Cots and Chairs

 Charlie Kirk was a cunt and I’m not sad that he’s dead. 

I say this, but then you probably already know. You know. Maybe not the word you’d choose, but still. You knew. Didn’t need me to tell you. Trust me though, there are plenty who don’t. I’m not talking about his friends, family, collaborators, not the men who funded him or the little incel pricks who cheered him when he brought his medicine show to campus. I don’t mean the fuckwits on Fox or the NYT opinion page who nowadays are basically the same but with their flies up and with bigger words. 

I mean just people; people you may know too, friends and relations. Woman my age from my hometown talking on social media about Charlie Kirk’s “decency,” which is like talking about a quadriplegic’s ballroom dancing. And not just her: retired nurse on my friend’s Facebook page admitting she doesn’t really follow politics (!) but she admired Charlie because he was obviously a good Christian. More than a few of those I saw. Bottle Blonds Kristin Chenoweth and Selma Blair being stupid. Various well-meaning souls reposting that picture of Charlie frolicking on a beach with his wife and children, as if that photo negates everything the man ever actually said and did to make America so much worse than he’d found it. I felt some obligation to disagree where I could. Usually I’d just scroll by, maybe mute, or “unfriend.” Not sure why I felt obliged to try. Didn’t even curse! In fact I tried very hard to be respectful of the people who expressed sympathy and regret — two qualities of which Charlie Kirk himself was devoid.

When I said he was a bad man who preached hate, I was told, “what you speak reflects your own heart,” and that I was talking about myself when I said that. I was also told that I was “on the side of the terrorist,” and that I was endorsing murder.

Right about here in any opinion piece about his assassination is where one is meant to disown political violence, guns, and murder. Shall we take that as given? After-all, and unlike Charlie Kirk, I’ve never endorsed the idea of stoning anyone to death, or described murdered school children as the price we must sadly pay to maintain the Second Amendment. Just to be thorough, I’ve also never advocated the suspension of due process, using deportation as terror, espoused the inferiority of women or races other than my own, or made blacklists of supposedly traitorous college instructors. 

Safe to say then that whatever I may be, good and bad, I’m proud to not be a reactionary opportunist like the late Charlie Kirk — which is why I can’t understand pretending to be sad about his death. He was a Christian White Nationalist, or put it another way, a cracker-fascist. I don’t mourn dead Nazis, nor worry over much about their widows and orphans. The man proclaimed empathy to be a mistake. In his case, for once he was right. Pity is wasted on the memory of the pitiless.

Now do I have either empathy or pity for the idiot who shot Charlie Kirk? Nope. Not a bit. He didn’t bump off Reinhard Heydrich. He killed a loudmouth campus bully, not a mass murderer. True, I was amused to see Kash Patel and company bumbled about for days trying to find this mastermind, only to have the dude’s dad all but walk him into the police station on the end of a rope, but that wasn’t anything to do with hoping the killer might get away. Fuck him. Let him rot in prison until he dies of old age. 

It does feel however that we absolutely must challenge the recasting of Charlie Kirk into any kind of martyr. He wasn’t “an influential media personality,” nor a “representative young conservative” nor “a rising star in Republican circles,” — all descriptions in print and broadcast media I encountered this week.  Nope. Charlie Kirk was a complete piece of shit and we cannot let them polish this turd into some kind of American hero just because some simpleton with a riffle murdered him mid hate-speech.

It feels exhausting already challenging this new false narrative even if only on the social media of vague acquaintances. Not brave, telling some elderly soul who “doesn’t really follow politics” that this was a bad man. Feels a little mean, frankly, like pointing out that this or that touching photo of celebrity A weeping by the casket of celebrity B is actually just Ai. It was a nice thought, wasn’t it? Yeah, well, but it’s also bullshit. It’s fake. Have to keep saying it because that’s the truth. Remember Truth? It’s not about having the answer or being the one telling the truth or explaining anything to anyone so much as it is just refusing the lie.

No. You don’t get to call Charlie Kirk a good Christian, or any kind of good. That’s a lie. He wasn’t a nice man. He wasn’t bringing Christ back onto campus. Charlie Kirk was an ill-educated, egocentric, power-hungry bully and a garbage thinker. Charlie Kirk was a soulless goon.

No, he didn’t deserve to die for that, but he doesn’t deserve anybody’s tears either. The world isn’t going to get any better because he was shot and killed. Might get worse because of this, history shows. Definitely worse if we don’t tell the truth about what a lier he was. Have to contradict the lie that he was ever anything else. 

Meanwhile, sending cots and chairs, right? Cots and chairs.