Okay, before I start, first and foremost, political violence is always bad. Everyone here at First Draft agrees, and none of us believes that Charlie Kirk’s murder is a good thing. It’s obviously very bad, for reasons that I fear we are yet to see.
That said, Kirk yesterday was the living embodiment of Hosea 8:7. That particular verse goes as follows: For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall.
You might have heard the first part of that verse; it was Hosea admonishing Israel for abandoning God and becoming a cruel, terrible society. You don’t have to take it literally to get the wisdom. “For they have sown the wind” refers to doing and saying terrible things. “They shall reap the whirlwind,” meaning how those actions can blow up in one’s face. “It hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal” refers to how ultimately, these are meaningless and destructive ways that help no one. And the final is where we get to Kirk’s murder, “if so be it yield, the strangers shall.” Unfortunately, Kirk’s philosophy of guns, domination, hate, and lies had a role in his demise. How much, of course, remains to be seen. As of this writing, there is no suspect (or “subject”) in custody as yet.
What I am saying already might make people upset or uncomfortable, because there is a weird impulse in our society to declare bad people good the moment their pulse stops, and that’s really not great. The man held reprehensible beliefs. Okay, you say, beliefs are opinions, not facts. But these are actual quotes; he was openly racist, proudly anti-LBGTQ, and not a stranger to misinformation. In fact, he was answering a few very good questions that were obviously aimed at proving his sick belief that trans people are becoming mass shooters was wrong. It is indeed quite likely that his last thought was based around spreading more lies about trans people and making dangerous and false claims that they are violent, a current project in the right-wing media world.
Good time to reiterate, NONE of these things is a death penalty for anyone.
Nevertheless, the mainstream media seems to be deeply focused on whitewashing Charlie Kirk, doing that thing I mentioned above, where death = good person, no matter what they were like as a living being. Ezra Klein led this charge with one of the most egregious cases of gaslighting I’ve ever seen by a major media figure, his New York Times opinion piece yesterday with the headline “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.”
It is very difficult to view doing things like having a list of liberal college professors for his followers to harass, calling Kamala Harris a “DEI candidate,” being a 2020 election denier, spreading misinformation about COVID-19, and promoting the Great Replacement Theory as doing politics the “right way.” My God, his politics have made a lot of us deeply concerned about what his followers might do to carry out revenge.
Several times yesterday, pundits on CNN and elsewhere claimed that the reactions on Bluesky were nothing but celebration over his death. This is simply not true; I saw a lot of self-policing and a lot of fear about what will happen next. But they have in their head what progressives are like, and damn the reality.
Meanwhile, the people on the right yelling about the left being sick are the same ones who had jokes about the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, both Democrats, who really yuck it up about Nancy Pelosi’s elderly husband nearly being beaten to death. Let us not forget that Trump said little if anything about the murder of the Hortmans, and Wednesday night offered nothing but divisive words and thinly veiled threats.
Finally, I want to address this odd claim I saw in the wake of the Kirk murder: That violence has never had a place in American politics. Um, violence has been part of our politics going back to when British tax collectors were beaten to death in the colonial American streets. You also might have heard there was a Civil War. The civil rights battle had violent moments. American presidents have been assassinated.
The correct statement would be about how we need to buck the literal centuries of violence that made us what we currently are. Given how Trump has acted, even before we have learned a motive for the murder of Charlie Kirk, we have a very long way to go.
The last word goes to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
