Charlie in his own words

First , a confession. I’d never heard of Charlie Kirk before his fatal shooting yesterday.The photographs of him present a neat, good-looking conventional 31-year-old, with that wide-eyed look you sometimes see coming from evangelist Christian.That doesn’t mean he was totally caught up in spiritual matters. On the contrary – he married a former Miss Arizona and worked assiduously spreading the gospel of the right.

Looking this morning at his public  statements,he clearly was a man with no qualms about speaking his mind. When an American football player collapsed  on field, Charlie took the chance to imply that it had to do with inoculation: “This is a tragic and all too familiar sight right now: Athletes dropping suddenly.”  When a trans man was involved in a school shooting in 2023, he spoke of ”transjihadists” and claimed  there were plans for “trans genocide” –  there was,he claimed a “violent undercurrent” among the trans movement. He repeatedly denounced Martin Luther King (having lauded him a few years earlier).King,he said, was “awful” and the 1964 civil rights  bill “a mistake”. He claimed King had been”mythologized”or even “deified”.

Charlie,  the victim of violence, was not a pacifist. He suggested it was fine to “fire next to” migrants. And he believed homeless people should be  put in”mental asylums”

He is credited with persuading millions  of young people into being active in the Trump movement. Trump himself was loud in his praise. But the facts appear to show a young man who saw a crypto-fascist band-waggon trundling by and shouted “Hey! Wait for me!” That said, his killing shows the worst possible response to someone many would disagree with. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Assassination is the ultimate form of censorship.”