A memorial for Charlie Kirk at the headquarters of Turning Point USA.Eric Thayer/Getty Images
In suburban Los Angeles, the masked white supremacists of the Patriot Front march, chanting “Say his name! Charlie Kirk!” In London, right-wing extremists rally against immigration, and again the name on everyone’s lips is Charlie Kirk. Across Europe, in Germany, in Spain, in France, in Hungary, far-right parties eulogize him as a martyr.
For someone who has been so often held up in recent days as a “moderate, mainstream conservative,” Mr. Kirk is strangely popular with neo-Nazis, white nationalists, Christian theocrats and other elements of the far right. I can’t imagine they’d be so keen on Mitt Romney, even in death.
And of course, he is well on his way to sainthood among MAGA Republicans. And why not? For MAGA – the Trump White House, in particular – Mr. Kirk’s assassination has proved supremely useful, as both a sword and a shield against their opponents.
The sword part is the most transparent. Democrats have been accused of celebrating his death (no Democrat of any stature has done so), if not of causing it. His alleged murderer, it is claimed, was inspired by leftist ideology (no concrete evidence has emerged that he had any coherent ideology), or incited by Democratic rhetoric (a claim that is not only baseless, but almost superhumanly hypocritical, given Mr. Trump’s rich history of support for political violence). The left is responsible, it is claimed, for all, or nearly all, acts of political violence (left-wing violence is in fact a fraction of the right’s).
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The intent is clear. It is not only to intimidate Mr. Trump’s opponents from criticizing his administration – there you go again with that dangerous rhetoric – but to lay the foundation for a sweeping crackdown on dissent.
Some of that is of the traditional authoritarian-state kind, as in the Attorney-General’s vow to go after “hate speech,” which Mr. Trump helpfully defined as the sort of criticism he has endured from the mainstream media. Some is via the vigilante mobs of the online world. Republicans have adopted left-wing “cancel culture” tactics with a vengeance. The punishable heresy has broadened, from making light of Mr. Kirk’s death, to criticizing him in life, to failing to mourn him sufficiently.
Because – the shield part – Mr. Kirk was the embodiment of every virtue: courageous, decent, brilliant, above all civil. Who attacks him attacks every Republican, every conservative. Because that’s what he was, wasn’t he: not a fanatical Trump supporter, or a far-right ideologue, or a “conflict entrepreneur,” or even a clever, hard-working hustler, but just a moderate, mainstream conservative.
Death has a way of washing away all sins. In the aftermath of his murder, it is not only Mr. Kirk – say his name! – who has been reborn as a moderate, but also his political soulmates. If he is a moderate, so must they be. If he is above criticism, so are they.
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It’s nonsense, of course. In order to regard Mr. Kirk as a moderate, you must either be an extremist yourself, or have no familiarity with his extensive public record. “Happening all the time in urban America,” he told listeners to his podcast on May 19, 2023, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.”
He was an advocate of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. He expounded at length on how “Jewish communities” – “Jewish financiers,” in particular – “have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” how “it’s not just the colleges; it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.” He said that former president Joe Biden should be “given the death penalty.” He denounced Islam as “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” Among a long list.
It’s possible to discuss controversial social issues from a considered conservative viewpoint. That is not what Mr. Kirk offered. Yes, he could be kind. Yes, he could say nice things about gays, or Jews. But in the main his views were of the most cartoonishly reductionist kind. At best they seemed based on a kind of adolescent desire to shock; at worst they were overt appeals to intolerance.
Obviously this does not mean he deserved his fate. It is only to counter the current heavy-handed attempt at mainstreamification, let alone beatification. There are worse figures in the MAGA movement. But to call Mr. Kirk a moderate is to cause words to lose their meaning; to extend this indulgence to his entire party is to weaponize them against meaning. A fascist party that wins an election is still a fascist party.
It is certainly “dangerous rhetoric” to call people fascists who aren’t fascist. But to call out actual fascists is not rhetoric. It is a patriotic duty.
The man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah university has been charged with aggravated murder. Tyler Robinson could face the death penalty if convicted.
The Associated Press