Fear and Loathing Part II
Charlie Kirk was killed at his rally in Utah. What does this mean?
It was just after three when I saw that Charlie Kirk, the American right wing political activist, was shot in the neck at one of his rallies in Utah. My attempts to eat my lunch and finish my cover story were futile, since a right wing activist in these highly right-wing times was murked, the bullet seemingly coming out of nowhere like that sniper episode in the thirteenth season of Law and Order. The sound of the shot was firm, crystalline, and smooth, the aim was perfect: right down the center of his Adam's apple, allowing his head to lean back calmly like Fat Joe’s flow on that rap song. Utter chaos developed in Utah, a place where Kirk of all people should have felt safest at. Not even Demi, Whitney, or Taylor Frankie Paul from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives can claim they feel safe right now, especially not with their fruity husband’s attached to their hips. Maybe Kirk should have notified Karl Malone that he was coming to town.
It reminded me of Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. That was another seemingly random, but ultra-specific killing, one that derived from a sort of pain at what this country has wrought from its capitalist healthcare system. But, Luigi, a boy radicalized through his agonizing back injury, was smart enough to know that the system was complex. “It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently, I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty”, said Mangione in his manifesto that federal agents found. To him, resistance needed a jolt, a needle in a vein, a bullet that helped wake people up. It sort of did too, allowing people to laugh at greed, while also taking joy in the handsome face of Mangione, despite his obvious mental deterioration, his intense public violence.
This time, however, Kirk is not a healthcare titan but a political voice, a merciless fanatic that chose his side very publicly. It remains to be seen who did this, why they did this, if all of their screws are loose, or like Luigi, if there is a creed of complicated resistance. Whoever it was, he picked a target that would make sense if you were someone who opposes the right wing. Yesterday, Kirk claimed that black-on-white violence a real problem in this country, that Islam does not fit into Western values, and retweeted right-wing quotes about crime in cities made by President Donald Trump. In 2020, he spread misinformation about COVID-19, he claimed that white privilege is a “myth”, a “racist idea.” He practices the age old thing that many white folks practiced in this country: racism. To see Kirk was to see hate, a youthful hate, scaring us into the abyss of hatred, of a broken relations between people. Like Brother Malcolm once said, the chicken have come home to roost.
It’s wonderfully clear: the person whose life ended today believed in things that are actively harmful, believed in white supremacy that is defining this current administration, believed in a sort of Christian jihad that allows for cities to be pervaded by ICE. His words are now reduced to a Twitter profile that will no longer have any posts in them. A part of me wonders if Trump will immortalize him forever with the nation’s highest civilian honor; to have lived life with words of racism under your belt is to now be considered a martyr in Trump’s eyes.
Are we headed towards unspeakable horror? Perhaps we’ll be at tolalirarian war now, with ICE knocking on the doors of even Black Americans, forcing them to show a passport in order not to be cuffed inside of a steel paddy wagon. That should be worrisome to any person with an empathetic soul and a brain to match. It is highly unlikely that one drop of blood on the right wing’s side is going to make them back down from their imperialism, their death march across these next few years of this administration. They wish for the excuse to expand, to kill, to wipe others off of the earth.
I do know one thing: everyone on the left, the actual left, has a crystal clear understanding of the moment we’re in right now. On Twitter, memes are flooding the timeline with impunity, a glee that is akin to a cookout on Flatbush Avenue. The people wishing Charlie Kirk well are the same people who have not batted an eye when videos of Palestinian children enter their timelines, their villages being ground to dust by a fascist government aided by right wing settlers. It is the left versus the right, in ways that have always been muted but are now wildly pronounced. If anyone is upset that those on the left have shown apathy or delight for the killing of Kirk, then they should live their life not advancing causes that aim to eradicate people on the left. It’s that simple: this is the land of a side now. Pick one — because the right wing has.