It Didn't Have to Happen, but It Was Inevitable

What to say?

The fascist, far right podcaster and political grifter Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a public event in Utah. It won’t be long before we have as many of these as we do school shootings, and we’ll get used to it.

What a horrifying thing to say.

My family was playing with toys when my spouse saw the news on his phone. The reactions hit along with it. Hot takes were already erupting all over the internet. Liberals were celebrating. MAGA was gnashing their teeth and blaming it on everything except their own hate.

Regardless of what we think, we all know one thing deep down. Nothing good will come from this. It won’t prompt anyone to take their pedal off the toxic rhetoric and violence that has engulfed our politics.

I wish…

Instead, it’s going to trigger an immediate and deep desire for payback. The Trump administration is already weaponizing the killing. They’re going to use this as the ultimate reason to start going after us harder than ever, taking away more of our rights, and subjecting us to more surveillance.

Oh, and I think this might finally be the golden opportunity Trump has been looking for to snap his base out of the Epstein trance.

They’ll circle the wagons now.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination will precipitate an outright declaration of war on what’s left of our democracy. Anyone who was starting to doubt Trump over the tariffs or any of his other scandals and disastrous decisions will repledge their loyalty. This will bring them all back together.

Maybe I’m wrong…

Now, let’s go ahead and discuss some key questions that will occupy everyone for the next several days. Given what I’ve seen online the last few months, we can hardly expect a sane and rational discussion, but let’s try.

Did Charlie Kirk deserve to die?

No, nobody deserves to die. But if someone tries to trim their bushes with a lawnmower, you know what’s going to happen. If someone tries to juggle chainsaws, you know what’s going to happen. If someone sticks their hand down a garbage disposal while it’s running, you know…

At least, what should happen.

Many of us are neither celebrating nor mourning Charlie Kirk. He was an awful, awful person. He built a brand on hate. He nurtured racism and violence. He actively sought to strip rights away from others. He promoted conspiracy theories during a pandemic. Let’s be clear. He’s responsible for countless deaths and countless more lives destroyed, even if he never shot anyone.

He is a murderer.

What I mourn isn’t that Charlie Kirk died, but that he helped usher in the era of violence and hate that led to his own death.

If you take the long view of history, he operated in the tradition of fundamentalist bigots going back to our founding days. I wish Charlie Kirk had chosen a different path. If so, he would still be alive.

So would many more.

What about his killer?

Many of us neither condone nor condemn what happened. Do you condemn the chainsaws that someone juggled? Do you condemn the garbage disposal? If someone refuses vaccines and won’t even use an air purifier, do you condemn the virus they catch? No, you don’t. So, do we condemn Charlie Kirk’s killer?

What a ridiculous question.

It should go without saying that whoever killed Charlie Kirk will have to be arrested. They’ll have to face trial. We’re still a nation of laws, right? At least for now. At least sometimes. I don’t know anyone who thinks it should just be okay to shoot someone dead in the street, at least not personally. Meanwhile, I know a lot of people who think it’s okay to bomb and starve an entire country.

In the end, we seem to be a nation of laws for guys like Charlie Kirk. They always want justice for themselves and their friends. They want free speech and living wages for themselves. They really don’t care about anyone else. They’re absolutely fine with killing anyone who doesn’t fit their criteria. They’re fine letting people die. They’re fine letting people waste away in poverty.

Charlie Kirk didn’t get what he deserved.

He got what he actively promoted. He wanted this. He wanted the hate. He wanted the violence. He wanted the chaos. In the words of so many who blame victims, he was asking for it. Except in his case, he really was.

I wish he hadn’t asked for it.

Like so many of his fans, like so many MAGA heads out there, none of them seem to understand that their own hate, their own ignorance, their own violence, has consequences that eventually touch them.

They can’t handle it.

So, we’re in a strange place. We can mourn the loss of life, and we can mourn what fascists like Charlie Kirk have done to the world. At the same time, there’s a certain place where we can observe the fact, without celebrating it, that someone who lived by hate and violence died by it.

Things don’t get more Shakespearean.

That’s the tragedy.

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