it out of pity — which was not something Kirk had for a hell of a lot of other people.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Kirk's debate style shows people pretty much all of the logical fallacies.
But the right wing things logical fallacies are some "made up liberal thing."
I'm not fucking kidding.
Belligerent twat uses logical fallacies against college sophomores unfamiliar with bad debate tactics, claims total victory.
There's a reason that Kirk, and Shapiro, and all their ilk go after college kids, and not real experts and debaters. It's because they are stupid and don't actually have a leg to stand on with any of their points, and college students for the most part don't have the necessary tools/experience to effectively counter them. A woman who was actually prepared went up against Kirk a couple months ago or so, and she fucking trounced his dumb ass.