‘The Chickens Came Home to Roost’

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the myth of him being a slain peacemaker was permanently carved into white marble. The widespread conspiracies surrounding his death all rest on the premise that Kennedy opposed CIA or military intervention. This man who started the Vietnam War, tried to invade Cuba, and in the aftermath of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, launched a blatant terrorist campaign against the island nation, we are supposed to believe that he was a dove? If anybody saw the absurdity of this myth being constructed, few had the balls to say it out loud, but Malcolm X did. “[Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon,” he said. “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never made me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” Malcolm had long been a critic of Kennedy’s violent foreign policy and his record on race. Earlier that year, there was a famous riot in Birmingham, Alabama. The state’s governor, George Wallace, had famously vowed, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Unsurprising, then, that when Black students were peacefully protesting, the police used fire hoses on full blast to knock over students who were sitting on the sidewalk, and released six dogs to attack the protesters—sending at least three to the hospital. One white man even drove his car into the crowd of students. Eventually, city negotiators reached the “Birmingham Truce Agreement” with the civil rights campaign, which called for partial desegregation. In response the local Birmingham police, together with the Ku Klux Klan, bombed the home of Rev. Alfred Daniel King, brother of Martin Luther King Jr., who thankfully survived. The Gaston Motel, where Martin Luther King was staying, was also bombed an hour later. The bombings resulted in a riot; an Italian grocery store was set on fire and a cop was attacked. Kennedy sent in the US Army to quell the riots. “The people who’ve gotten out of hand are not white people,” Kennedy said, “but the Negroes by and large.” Malcolm X later said, President Kennedy did not send troops to Alabama when dogs were biting Black babies. He waited three weeks until the situation exploded. He then sent troops after the Negroes had demonstrated their ability to defend themselves. In his talk with Alabama editors, Kennedy did not urge that Negroes be treated right because it is the right thing to do. Instead he said that if the Negroes aren’t well treated the Muslims would become a threat. He urged a change not because it is right but because the world is watching this country. Kennedy is wrong because his motivation is wrong. At a time when the country was officially mourning JFK’s death, uttering truthful words about him was practically heresy. Malcolm X was not only denounced but suspended by his boss, Elijah Mohammad. In the first interview he gave after his suspension, he doubled down: “I said the same thing that everybody says, that his assassination was the result of the climate of hate. Only I said, ‘the chickens came home to roost,’ which means the same thing. A climate of hate means that this is the result of something.” Two weeks ago, one day after the public assassination of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk, I wrote a small piece about the inherent double standard in the subsequent condemnations about violence. The same people that are uncaring or even cheering on the genocide in Gaza are the same people most indignant about Kirk’s killing. I wanted to write a follow-up because I’ve found the public reaction to Kirk’s murder—especially how effectively his image has been whitewashed—very disturbing. And also, on a more personal note, I want to express my own feelings about Charlie Kirk and his legacy. Let’s start with the public reaction to Kirk’s death. New York Times pundit Ezra Klein, representing the peak of elite liberal culture, wrote an op-ed titled: “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply to the right in the 2024 election.” In last week’s article, I described some of the causes for the right-wing shift among all demographics. Any decent analysis of this shift will be far greater in scope and complexity than, some spirited debater won over “the hearts and minds of college students.” Elite liberals would naturally want to believe it was due to some savvy “practitioners of persuasion,” and not the abject failure of the neo-liberal project. This comforting, myopic fantasy allows them to believe that the youth can be won back by crafting better arguments and a shrewd messaging strategy, without serious disruptions to the status quo. “American politics has sides,” Klein continues. “But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project—we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. … Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics.” This presentation of Kirk as an honest broker, someone with whom you could respectfully disagree, is by no means an outlier. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly praised Kirk in a series of canned platitudes, writing: I knew Charlie, and I admire his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence. The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate—never through violence. Honest disagreement makes us stronger; violence only drives us further apart and corrodes the values at the heart of this nation. This sentiment was universal in the media’s coverage of Kirk’s shooting. On CNN, MSNBC, and naturally on Fox News as well, Kirk was hailed for his willingness to speak with anyone and defend his honest beliefs. Atlantic journalist Sally Jenkins wrote on Bluesky that Kirk “argued with civility” and that “his death is a significant loss for those who believe engagement can help bridge disagreements.” It says a lot, however, that all the kind eulogies fail to mention any of Charlie Kirk’s accomplishments or his views. Indeed, it becomes almost bizarre that no one seems prepared to do what is customary when someone dies: recall their life’s work. I’ve read several touching tributes to the recently deceased Robert Redford. The New York Times, MSNBC, and CNN all had long pieces recounting his best movies, his environmental work, him being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and his role in founding the Sundance Film Festival—all peppered with anecdotes from Redford, some about his childhood, others about his work ethic. But for Kirk? Not a word about his work, not a quote signifying his beliefs. Why should we ignore a man’s achievements at his eulogy? Let’s mention his accomplishments in all their wickedness. Let no grim detail go unmentioned. How could highlighting his career be an insult? And lest anyone admonish us for not “respecting the dead,” tell them there is no decency in honoring a soul you wouldn’t honor in life, nor to obfuscate his record to please the dead.As Voltaire once wrote: “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” Charlie Kirk spent his entire adult life dehumanizing others, spreading hate, celebrating cruelty, and fomenting violence. His method was not, as suggested by the posthumously sanitized version, persuasion, but rather obnoxious grandstanding. His “debates” were intended to humiliate his opponent through arrogant peacocking and holier-than-thou sneering. The reason why this 30-year- old man with experience and media training still traveled around the country’s colleges to debate fresh-faced 18-year-olds was to film dishonest propaganda—or “rage-bait,” to employ the appropriate Internet slang—depicting an overly- emotional “woke” Left that lacked intellectual legitimacy. When those young students did win a debate on factual grounds, Kirk used sophistry to blithely dismiss them as ignorant and wrong. His team would edit the clips of his “debates” for social media in such a way to ensure Kirk always got the last word. It didn’t matter to his fans that he was factually, demonstrably, unquestionably incorrect on topics such as climate science, vaccines, or statistics for immigration and gun violence. This is why it’s laughable (if it wasn’t so grotesque) that people now hail Kirk as a principled polemicist. Charlie Kirk never convinced anyone; believing things Kirk believed was the prerequisite to believing what Kirk said. The desire to believe that feminists, gay people, and racial minorities heralded the decline of Western civilization was something Kirk couldn’t create. A recent YouGov poll asked US citizens if they viewed Charlie Kirk favorably. The demographic that favored him most were those aged 65+ (34 percent “very favorable” and 9 percent “favorable”), while the demographic that disliked him most were aged 18-29 (16 percent “very favorable” and 6 percent “somewhat favorable”). This is consistent with other polls. One from Generation Lab that polled college students found 70 percent of them disagreed with Charlie Kirk. It contrasts sharply with the image Republicans and liberals tried to present of Kirk’s unique ability to influence young people. As Trump put it, “there’s never been anyone who was so respected by youth.” While Kirk lacked the ability to convince anyone, especially the youth, through argumentation, right-wingers flocked to Charlie Kirk like boxing fans to Mohammad Ali. Kirk was a gladiator for their cause. He portrayed left-wing ideas as so intellectually fraudulent that entertaining them became thought of as meaningless. Again, he didn’t do this by debating left-wing academics, but teenagers. He gave his followers license to dismiss leftists outright, without debate. Kirk’s job was to stifle debate, not encourage it. As for his ideology, it revolved exclusively around robbing others of their humanity and convincing white, cis, and straight American men that the West was under threat from Islam, queer people, Jews, feminists, non-white immigrants, and “cultural Marxists”—a term that means absolutely nothing but serves as a scare word. Kirk was a proponent of the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white supremacist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which posits that Jews are funding and facilitating immigration from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to Europe and North America in an effort to destroy Western civilization. The reasoning being that people from these countries can’t comprehend the values of the Enlightenment due to their savage nature or primitive cultures. Hence, their presence in the West undermines secular Western democracy. It’s essentially the 21st century version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and nearly indistinguishable from Nazi dogmatism. This theory was a mainstay of Kirk’s rhetoric. “Anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors,” Kirk said. According to him, Jews control “not just the colleges; it’s non-profits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.” “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas,” he said, using the aforementioned vague scare word. During the 2024 election, the myth Republicans were constructing revolved around an out-of-control migrant crime wave, an “invasion” of the unwashed barbarian hordes. Trump and J.D. Vance singled out Haitian immigrants, saying they were stealing people’s pets and eating them. Kirk joined in: The Haitians that are in Huntsville, that are raping your women and hunting you down at night, it’s only going to get worse unless Donald Trump wins. A new report from Fox News shows that across the border, 13,000 people convicted of murder, 15,000 people convicted of rape on the non-detained list—meaning they’re currently roaming free around our country. So, right now, roaming free on the interior of the United States are 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 convicted rapists, and they’re just, they’re having a field day. And they’re coming for your daughter next. All horseshit, for the record. “The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white,” he said in 2024. “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that [again].” Kirk also detested the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed segregation and discrimination, calling it “a huge mistake.” He argued that Black people “were actually better in the 1940s” because “they committed less crimes [sic].” He called Martin Luther King Jr. “an awful person” who “said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.” Italian philosopher Umberto Eco once wrote, “Since permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality).” The contemporary neo-fascist movement in the US is no different. Kirk argued that parents should take away their daughters’ birth control, and that having “a ton of kids” would cure women from “this kind of liberal … nonsense.” When Taylor Swift recently announced her engagement, Kirk told her to “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” A Republican abortion ban in Ohio prevented a 10-year-old rape victim from getting an abortion. When she got one in neighboring Indiana, Republicans tried to outlaw traveling to another state to get an abortion. In 2024, when Kirk’s daughter was 10—the same age as the girl from Ohio—someone asked him if he’d force her to give birth at 10 years old. “Yes,” he answered, “the baby would be delivered.” During another “debate” with a pro-choice teenage girl, he berated her for using the word embryo. “You are using dehumanizing language,” Kirk said. “That’s how we get Auschwitz.” “So you’re comparing abortion to the Holocaust?” the girl incredulously asked. “Absolutely I am!” Kirk yelled. “In fact, it’s worse! It’s worse!” As for queer people, Kirk advocated that gay people should be “stoned to death” according to “God’s perfect law.” He called trans people an “abomination” and “a throbbing middle-finger to God.” What doesn’t come across in written text is the impish grin he had on his face when saying that. He delighted in the cruelty. “You hear that?” he yelled, “you’re an abomination to God!” “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor,” he once said. “We need it immediately.” “These people are sick,” he said on yet another occasion. “And again, I blame the decline of American men. This never should’ve been, you know, this never should’ve—someone should’ve just ‘took care of it’ the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and ’60s. But, you know, as you have testosterone rates go down and men start acting like women, and they don’t do anything, then, hey, … there are a lot of sick people in the world, unfortunately, and without the strength to go against them, the country is going to completely topple.” On this occasion, suggesting that someone should’ve just “took care of” trans people, Kirk was being uncharacteristically coy. Usually he openly supported violence. After George Floyd was murdered by the police, Kirk argued that the cop should be pardoned because Floyd died “largely because of a drug overdose.” Despite the autopsy report listing the cause of death as “neck compression.” He called the court proceedings a “show trial” and said the Black Lives Matter movement was led by the “most corrupt and disingenuous voices that any human being could possibly find.” He didn’t clarify who these corrupt leaders were or their goals, but he did say that the town in which he was speaking—Mankato, Minnesota—“build by wonderful Scandinavians, … seems as if it’s being destroyed now, rather intentionally” by Black Lives Matter protesters. He also said that “in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” The type of employees Kirk hired for his youth organization, Turning Point USA, are also quite telling. The former national field director once texted a colleague, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” In another instance, a Turning Point USA adviser wrote an essay about Black people being “socially incompatible with other races” because their culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” Kirk was also an avid supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse, and helped propel him to conservative stardom after Rittenhouse shot three innocent Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin with an AR-15, killing two. Kirk hailed Rittenhouse as a “hero to millions.” Rittenhouse also made an appearance at the conservative Young Women’s Leadership Summit—an event organized by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, where Kirk frequently encouraged teenage girls to drop out of school and start having children as soon as possible—where Rittenhouse was introduced as “the kind of man you should want to be attracted to.” This love of violence also naturally extends beyond America’s borders, because why be a local scumbag when you can make it everybody’s problem. Kirk said British colonialism is “what made the world descent.” That brand of decency is on display right now in Palestine. Although Kirk didn’t believe “the place exists. Because it doesn’t, it’s called Judea and Samaria. It’s not called Palestine.” Displaying his Rhodesian sense of humor, Kirk said: You know, it’s funny, I used to say that, hey, if you as a gay person would go to Gaza, they’d throw you off of tall buildings, right? Now they don’t have any tall buildings left. So I don’t—is that too soon? I’m sorry, maybe you shouldn’t kill Jews, stupid Muslims! In my last article, I compared Kirk’s rhetoric on citizenship to Adolf Hitler’s discussion of the same topic in Mein Kampf—revealing the two were nearly identical. This brief 1,293-word summery is inadequate to encapsulate Charlie Kirk’s entire political career, but it captures it. I’ve heard some people say that Kirk became more right-wing in recent years. In fact, the culture became more right-wing. It freed people like Charlie Kirk from their muzzles, imposed by society’s liberal veneer, so they could openly espouse white nationalism, theocracy, and neo-fascistic ideals without being shunned in public—a practice they denounced as “cancel culture.” Which was narrowly defined thusly: as the liberal muzzle. This explains the one-sided application, whereby a conservative being “canceled” for racist or transphobic remarks is evidence of the illiberal blight of a cancel culture run amok, but Jimmy Kimmel’s show being canceled for his remarks about Charlie Kirk’s shooter is a decisive cultural victory for the Right’s ideological spartans, thus a strike against the liberal muzzle, i.e., cancel culture. I have no doubt that if the society moved further rightward, Kirk would’ve moved along with it. Let me tell you earnestly what I see when I look at Charlie Kirk: I see a man that would’ve sent me to the death camps. There is no doubt in my mind that if we devolve to the same point that Germany did and leftists, queer people, and racial minorities were ordered into camps, Charlie Kirk would’ve relished packing me onto a train, the same way he savored the mass ICE deportations—of which he wrote, “We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.” Ultimately, this is why the posthumous coverage of Kirk is downright offensive to me. The imago of Kirk as a cordial conversationalist whose belief in spirited debate and open conversations represented the dialectical ideal of democracy, whether one agreed with him or not, deliberately ignores that this man was deeply malevolent. He would’ve celebrated my death. His life was dedicated to making other people, groups he perceived as lesser, suffer. That is my definition of evil. I feel like he escaped justice through his martyrdom, by having the media ignore both his immoral rhetoric and the victims of the hateful culture he helped create. They whitewashed his actions like Pontius Pilate. Let me mention something from personal experience. I live in a pleasant liberal backwater and I’m not on social media: I am about as insulated from the noxious hate culture as one can get. Yet even I can’t escape it. Firstly and most obviously, I read the news everyday. And after Trump’s 2024 victory, the floodgates opened. “I feel liberated,” a Wall Street banker told the Financial Times, “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting canceled … it’s a new dawn.” (I mentioned more examples at the end of my “Postmortem” piece, such as Trump supporters at Texas State University celebrating, holding signs that read, “Homo sex is sin,” “women are property,” and “Types of property: women, slaves, animals, cars, land, etc.”) I also play video games, and since Trump’s election I’ve noticed an overwhelming increase in racist, misogynistic, and transphobic players, who have become emboldened. Even for someone like myself, who is largely immune from the worst effects, our culture has become so polluted with hate that it’s becoming toxic to breathe. Therefore, seeing the performative mourning of Charlie Kirk, mostly by people who haven’t had a damn thing to say about the genocide in Gaza, is offensive to me (and I don’t get offended easily). And for the Right, let’s underscore how performative it is. Charlie Kirk’s recent memorial service functioned as a rally for various far-right demagogues and their insatiable egos. Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, et cetera, all made speeches more about themselves and their accomplishments than their slain “friend.” Of course, they did feature creepy AI videos of Charlie Kirk in heaven making an impassioned plea for the Right to keep fighting. A strange memorial service, indeed. Furthermore, the same aforementioned logic about “cancel culture” being the explicitly liberal muzzle, pretty much defines all of right-wing thought (to the extent that “right-wing thought” isn’t oxymoronic). Every principle is filtered through the following equation: if it hurts the Left, it’s good; if it hurts the Right, it’s bad. Whatever the political question, they’ll turn it into a cudgel to beat their enemies with. Here, too, we can easily see this calculation at work. US Representative Randy Fine, who called for Gaza to be nuked like Hiroshima, and told Israel to “starve away” the Palestinians, called for “those celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk” to be “thrown out of civil society.” Fine supported Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation because “he crossed the line.” For the record, Kimmel didn’t say one negative word about Charlie Kirk. The segment is available on YouTube for everyone to watch. Kimmel made two points: one, Republicans are trying to exploit Charlie Kirk’s death for their own benefit, and two, he pointed out that Trump seemed indifferent to Kirk’s killing. Both of these comments were fairly banal, accurate, and not aimed at Kirk, but apparently “crossed the line.” Unlike calling for 2 million innocent people to be nuked and starved away. Laura Loomer, suddenly appalled by political violence and the callousness of the Left, is now calling for “the Left” to be classified “a national security threat,” writing: “We must shut these lunatic lefties down. Once and for all.” Meanwhile, last May, on the anniversary of George Floyd’s killing, she tweeted, “Congratulations to George Floyd on being 5 years sober today.” Nancy Mace, before Kirk’s body was cold, lied while using a transphobic slur by saying the shooter “was a tranny,” and denounced trans people as “the most egregious, most vile, violent people on Earth.” “They are mentally ill,” she added, “and should be in a straitjacket with a hard-steel lock on it.” When the shooter was caught and turned out not to be transgender, Black, or any other demonized category, but rather a white cis man, Mace changed her tune: “We know that Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same,” she tweeted. Donald Trump Jr., now role-playing as an opponent of political violence, once tweeted a picture of a hammer laid on men’s underwear with the caption, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready,” mocking the nearly-fatal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was attacked with a hammer. The underwear references a popular Republican joke that Paul Pelosi was attacked in his underwear (he wasn’t) because he hired his would-be assassin as a male prostitute. (Charlie Kirk implored his audience to bail the attacker out of jail.) Earlier this year in June, a Trump supporter in Minnesota murdered Democratic State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and shot Democratic Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in their respective homes. The Republican shooter had a list of nearly 70 targets, a lot of them Democrats, including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Other targets included pro-choice advocates and abortion doctors. (Recall Kirk’s rhetoric decrying abortion as worse than the Holocaust.) Republicans saw this as an opportunity to attack and mock their opponents. Senator Mike Lee posted a picture of the murderer, wearing a mask, with the caption: “nightmare on Walz street”—a reference to the slasher horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street and Governor Tim Walz. Hilarious. Naturally, Lee decried the “cowardly act of violence” on Kirk, presumably while sitting on a very high horse. Then the effort began to pin the killings on the Democrats. Make no mistake, Republicans knew perfectly well how dishonest this was. They were amusing themselves. “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” Sen. Lee wrote. When Trump responded to the killings, he blamed Tim Walz for being “a terrible governor.” Elon Musk also called the killer a “Marxist” and blamed “the far left” for being “murderously violent.” Laura Loomer said the killer was one of “Walz’s goons,” and labeled the Democratic Party “a terrorist organization.” I could go on. Mehdi Hasan at Zeteo wrote a short list of recent acts of political violence perpetrated by Trump supporters. Among the cases I haven’t mentioned so far: the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a series of shootings on Democratic officials in New Mexico, the killing of an Obama-appointed district judge’s son, the failed attempt to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, sending pipe bombs to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats’ homes, the killing of left-wing activist Heather Heyer, and of course, January 6th. Republicans love violence. Case in point, to honor Charlie Kirk—a life-long lover of Israel who said it “made the Bible pop into reality, and gave me the most precious memories”—the IDF wrote “In memory of Charlie Kirk” on a bomb. And we can find violent rhetoric all over the place. Just recently a Fox News host said that the problem of homelessness should be solved via “involuntary lethal injection or something, just kill them.” This has become so normalized on the Right that it barely raises eyebrows anymore. Republicans are pro-death, they just don’t like violence against one of their own. Since “the Left” is their enemy, and they portray their enemy as the source of all violence and disorder, violence against “the Left” is anti-violence. They turn everything into a cudgel with which to beat their enemies. This was also Charlie Kirk's job. And they are not subtle about it either. Far-right commentator Matt Forney tweeted shortly after the shooting: “Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.” (It’s telling that even in their own analogies they are the Nazis.) The conservative activist Christopher Rufo—who was responsible for the right-wing media hysterics surrounding Critical Race Theory some years ago—tweeted: “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.” The reference to the Red Scare is accurate. In the week following Kirk’s murder, conservatives compiled an online database of people who have not been sufficiently apologetic and mournful about Kirk’s death, listing their contact details and, for some, even their home addresses. Everyone on the list, even those added erroneously either by mistake or malice, has received death threats, rape threats, etc. Employment is another vector of attack; right-wing activists have been contacting employers, trying to get their targets fired. The State Department also said it will impose visa bans on foreigners who “praise, rationalize, or make light” of Kirk’s death. “Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors,” explained the deputy secretary. Unless, of course, that foreigner is Benjamin Netanyahu. Even those Republican figures that elite liberal Democrats often praise as “moderates” have shed their cloaks and revealed that they are just as committed to building the neo-fascist social order. Mike Pence was asked about the FCC threatening ABC’s broadcast license if the network didn’t cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a clear violation of the First Amendment, and he replied: “The First Amendment of the Constitution protects against government censorship of individuals, ... the First Amendment, though, does not protect entertainers who say crass or thoughtless things.” Just because this man is a boring, milquetoast, insipid, muesli-flavored, sleep-inducing orator doesn’t make him a “moderate.” Even Charlie Kirk’s last moments on Earth were spent playing this game. The latest cynical attack on trans people involves gun-control. Otherwise anathema to Republicans, they now say trans people shouldn’t have the right to purchase or own firearms. This will never materialize, but the goal is not legislation, it’s creating a category to separate trans people from “normal” people; to classify them as “lesser” and cement their status as second-class citizens, culturally if not institutionally. At the risk of coming across like an alarmist, I’ll mention that the Nazis did the same: they loosened gun restrictions and encouraged gun-ownership for everyone else, but they forbade Jews from owning weapons. An audience member at Kirk’s Utah rally attempted to prove that trans people commit fewer acts of violence per capita, and asked him, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kirk responded, “Too many,” which tells you all you need to know about his “debate” style. “In America, it’s five,” the audience member said. “Do you know how many mass shooters [in total] there have been in America over the last 10 years?” “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk asked, using “gang violence” as the thinly-veiled Republican code word for “Black.” Then he was shot. His last words were snidely implying that Black people are more violent than white people. What a fucking legacy. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal was so eager to use Kirk’s murder as a cudgel against trans people, it reported that the assassin’s bullet casings were engraved with “transgender ideology,” whatever that means. The claim turned out to be false. Or to put it more bluntly: the Wall Street Journal lied to demonize trans people and stoke hatred before the proper information could be released to the public by other outlets. For all the pear-clutching about the depravity of people online reacting glibly to Kirk’s murder, accusing those people, not without a considerable sense of moral superiority, of minimizing or even “celebrating” political violence, there has been virtually no recognition that the current right-wing movement is violent. I have restricted myself to discussing the public representatives of the Right. The official ideologues. The open sweltering sewage of hate that has spread throughout the rank-and-file Blackshirts is far more violent and destructive than anything I’ve discussed today. Kirk was a pig in lipstick for a movement of mud-rolling extremists and violent neo-fascists, openly calling for the lynchings of Black people, pogroms against Jews and Muslims, and the extermination of trans people. The bile found in these spaces is hard to overstate. Online, anonymously, they “joke” about trans suicides, they “joke” about dead Gazan children, they “joke” about school shootings, and they “joke” about women. Until it isn’t “just a joke” anymore. And then there is institutional violence. When the Right takes away health insurance from millions of the poorest Americans, that’s violence. When the Right’s jackbooted thugs round up and deport people simply for being Venezuelan, and send them to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, that’s violence. When the Right imposes austerity on Americans, along with sweeping taxes in the form of tariffs, to pay for unprecedented tax breaks for multi-billionaires, even as kids living in the richest country on Earth have to skip meals, that’s violence. When the Right reverses a ban on toxic pesticides that are linked to cancer, allowing the agricultural industry to poison the food of Americans, that’s violence. When the Right hinders, obfuscates, and lies about climate change, while bestowing generous gifts to the fossil-fuel industry by withdrawing from treaty obligations and giving them massive tax breaks, ensuring the capitalist destruction of the human race, that’s violence. Bombing Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia, that’s violence. In the first five months of his second term, Trump bombed nearly as many countries as Biden did in his full four-year term. Committing genocide in Gaza, that’s violence. In modern terminology, Charlie Kirk was a stochastic terrorist. The word stochastic means “probability”—stochastic terrorism refers to attacks that are statistically predictable but not individually predictable. In other words, the precipitous rise in hate crimes against immigrants (or those suspected of being immigrants), LGBTQ people, or Jews and Muslims, can be linked statistically to hate preachers like Charlie Kirk, despite the lack of evidence linking them to individual crimes. A study by the Department of Justice found that, Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far- left extremists or radical Islamist extremists, … longstanding ideological grievances related to immigration, and narratives surrounding electoral fraud will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions. Incidentally, the Trump administration is quietly scrubbing these reports, including the one quoted above, from the department’s archives. Charlie Kirk is partly to blame for the uptick in far-right extremism. All those who eulogize Kirk without mentioning his record, his enmity, or his responsibility are implying that he did not cross a line, that his words did not cross a line that he bears responsibility for. After all, Kirk never killed anyone personally. Do we condemn a man for his lies, for his free speech? After World War II, Julius Streicher and Alfred Rosenberg, the editors of two far- right Nazi newspapers Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter, were convicted at the Nuremberg trials for advocating the extermination of the Jewish people, thereby manufacturing consent for the Holocaust. Yes, speech is free, but exercising your right to free speech doesn’t absolve you of your sins. Charlie Kirk was not a good person—nor should he be honored as one. We should repudiate everything he stood for. His movement is one of hate, cruelty, and violence, and it aims to seize state power in pursuit of those goals. Their conception of “freedom” means freedom for the State, for the corporation, and for the so-called white race to exploit, rob, dominate, and kill groups of “lesser” people. The success that this movement has had so far is what killed Charlie Kirk. His murder is a testament to the achievements of right-wing demagogues to create a more truculent society. Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old kid who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk, will pay a steep price for growing up in this poisoned culture. He’ll be vilified and nobody will see what was done to him; and unlike his victim, nobody will turn Tyler Robinson into a martyr. The pollution of our culture with this right-wing disease that preaches hate as a solution to problems and cheapens human life, gave birth to the Reaper that came for Charlie Kirk two weeks ago. The famous anarchist, Emma Goldman, once wrote that prisons existed so “that society may be ‘protected’ from the phantoms of its own making.” In another essay she added, “society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.”