do not retcon his legacy
He was one of the loudest voices in support of keeping up the very same thing that has killed so many people in shootings. To the very end, he fought tooth and nail over keeping the policies intact that kill people every day, especially school children.
He was openly racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic, and pro war.
He thought empathy was a new concept that is toxic.
He voted for the separation of families, to take millions of individuals' health care away, to make access to education less accessible. He supported and was funded by an authoritarian government.
No, simply having a loud and disrespectful opinion and sitting somewhere waiting to ragebait people in a booth isn’t being “respectful” or “open for discussion”. It reduces these extremely dehumanizing views to a mere difference in opinion that is debatable. The existence and need of basic human rights is not up for debate, and earnest discussions of abolishing them for certain groups of people should never even be entertained. It is not a thought experiment - it has real consequences and it’s not like debating about ice cream flavors or actors. I know how it feels like to sit in class and have your humanity and rights debated as an exercise, as if you do not exist in that space. This is very similar.
People are talking about "have empathy" and "no one should be killed because of their political beliefs" because said person's beliefs didn't affect them. Don’t ask me for empathy for a man that would have loved to take everything from me and my loved ones if I lived in that country. I will reserve it for his family, and the audience.
It’s easy to feel morally righteous when you have no skin in the game. Many of the people nonchalant or even celebratory about UnitedHealthcare CEO’s assassination are now clutching their pearls, and it’s because they can get behind being the victim of the violence of a corrupt healthcare system, but may not be the target of Kirk’s views. Other than that, the cases have a lot in common. Interesting to see that for some, these things are only morally okay as long as they themselves profit or have been harmed by the individual.
If the world needs more love, or needs to cool off the political temperature, then Kirk was not aiding that at all. The hate he spread, the smug and inflammatory language he used are not compatible with that. He did not care about connecting people and finding the truth, he cared about being right and winning, and humiliating and attacking his opponents, and creating a divide. He was a horrible excuse of a Christian and going against everything Jesus stood for.
Really, all this has proven to me that a lot of people who claim to be in support of marginalized groups have absolutely no spine and will not call a spade a spade. If you have nothing nice to say and don’t want to say that in public, you don’t have to, but many act as if anyone held a gun to their head and forced them to publicly come out to the defense of someone like that. Do you really think that by being overly respectful and feigning ignorance about the context of it all in public will mean that the fascists will spare you? Come on. What will you tell them when they come for you? “Why are you doing this! I said his death was bad and defended him online!” I don’t think they will care. They might use you, but they’ll never respect you.
In the end, I guess the people more closely aligned with your oppressor in terms of racial identity, gender identity and/or wealth will jump back to them when it gets dire. Instead of addressing the facts, we make up good things about a guy that would have celebrated deaths for political gains just the same. When people like him make a career out of victimizing the powerless, many people stay quiet, but when others enact violence, that is suddenly deemed “causing more violence”. It’s not even acknowledged that there would have been more violence coming from the target in the future, too, or that executing the shooter is also causing further violence.
It makes me scared for everyone that is oppressed under that MAGA fascist regime, because if they fight back against their oppressors, you will just come out saying that these conmen, white supremacists and rapists are fine and respectable men who just tried to do good. It is scary to me how you can watch someone beat on the same groups for years and then pretend that did not happen. You’ll have a man pretend trans people and black people are the biggest threats in the country right before his death, and you all gloss over that. School shootings, other political assassinations in the same country the same year, other issues in the world - yet you come out of your supposed apolitical trance to post about him? I know what you are.
If you love Charlie so much, celebrate him fully; don’t change the legacy he left behind by pretending he didn’t do what he did. He deserves to go down in history as a horrible court jester in direct support of the very violence that killed him. Don’t take that away from him - he earned that and he proudly paid with his life for that. And thanks to there being many more of him, even more marginalized people will pay the price due to the consequences views like his have. I will honor him by remembering him how he truly was, instead of the fantasy that is currently collectively conjured up online.
sidenote
The kind of people that say that this view I’m espousing is hateful, wrong, and we are pissing on the grave of a loving man? That’s them, under an article of The Nation on X:
These are the people who call for love and respect for that man; those are the people pretending others saying the truth are dividing that country, not them and their vitriol. These are the people you align yourself with. Do they seem to you as if they are reasonable people that just want to get along? You’re gonna let username “Violence first” convince you they think violence is wrong? This isn’t even cherry-picked, the entire comment section is like that.
They love this, and they love to come across any excuse to enact violence. They’re “freedom of speech” until you say the above; then they want to censor you by doxxing and legal threats. Don’t be fooled.
I’m not here to debate this in my emails - this is here to sound off to others that similarly feel gaslit by the reactions of others, and possibly, for some people on the fence.