POLITICAL MANIPULATION, DISTORTIONS AND THE SHOOTING OF CHARLIE KIRK
Dr. Common Good
I am going to make this short and to the point.
First, political violence is unacceptable, period. No matter what Mr. Kirk said, or what his positions were, there is no place whatsoever for assassination or political violence in the United States. We empathize with the Kirk family for their loss.
That said, the canonization of Mr. Kirk by Trump, Vance, and other right-wing voices is grotesque. However clever his manner, he espoused vile racism, bigotry, white Christian nationalism, hostility to immigrants, and a backwards misogyny that fed hatred and violence. To wit:
- He opposed the fundamental American tenet of equality, calling, for example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake,” and that Black people were “better off” years ago during Jim Crow and slavery, and he hosted on his podcast a slavery apologist who said that things went downhill after Black people were guaranteed the right to vote. He was a major proponent of the “great replacement theory,” claiming that liberal forces were seeking to replace white people with immigrants. He also once said that Black women – including Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson – “did not have the brain power to be taken seriously.” They had to “go steal a white person’s slot” to be taken seriously. And he spread a litany of lies about the police killing of George Floyd.
- He called for a white Christian state, claiming that “there’s no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the Constitution.” He advocated for an “American way of life” based on “Christendom” and he was routinely, and rabidly, anti-Islamic, saying that he didn’t ever want his children to hear a Muslim call to prayer. He even called the prophet Muhammad a rapist and a pedophile, among other names. Along the same lines, he wholeheartedly supported Israel’s war in Gaza, denying reports of mass deaths and genocide, and professing his belief in the “scriptural land rights given to Israel.”
- He claimed that women should be subservient to their husbands and that having children was their primary role; so much so, that on being asked if his 10 year old daughter should bear the child if she was raped, he unequivocally said that she should.
- He opposed any gun control and argued, ironically, that a few deaths every year was an acceptable price to pay for maintaining his version of the right to bear arms.
There is little doubt that these and his many other pronouncements fed into extreme MAGA and right-wing hate.
Now, Trump, Vance and generally the MAGA-world, are shamelessly exploiting the Kirk shooting to excoriate and call for vengeance against liberals and “woke-ism,” calling liberals “scum,” exhorting people to root out liberals, and blaming them for political violence, conveniently forgetting the right-wing extremist assassinations of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, attempts on the life of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and his family, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and the litany of mass shootings inspired by right wing hate against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community, at churches, synagogues, bars, and Walmarts, among other locations. At the same time, they have held up an imaginary Charlie Kirk as a bastion of American values, with Vance taking his casket on Air Force 2, and Trump awarding Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom as an exemplar of American values and a “champion of liberty.” And to cap the hypocrisy, Attorney General Pam Bondi now says the Justice Department will go after hate speech, which, she said, is not free speech. Really. After charging liberals with “cancel culture” allegations when there was any outcry against right-wing hate speech, she can still say that with an apparent straight face. George Orwell would have a field day.
For Dr. Common Good, what Mr. Kirk stood for should never be held up as exemplary American values. What he stood for is not the America the world once admired, not the America of the great democratic experiment, and not an America that many recognize any longer.
Despite all of this, we should be using this as a moment to be reflexive about the ugly political divide, and to seek out ways to move forward, allowing for civil disagreement and not zero-sum game authoritarianism or the politics of exclusion. That is not American. Unfortunately, that is not the path Trump and his MAGA allies have taken. They are instead using this opportunity to ramp up authoritarian control.