Maybe smearing a mild-mannered murder victim as a monster who deserved to die is just many leftists’ strange way of mourning. Or at least, that would offer some hope of moral redemption to the vast, informal army of ghouls who came out to celebrate conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s murder, or to damn him with faint praise.
Even many of the condemnations from moderate or conservative voices of Kirk’s killer started out with some obligatory assurance that the person doing the condemning didn’t of course condone the things that Kirk said blah blah blah. If you had time enough to suppress your horror at his death and think the five-word mantra “Not that I supported him,” consider squeezing in another five-word thought: “Now is not the time.”
I’m an anarchist/libertarian and agnostic. Kirk was a nationalist and a Christian (not the same thing as wanting a theocracy or ethnostate, by the way—more like the loose, amorphous combo of virtues that the average 1980s Reaganite was seeking from politics). Kirk was an optimistic, all-too-accessible debater with a fondness for Greece and Rome, not some ranting hatemonger. But this isn’t the column for explaining the obvious differences between these worldviews and why they don’t really matter at the moment.
We should be giving more attention to distinctions such as that between a morally-competent human being and, to take just one example from an online video, the college girl who calmly, unhurriedly told a crowd that was listening to her remarks as part of a panel reacting to the death that her big worry now is that someone out there won’t get the message of this event and will want to continue Kirk’s work.
So, the message, in case we doubted, is supposed to be the one terrorists always send: that you really ought to shut up now if you know what’s good for you because if you keep at it, hey, you could be next (you and about half the country). No wonder it’s getting harder to tell the difference between a liberal arts college and a radical madrasa.
And the kids these days apparently aren’t only sociopathic enough to think such sentiments are okay—something to be said in a gentle, feminine voice as if offering compassionate advice—they’re also ignorant enough to think this strategy tends to work out well for society in the long run. Or as the disgusting British rapper Bobby Vylan, putting it more brazenly, told a cheering audience in Amsterdam during his rant about Kirk: “Cuz if you talk shit, you will get banged!”
The concerns above all remain valid, I should emphasize, even if it turns out that the killer’s motivation, or true identity, is vastly different than now appears to be the case.
There has been no shortage of contradictory theories, from all sides, about exactly who, how many, and from which factions were responsible for the shooting, from Antifa furries to Mormon Groypers, but my worries about the left’s mindset hold even if it turns out right-wing elements of the Deep State concocted the whole incident to divide the populace and create an excuse for later crackdowns. I’ve come to think sane people entertain such ideas and only the blinkered, stubborn, and insane insist such scenarios are unthinkable.
Consider the theatrical-seeming complexity of Kirk audience member George Zinn distracting security immediately after Kirk was shot by proclaiming loudly that he was himself the gunman and eager to get shot, leading to him being dragged away. Apparently, he’d made similar false claims after 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing, but he was still walking around.
And who were the people with out-of-state plates visiting the apparent real shooter, Tyler Robinson, in the days before the killing? And were members of the security team flashing suspicious hand signals? And were the pellet guns in the audience decoys to distract from the real firepower? And was it coincidence that a drone showed up within 30 seconds of the attack? And is perennial Israel-basher George Galloway the only one who wonders if Netanyahu wanted to preempt Kirk drifting farther away from his longtime pro-Israel backers? And how many of the furries in the social media community of Robinson’s apparent boyfriend knew in advance about the attack?
Reacting to the flurry of distracting theories about the event, uninspiring and frustrated Utah Gov. Spencer Cox now declares the internet worse than “cancer” and akin to “fentanyl” (the harshest comparison possible in politics these days), suggesting that it’s a dangerous and all too uncontrolled playground of unwatched radicals—even though Discord, the online service preferred by some of the aforementioned furries, has been revealed in recent days to be aggressively monitored in real time, its owners responding rapidly every day to police requests for info on users, for good or ill.
Let us not overreact, then, by thinking the whole world is breaking down into anarchy (of the bad kind) and that a wave of new controls is needed. Little in politics gets settled once-and-for-all in a big final battle. It’s a never-ending series of little debates, as Kirk understood and enjoyed. Keep that going, no matter who favors uglier methods.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey