On Violence

"We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty... We need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. But I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

-Charlie Kirk

To say that Kirk was hoisted by his own petard in the most literal sense of the idiom (a petard is an early form of bomb or mine, typically stone or fired clay filled with black powder, a medieval predecessor to the bullet) is to reduce the scope of his evil for the sake of a glib summary. The violent hypocrisy of men like Kirk make that glibness almost irresistible, but behind it is a much larger and more pressing truth, a vital illustration of how violence is brought into the world, what we expect that violence to do, and who is permitted to create and wield it. Charlie Kirk spent his days fomenting violence. Through the founding of his student organization TPUSA, or Turning Point USA, he sought to indoctrinate millions of American children into violent white supremacy. Through his media appearances and podcasting he called repeatedly and with great relish for the extermination or brutal oppression of those he considered undesirable, from people of color to queer and trans Americans.

That we now live in the world Kirk longed to build, a world where truth is meaningless, where groveling before power is the whole of the law, cannot be denied. That it was a product of his own savage ideology who cut Kirk from that same world with a bullet is equally clear. The man who once claimed the signing of the Civil Rights Act was a colossal mistake, that Jim Crow was preferable to racial integration, that Black women do not have the mental “processing power” to compete with white men, now lies dead at the hands of his spiritual progeny, a radicalized young white man in thrall to the cultic power of the gun and its use to shape political reality.  This is one of the chief uses of violence and the threat of violence, separate from any distinct ideology. The Black Panthers honestly and openly discussed targeted violence in pursuit of their much nobler goals, and were themselves pre-emptively cut down by the state’s use of violence in turn. Martin Luther King Jr’s non-violent tactics faced the same state reprisal.

Aside from his repugnant beliefs, the cruelty and libidinal sadism of which can hardly be overstated, what set Kirk apart from the controlled and directed actions of others who have used violence to their own ends is that he sought to retain plausible deniability for himself. He called for violence, as when in an interview he misquoted and conflated several passages from Leviticus in service to his claim that homosexuals should be stoned to death in accordance with “God’s perfect law”, but never enacted that violence himself. He remained insulated from the consequences of his words, adopting a stance not dissimilar from that of the NRA and the firearms industry. His rhetoric was a political position, not a weapon. What happened with it once it left his lips simply wasn’t his responsibility.

More telling than the US government’s incoherent babble about Kirk’s beautiful legacy, their flying of the flag at half-mast at the Guantanamo Bay McDonalds and other “Freedom Fries”-esque acts of symbolic insanity, is the reaction of the journalistic press and Democratic leadership. Liberal political commentator Ezra Klein fawned over Kirk’s “perfect” practice of politics, praising him for speaking his truth bravely and trusting in the power of words and ideas to carry his beliefs to victory. Gavin Newsom, in a gushing obituary post, called for Kirk’s work to be continued. Countless pundits and politicians took to the airwaves or to Twitter to heap praise on Kirk and make a public show of their sympathy for his widow and children, a reaction which appears from an anecdotal perspective to be violently out of step with the average American’s opinion of Kirk. Comparisons drawn between Kirk and Martin Luther King Jr are particularly staggering in their disingenuousness. 

Capitulation to the fascists at the highest levels of government is certainly an obvious motivator for such behavior. Class solidarity also doubtless comes into play. Other journalists, particularly those from among the elite, clearly saw Kirk as a peer first and a blood and soil Christofascist second if at all, and so their sympathies lie with him because to them a peer’s opinions are more a matter of aesthetics than of principle. That American journalism at large has proven itself not just unequipped to handle the rise of modern fascism but in fact fatally compromised by the same cruel impulses driving that rise is not a matter for debate. Institutions like The New York Times have a vested interest in denying the true nature of power, in denying the origins of violence, in playing dumb as regards the context in which modern American politics exist. They will not expose or extract the tumors growing in the body politic because they are themselves a species of cancer, and they love their fellow clotted and malignant shadows on our collective X-Ray as they cannot love real human beings.

Kirk was funded by the country’s richest and most powerful, feted by president Donald Trump as the whip that kept the youth vote in line and worked them into a frenzy on Trump’s behalf. This gave him power. This made his words cut flesh and snap bone. There is no separation between Kirk’s rhetorical violence and the violence carried out on his behalf both by government apparatuses and by disturbed “lone” actors whose sickness he gleefully stoked in hopes that it would burst forth into showers of blood. His hopes are now splattered across the backdrop of a gaudy little pavilion, under banners reading PROVE ME WRONG, but in his own sick language, Kirk was proven right. He seized power, used power, and effected great change in the world around him through the force of his desire for violence. He died as he lived, twisting statistics to lie about minorities in hopes that others would murder them on his behalf. 

Two days ago, I made a glib joke about Kirk’s death. It was irresistible to me. I had spent years smelling traces of the poison fumes he left in his wake, seeing his sneering face, his mouth full of teeth like baby corns and gums like congealed aspic. I stand by the sentiment of what I said. Kirk was evil. He can no longer hurt us, even if his cruelty will linger like a bad smell for decades to come. What I regret is that I didn’t take that cruelty more seriously in a moment when people were ready to discuss it, to unpack how violence is done, and why, and at whose behest. I have tried to make my own analysis of it here, to account for class, for race, for sexuality and political theory. I have not touched upon religion, but the perversion of Christianity by lovers of human suffering and brutalization has reached a fever pitch so deranged and terrifying that its influence on men like Kirk and his influence on it in turn should be self-evident to all. So, he’s dead. Our betters have rushed to mourn him and found us repulsed by their sentiment. Our enemies have discarded him as politically inconvenient in the wake of discovering his shooter’s political affiliation, with Trump briefly declaring his death “sad” before steamrolling his interviewer to babble about the new White House ballroom, a sort of cathedral to the corporate wasteland of Cheesecake Factory aesthetics being built atop the bulldozed ruins of the famous rose garden, which is fitting, as that’s the world Kirk fought so hard to make.