Probably Not The Last Word on Charlie Kirk

 

Kamala Harris is wired to be repulsed by the name of God. She mocks God. Again, everything Democrats love, God hates. Let me say that again: everything that Democrats love, God hates. And if you’re a Christian that votes [for] the Democrat Party, you are voting for things that God hates. That’s between you and God. Think about it. If you’re voting for the Democrat Party, you’re voting for stuff that God hates. 

—Charlie Kirk, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” October 21, 2024

 

Let’s speak ill of the dead, shall we?

Keith Olbermann now calls him “St. Charlie of Kirk,” and who could argue with a rapid canonization, given the deep piety of the statement above?

It’s impossible for decent people to talk about Charlie Kirk’s assassination without starting the sentence with the obligatory “I condemn all forms of violence, but…”

This is quickly followed by some watered-down version of Kirk that paints him as less loathsome in death than he was in life. Which he happens to be, but that’s faint praise indeed.

Pundits of every stripe have all made the appropriate noises. They’ve fallen all over themselves to condemn “the senseless violence,” as if this is new. Some, like Ezra Klein, have written things so stupid, their careers may never recover.

But not enough of them are stating the obvious, which is that Charlie Kirk was an out-and-out dirtbag. I have discerned in him no redeeming qualities, and I don’t care how good a father he was.

There has to be a special place in Hell for people who know better. For people who fully understand that they’re lying for a living. For people who use their prodigious communication skills to turn hate, ignorance, and violence into a business model.

Kirk was smart enough to know exactly what he was doing, and there wasn’t a shred of intellectual honesty in any of his public utterances. I’ve seen no evidence that he believed anything he said, and plenty of evidence that most of what he said was both fabricated and thoroughly monetized. His beliefs were for sale, and Trump’s billionaire donors paid top dollar for them. If there’d been similarly deep-pocketed donors on the left, he might’ve become a Democrat.

But he was, above all things, a cash cow for the MAGA brand, and he sold that brand with real marketing savvy. His lavishly funded lie-generation platform, Turning Point USA, was the key driver in converting much of last year’s youth vote to Trump.

Kirk made a killing, so to speak, stoking the rage of young adults, and directing that rage in all the wrong directions. He used classic scapegoating techniques to get into the skulls of young people who had, to be fair, already been intellectually neutered by our sabotaged education system.

His turf was college campuses, and wherever he went, he convinced horny college men that Democrats were the reason women wouldn’t sleep with them. He got millions of semi-literate gullibles to embrace the stripping of their own safety net and the jettisoning of their own futures.

I’m guessing most of my readers were only dimly aware of Kirk, before death so dramatically raised his PR value. He was, after all, a creature of the far right, and he worked mostly within the echo chamber of wingnut podcasting, a dark place most of us don’t go.

There’s far too much material out there to do justice to the entire Kirk canon. If this post consisted of nothing but his quotes, with no commentary from me, you would know more than you ever wanted to know about him.

Nonetheless, here are a few highlights:

Kirk thought gun deaths and mass shootings, while inconvenient, were “worth it” to preserve the Second Amendment. He would agree, in other words, that his own murder was a small price to pay for a society that is at all times armed and dangerous.

He called homosexuality an “abomination.” He called transgender identity a “mental disease.” He called Martin Luther King Jr. a “myth,” George Floyd “a scumbag,” and the Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake.” He had a way with words.

He thought televised executions would be a great idea, and that children, aged 12 and older, should be required to watch them. Guillotines were discussed with a straight face. Think of the production values.

His dominant themes were racism, misogyny, immigrant-bashing, antisemitism, and a vengeful strain of Christianity that somehow omitted the teachings of Christ.

But it wasn’t just his words, toxic as they were, that did the damage. Arguably his worst contribution to humanity was, and remains, the Professor Watchlist. Still spreading its venom, the Watchlist is basically a tool for informers.

In their own words:  

The mission of Professor Watchlist is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.

In other words, they’re encouraging students to inform on their teachers. They take “tips” from students about the oppressive wokeness of a particular professor. They then scour the Internet for published news stories either by, or about, that professor, so as to confirm the hypothesis that he or she is a dangerous “leftist,” which for the Watchlist is a very low bar.

Teachers who make the list — and there are hundreds of them — get their pictures posted on the Watchlist website for any nutjob to see. This leads to death threats, doxing, and the harassment of people who can ill-afford bodyguards. Some teachers have gone on record and admitted that they’ve been intimidated, that they’re second-guessing their own teaching, and they’re questioning the materials they use in the classroom.

But that’s not even the most chilling part. When this regime gets around to arresting artists and intellectuals, as every fascist regime eventually does, the Watchlist will serve as a useful starting point for the roundup.

The Professor Watchlist will be Kirk’s real legacy, mostly because it will surely live on without him. As will Turning Point USA, at least for a while. His wife, who appears to be at least as vile as he was, intends to carry on his “work.” I take this to mean she’ll keep the money machine churning for as long as she can. I wish her all the worst.

But going forward, Kirk’s usefulness to the regime, even as a martyr, is probably limited. The knee-jerk blaming of “radical leftists” hasn’t convinced anyone but Fox News. His death should have distracted from the Epstein files for at least a few hours, but that didn’t happen either.

More to the point, the young people he bamboozled into voting for Trump are, after eight months of shock and awe, having serious buyer’s remorse. This will only get worse as they watch Trump blow up their chances of ever building a career, owning a home, or getting regular sex.

They might ultimately see Kirk as the worst thing that ever happened to them. Which means any talk of his pending sainthood could be jumping the gun. So to speak.