Who the hell was Charlie Kirk anyway?
The podcaster’s death was bad, but unworthy of collective punishment.
On September 10, 2025, 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was shot from a rooftop and killed in his debate booth on the campus of Utah Valley University. I confess, until his death, I barely knew who Mr. Kirk was. His career was meaningful to Young Republicans of college age, whose political journeys coincided with his, and I hear he was, IRL, a nice guy, but I never cared for his videos. He should not have been killed, but neither should America be ruined in his memory.
I am aware of TPUSA from Facebook and YouTube advertisements where Mr. Kirk’s face was pasted beside provocative quotes, “baiting” users to click and see the context. For example:
No thanks! I never listened to their podcast, either—it sounded obnoxious.
Netizens of good character were once taught: “Don’t feed the trolls!” That aphorism served me poorly. Online antagonists like Mr. Kirk became a professional class, and irritating the Internet is now a real political job. If I had known this was a lucrative skill to refine, instead of a juvenile mentality I needed to outgrow, I could have spent more of my twenties blogging instead of drinking, smoking, and enjoying life in every way the Good Christian Conservatives hated. I am an excellent bombast—few can ride a villain’s nerves like your boy Hex—but Mr. Kirk launched a career of it when I thought it was a vice.
I also had an adversarial relationship with TPUSA’s spam campaigns. Last autumn, I went “full Karen” and called to harangue their office because I was receiving unsolicited SMS. I keep it real—I do not like it when people play with my phone—and I made them knock that shit off.
After Mr. Kirk’s death, fundraising messages impersonating his widow, Erika Kirk, cluttered my inbox, despite prior instructions never to contact me. Because I am a considerate person, I postponed calling to tell them to fuck off for the second time. I will wait until an appropriate grieving period has passed, but I always waste an equal amount of spammers’ time as they do mine.
If you receive such unsolicited e-mail, Dear Reader, please report it to SpamCop. SpamCop is one of the Internet’s longest-running anti-spam services.
TPUSA’s annual AmericaFest was on my radar because its afterparties sounded like “bangers.” It reportedly became a debauched weekend where conservative youth influencers get “sloppy drunk” and “what happens at AmFest, stays at AmFest.” In a Twitter dispute, one right-wing influencer accused another of getting “fingered in the middle of a hotel lobby.” I fail to see in such conduct “Christian values.” See:
After the killing, the body politic acted like damn morons—the president, the vice president, members of Congress, television hosts, podcasters, “influencers,” talking heads, and social media posters alike all spouted hyperbole. I had opinions, too, but I measured them instead of speeding into discourse. If every American were so disciplined, this country would not be sliding into Hell. Right away, the president sat on the Fox & Friends couch and announced the government would target “radical left lunatic organizations” responsible for the killing. Except that no organization was “behind” the lone-wolf sniper, and “the left” is not an organization. Most of us do not know or like each other.
Mr. Kirk was a “shock jock,” an entertainer. He catered to a certain audience and produced vitriolic podcast “hot takes” and viral clips of debates with blustering kids. “Content” like that earns enmity but should not carry a death sentence in a free society. Liberal creators were accused of contributing to his murder for being “haters,” which is stupid. If “people who dislike you” are murderers, I am endangered by every grey-haired patriot who complains at the Tysons Corner Center (“where the stores are”) about my “TRUMP IS A BITCH” T-shirt (censored by our Spreadshop store). I hope none of those Reaganites kill me!
I abhor political violence. That is why I do not do it, do not promote it, and expressly decry it. The closest I have come was after shouting “He can’t keep getting away with this!” while reading an article about Mr. Trump’s strikes on boats that are either carrying Venezuelan fishers or fish-scaled cocaine. I slammed my fists on an Ikea LAGKAPTEN tabletop and broke it into two cardboard halves. I spent weeks rebuilding the Partisan Hex office after the tantrum. Fortunately, having nowhere to type prevented me from making any ill-considered remarks on Mr. Kirk’s assassination before the right-wing cancel culture mob built online databases of Mr. Kirk’s critics they wanted to see hurt, harassed, punished, fired, or worse, such as the Cancel the Hate app or the defunct CharliesMurderers.com.
I did not revel in Mr. Kirk’s death or his family’s pain, as histrionic Republicans claim was typical. I will not feign that I saw none of that—one manic jerk on Bluesky posted: “RIPBOZO PACKWATCH 100 100 REST IN PISS YOU WON’T BE MISSED.” I chose to be charitable. I researched how Mr. Kirk responded to political violence so that I could honor his words when I called for peace.
Shockingly, he was less than respectful when his ideological enemies needed kindness. Paul Pelosi was injured in a hammer attack in October 2022, for example, and Mr. Kirk said of his assailant:
“If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy [who put an elderly man in the hospital] out [of jail].”
Mr. Kirk was no exemplar of compassion for your enemies. So, when we are commanded to show him respect, we are expected to grant him more grace than he awarded Mr. Pelosi. Well, I always do that. Nobody gives others more grace than they deserve than me.
The podcaster has been transfigured into a martyr and messiah. Churches aired AI-generated “messages from the afterlife” to their congregants using his voice. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called Mr. Kirk his “soulmate” and compared the assassination to that of his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, as well as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who Mr. Kirk called “awful… not a good person,” that “most people disliked” and “said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.” Haters wrote the same about Mr. Kirk. Still, to those Bluesky posters who hit up ChatGPT with Deep Research requests to build an arsenal of mean factoids with which to “dunk” on Mr. Kirk before his body was cold, I say we should aspire to a world where nobody does “oppo” on the recently departed.
President Donald Trump, who cannot let tragedies be wasted, blamed Mr. Kirk’s death on “vicious and horrible and politically savvy” “radical left lunatics,” then pledged to go after “their” funding. His ghoulish vizier, Stephen Miller, ranted: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people…. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Except they were talking that blah blah blah when the killer was still loose and unidentified. Mr. Kirk might have been murdered by antifa super soldiers enthralled to an insidious strain of “leftism”—whatever the hell “leftism” means, the term is useless from over-attribution. If the assassin were a member of any posse, that still required evidence before asserting, and none existed. Weeks and months later, the orange dotard and his toadies still regurgitate that baseless claim when they want to be asinine, and they expect Americans to take them at their word.
The Trump administration saw Mr. Kirk’s death as an opportunity to advance malicious goals that were already “on the agenda.” Earlier that year, after the firing of Stephen Colbert, the president warned that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was “next.” Following Mr. Kirk’s death, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr pressured ABC affiliates to remove the former Crank Yankers star from broadcast. During the few days when Mr. Kimmel was canceled, it was clear that those fools thought there were no limits to their power. Jimmy Kimmel Live! was back on the air less than a week later.
So, too, I assume, the president’s ranting statements blaming George Soros, the Ford Foundation, and various NGOs for civil unrest and yapping about RICO were drafted in advance. By the by, Mr. Trump was accused of RICO alongside Mr. Soros in 2008, and his Chicago properties received substantial investments from Mr. Soros in 2004. The president knows from that personal experience that Mr. Soros is another billionaire gambler playing the same games as Mr. Trump’s friends and donors. Based on the amount of money MAGA Inc. is taking in—nearly half a billion between 2023 and 2024—is Mr. Trump sure he wants to accuse anyone of financing murder with political spending? That could hurt Trump-affiliated groups, whose intra-faction stochastic terrorism is a regular feature of their information environment. See: Garbage person Megyn Kelly once huddled for “16 months” “under armed guard” to protect her children from Trump supporters. She has since forgiven the president and now beats her chest beside him.
A memorandum designated “Antifa” as an organized terror group, despite being neither organized nor a group (though fascists are terrified of them). It explains the rationale, though not well:
“These campaigns often begin by isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action against them. They do so through a variety of fora, including anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions. These campaigns then escalate to organized doxing, where the private or identifying information of their targets (such as home addresses, phone numbers, or other personal information) is exposed to the public with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate, or violently assault them.”
To characterize the villainy described, imagine a blue-haired, genderqueer, pierced-up punk 23-year-old slaps on their fingerless typing gloves and says on Discord: “I hate that Twitch Streamer Mr. Magaman Jackson. Here is a list of reasons he is a piece of shit, and memes about how he sucks. I Googled his nasty ass. Here is his address in Ohio. Will nobody rid me of this turbulent streamer? I mean, someone should kill him in the name of radical socialism!” This Republican theory treats even the initial shit-talk as “pre-crime”—it would ruin the GOP if ever applied to them.
Notoriously unstable Representative Nancy Mace, who in recent months has challenged Representative Jasmine Crockett to a fistfight and melted down screaming at the police in the middle of an airport, said: “This is the predictable result of the left’s rhetoric. They have normalized political violence, they have demonized their opponents as evil, and now a patriot is dead. Let’s not mince words: Democrats own this.”
I do not. I “own” nothing except DEEZ NUTS. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer or House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries probably could not match Mr. Kirk’s name with his face, so they cannot “own this” either. But it is interesting that “demoniz[ing] opponents as evil” is the Mace standard. It is not difficult to find Republicans, including Messrs. Kirk and Trump as well as Ms. Mace, wildly “out-of-pocket.” For example, one week after saying this, Ms. Mace tweeted that Representative Ilhan Omar was an “enemy of the state” and called for her deportation, which is inflammatory, and Mr. Trump often uses the word “evil” to describe Democrats, #Nevertrump Republicans, and celebrities he dislikes. As the Beltway aphorism goes: “If not for double standards, Republicans would have none.”
This asymmetry is not a hypocrisy to be caught. It is a design by evil men like Mr. Miller, who I expect will one day be caught cackling and calling himself an “artisan of pain” or something else ridiculously macabre. Republicans want to hurt, but do not wish on themselves what they inflict on others.
The so-called “Party of Personal Responsibility” traditionally was philosophically opposed to the practice of collective punishment, where groups are penalized for the actions of individuals, but today they sort all their critics, including even neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney, into an amorphous, vague blob of “leftists.” We account for our own actions, not those of anyone sharing our political alignment. The type of person who snipes a podcaster is unlikely to say, “I don’t want to get Stephen Colbert in trouble!” What’s that got to do with him? It is remarkable how quickly the “rugged individualists” embraced collectivism and labeled Americans as “Charlie’s murderers” for speaking ill of him. Words are not bullets. Disrespect is not homicide. Meanness is not on a continuum with terrorism.
Social media was unusable for most of September because of ranting partisans demanding a second Civil War after they were “triggered” by comments on TikTok making fun of Mr. Kirk. It is insane to see adults conflating inflammatory text boxes with half of America. According to this collage of right-wing Twitter stitched together by Meidas Touch, Internet goons called the assassination of Charlie Kirk their “Reichstag Fire.” Fucking Christ, that was an ahistorical horror, not an aspiration. Democracy ought not be dismantled because of “mean tweets.”
Those crying blood-for-blood are not only losers, trolls, Russian bots, and shock jocks. The Daily Caller’s editor-at-large Geoffrey Ingersoll’s essay “Enough Is Enough … I Choose VIOLENCE!” “call[ed] for violence … [e]xplicitly,” naming “wildly disproportionate” “ultra-violen[ce]” and “blood in the streets” as appropriate “reinstitut[ion] [of] public debt for anti-social and subversive behavior.” Such a Christ-like fellow deserves everything he prays to be done to others.
Tyler Robinson, the killer, was not found through the work of FBI Director Kash Patel (or as I like to call him, “Kush Patel,” because that fool has got to be smoking something). Mr. Robinson’s father recognized him on TV and persuaded him to surrender. Until then, those two days of ambiguity turned the political aether into a feverish hell of paranoid discourse and hate. We could have waited for Mr. Robinson’s day in court to determine what is true and false about him. We still can. Instead, the country hyperfocused on finding out which “team” he could be assigned to. Was he a rightoid, a Marxist, an incel, or a drag queen?
None of those. Mr. Robinson is a chronically online loser whose brain is rotted by furry pornography, violent computer games, and the chat program Discord. He dressed like Pepe the Frog for Halloween. His bullet casings were engraved with memes, jokes, or other Internet culture detritus: “Notices your bulge, OwO, what’s this?” (referencing a cartoon where two grotesque men engaged in cybersex while roleplaying as sexy foxes or cats or something), “If you read this you are GAY lmao,” “O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,” (an Italian anthem brought to popularity by Netflix’s “The Money Heist”). Drawn on another bullet was a command sequence from the “looter shooter” Helldivers 2, captioned “Hey Fascist, catch!” He spent all his time on Discord, which is where he posted his confession and apology before turning himself in. His voter registration was inactive and unaffiliated—he did not vote in 2024. So why would Democrats bear any responsibility for a gamer who never donated, volunteered, voted, or even socialized with them?
In the chaos following the shooting, right-wing media seized on a false ATF bulletin cited by Mr. Patel claiming the bullets were engraved with ‘transgender ideology’—whatever the hell that means. The Wall Street Journal ran that story before retracting it when the actual inscriptions were memes. But to the relief of bigots who had been hunting for any trans connection, Mr. Robinson’s roommate was transitioning, and it seems the two were in a romantic relationship. ‘That settles that! Left wing!’ is what I am sure conservatives cheered, but that seems dumb. Caring about a transgender person is not an ideology.
Over that September weekend, the Kennedy Center held an event honoring Mr. Kirk. The president skipped it to go golfing again (according to
https://didtrumpgolftoday.com/
, approximately the 60th golf trip he took since Inauguration). Mr. Trump cares less about celebrating Mr. Kirk’s life than he does profiting off his death. Mr. Kirk was important enough to direct “fire and fury” at random targets, but not enough to change the president’s weekend plans.
On the Kennedy Center stage, Senior Advisor for the U.S. Agency for Global Media and two-time electoral loser Kari Lake cried that “Five years earlier, [Robinson] was a Trump supporter. Then we send our kids off to college and they brainwashed him. I am making a plea to mothers out there, please don’t send your children into these indoctrination camps.”
Mr. Robinson attended one semester at a Utah public college and is in his third year of an electrician apprenticeship. For all her tears, Ms. Lake neglected to read even a single article before going into a spotlight and “winging it.” Is this the rigor she applies to her projects at Voice of America? She could have called any VOA employee and said, “Hook me up with an outline. I don’t want to look like a fucking idiot!” She did not.
My colleagues on the left also engaged in unproductive behavior—Redditors wearing detective hats saw “frog-posting gamer on Discord” and concluded he was an incel from a conservative family, probably a “groyper.” They wanted to say: “Not one of us. He was yours!” The temptation is misguided. Nobody makes everybody associated with them guilty. The exercise of assigning group affiliations to lone actors is worse than a sloppy means toward justice, because “cracking down” on broad target groups necessitates that the innocent be punished.
There should be no difficulty reconciling Mr. Robinson’s 2A-friendly upbringing—his family photos feature big smiles and bigger guns—with his willingness to kill a MAGA icon. It is not complicated through a non-ideological lens. If he loved a trans woman, as his texts suggest, perhaps he resorted to violence as a misguided romantic gesture, like twenty-year-old idiots do. Mr. Kirk’s rhetoric about the transgender community was unkind—of course Mr. Robinson took offense to insults on his lover’s behalf. Youth prone to passions imagine their feelings are the center of the world.
Robinson: drop what you are doing, look under my keyboard.
Under the keyboard, there was a note that allegedly read: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.”
Roommate: What?????????????? You’re joking, right????
Robinson: I am still ok my love, but am stuck in orem for a little while longer yet. Shouldn’t be long until I can come home, but I gotta grab my rifle still. To be honest I had hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age. I am sorry to involve you.
Roommate: you weren’t the one who did it right????
Robinson: I am, I’m sorry
Roommate: I thought they caught the person?
Robinson: no, they grabbed some crazy old dude, then interrogated someone in similar clothing. I had planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after, but most of that side of town got locked down. Its quiet, almost enough to get out, but theres one vehicle lingering.
Roommate: Why?
Robinson: Why did I do it?
Roommate: Yeah
Robinson: I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.
I, too, made foolish romantic gestures at his age. I plotted a forbidden liaison with the art-student daughter of a defense contractor. He disapproved of his daughter having an affair with an outspoken, chain-smoking, bad-boy liberal, but I thought it would be quite cool to carry on the romance as a “back door man.”
I snuck through the yard in the dark to that lover’s window so I could invite her “cruising” in my old Hexmobile. Except I tripped on a pile of lumber and unleashed wood bees on myself. It was bad. One flew up my “George W. Bush Is a Miserable Failure” T-shirt. I stripped it off while running away. She was not impressed to see me drive home half-naked and yelping. Going forward, my calls were unreturned.
Mr. Robinson likely saw transphobia as an obstacle that the purity of his feelings could defeat. Mr. Kirk, the villain in his love story, got shot. I am surprised “Second Amendment stalwarts” who dress like cowboys are unable or unwilling to imagine a 22-year-old acting like one.
On Monday, September 15, Vice President Jim Dave Vance hosted the Charlie Kirk podcast and claimed he wanted “no unity with the left” because “they” were harassing Mr. Kirk’s widow and children, mocking his death, and taking his words out of context.
Nonsense. I did not. Every major Democratic leader expressed condolences, condemned the attack, and well-meaning knaves in swing districts even advanced legislation declaring October 14 “Charlie Kirk Day.” If, heaven forbid, something happened to my personal hero, Keith Olbermann, would a single Republican give him the same honor?
Where online was the vice president of the United States reading so much mean shitposting? He has job responsibilities, doesn’t he? How deep was he in the replies? Mr. Vance requested that the audience contact the employers of anyone celebrating, rationalizing, or justifying the death of Mr. Kirk. Snitching. Posts that count as “celebrating” or “justifying” say, roughly: “Charlie Kirk said shit I don’t like.” But if nobody objected to Mr. Kirk, his career as a shock jock would not make his family millionaires.
Megyn Kelly (who, again, spent 16 months under armed guard) tweeted (though I want to say “shrieked”) at The Bulwark’s Tim Miller she “D[ID] NOT CARE” that White House Border Czar and cartoon thug Tom Homan was videotaped accepting a bag containing $50,000 cash. She said:
“One of yours killed Charlie and then you laughed at our pain, protested our vigils & said Charlie was to blame and in hell. You lied about the killer’s motives & said he was MAGA when you knew he wasn’t. You put us all in danger by not admitting the truth and then not relenting on the lies you tell about us. You cried endless tears for Jimmy Kimmel but none for Charlie. You gleefully cancelled all of us for five+ years and danced when we suffered.”
I did none of that, and neither did Tim Miller. But reasoning with Ms. Kelly is futile. She has also suggested Mr. Kirk was killed by a witch’s curse. How spooky! She seems unwell.
I read too many variations of this: “U leftists R rly quick 2 point fingers after u POKED THE BEAR??! It iz ALL u guys’S fault 4 calling every111 literally HITLER & saying St. Kirk ‘got what he deserved’ & posting Joker memes!”
“You guys?” “We” “poked the bear?” Until his assassination, I never typed Mr. Kirk’s name. I had no relationship with the man. How could I provoke anything? If we were meant to feel responsible for every utterance by every crank who votes like us, Republicans would be maddened by tell-tale guilt.
If a 22-year-old right-to-repair activist shot at an Apple store and left a manifesto complaining about his iPad Pro’s repairability, nobody would suggest shutting down iFixit, going after Louis Rossmann’s advertisers, or doxxing Redditors complaining about planned obsolescence. Only perhaps John Deere executives might declare that violence was the predictable result of “anti-corporate rhetoric” and demand crackdowns on DIY forums.
Then again, Mr. Trump does not need his reasoning to be convincing; the “why” is an excuse for pre-written orders. Mr. Trump only needs something to blame for what he will do. I think he is not trying to win an illegal third term in a free, fair election, nor does he plan for his successor to win their term against an intact opposition. If this is chess, he plans to destroy all the Democratic knights, bishops, and rooks in advance of the game, so that they must play with fewer pieces.
This assassination did not give the right unlimited political capital. They spent more than they earned and wasted much of it on score-settling with late-night shows. Hubris and erratic prioritization will be their undoing. I am more “plugged in” to politics than the average voter, and I still could not be bothered to care about Mr. Kirk while he was alive. The fantasy that individuals more indifferent would accept a government takeover of network TV and exiling shitposters from the workforce because a podcaster was shot is delusional, even for today’s GOP.
We cannot look away from Mr. Trump’s declarations that the Democratic Party will “disappear.”
He said that in 2026, there will be no blue states, accused critics of treason, and suggested that right-wing terrorism somehow supports law enforcement, while comedians’ monologues are left-wing terrorism and hate speech. Mr. Trump is not “overreaching,” or “misreading his mandate.” He is making threats, not gaffes. “Bad optics” no longer matter to him. He often calls for the prosecution of political opponents, judges, investigators, senators, congresspeople, governors, ex-employees, and celebrities. Even if that “turns off the voters,” that would be a non-factor in the GOP’s electoral luck if their opposition is crippled.
Early in the 2025 MAGA Republican government shutdown, Mr. Trump said, into microphones and in writing, that he would target funding cuts and layoffs at blue states and “Democrat programs.” The president wants to hurt the Democratic half of Americans, and put work into planning ways to do it. He withheld disaster aid from traditionally Democratic states and threatened to steal funds from Maryland meant for rebuilding the destroyed Key Bridge because he was irrationally angry (his feet hurt) about being invited by Governor Wes Moore to go walking. He put troops on the streets of Washington, DC, Chicago, and Portland, and tweeted about having “his people” run New York City. This is not “politics as usual.” The ruling regime is pitching to turn America into a one-party state. That is something from which we may not be able to return.
The GOP wants no opposition and absolute impunity, which is impossible. If every Democrat vanishes overnight, tomorrow a teenager would realize Mr. Trump is a bitch, and the cycle begins anew.
Mr. Robinson’s story has been so lacking in intrigue that fringy-sounding (but successful) fever swamp influencers prefer Candace Owens’s version, an elaborate conspiracy in which Mrs. Kirk was an Israeli spy and the French Foreign Legion, in alliance with Mossad, was coming for Ms. Owens next, as dictated by Mr. Kirk’s ghost.
Mr. Kirk’s stances toward guns and political violence may seem to invite schadenfreude, but that should be resisted. Reveling in the wailing of widows and children is a sickness I cannot fathom—I barb my words, but despite my dark rhetoric, these moments bring me grief, too. I pray for an America where we leave each other alone, instead of using force and fury to compel and control those with whom we would never consort. TPUSA is a noxious organization, and I have as little use for them as they have for me.
The latest “hot goss” has been that Erika Kirk and Mr. Vance are starting a courtship that will end in the vice president’s divorce from Second Lady Usha Vance. I do not endorse this lurid tabloid speculation, though I keep a bag of popcorn reserved for further developments. It is disrespectful to “ship” in the middle of a tragic moment (the way, after the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, Messrs. Trump, Kirk, and Don Jr. suggested assailant David DePape was Mr. Pelosi’s scorned lover).
Photographs of Mr. Vance and Mrs. Kirk are indistinguishable from tawdry book covers, but any man holding another woman by her waist while her hands are in his hair looks like a rake. I am not interested in how a widow processed her grief on stage—none of my business!—but the vice president must know immediately guest hosting the podcast and embracing Mr. Kirk’s wife will stir up gross whispers that he is also “profiting” from his friend’s death.
I think certain conservative influencers cannot live without the additional income, traffic, and engagement the assassination brought them, so they must resort to ploys to keep that attention. For Halloween 2025, a photo circulated of high school math teachers in Arizona wearing white T-shirts stained with fake blood and the text: “Problem Solved.” This is clearly a running joke, as they wore the same shirts in previous years. Yet Twitter addicts, including “Based” Senator Mike Lee, demanded the teachers’ firing because they believe any bloody shirt anywhere is now a sly joke at Mr. Kirk’s expense. It has been more than two months. Most Americans are not thinking about Mr. Kirk at all.
Democrats will not accept blame for a crime no Democrat committed, and if Republicans punish half the country, build databases, fire Internet commenters, and treat all criticism as terrorism, that logic will destroy them, too, and an intra-societal cycle of vendettas involving killing content creators is not good for your boy Hex.
If convicted of the murder, the state of Utah will seek the death penalty for Mr. Robinson. This is unfashionable to say, because there are existential moral problems with executing people under conditions of less than 100 percent metaphysical absolute certitude of their guilt, but I think that would be right. It should end with him. I recognize that endorsing capital punishment without warning may seem jarring. I wanted to avoid the subject—the topic merits more time and thought than I can offer—but in Utah, Mr. Kirk “has a right to be executed by a firing squad.” We cannot look away from that.
We entrust the monopoly on violence to the state. Mr. Robinson, in executing a public figure, broke that contract. In response, conservatives spoil for vigilantism, too, and gun stocks, sales, and permit applications “went to the moon.” That means that the pro-democracy coalition must also invest money in security for their own events, speakers, and persons—pat-downs and metal detectors outside events like CrookedCon, WelcomeFest, and Principles First are not free, and make it difficult for cool guys to slip in and out of the venue to smoke. This should not become the world. Men will need armed guards to have public lives if the people start warring physically over influencers. And thanks to Mr. Kirk’s trailblazing, shitposting is also a public life now—nobody should consider themselves insulated unless they are silent.
Even if you hate Mr. Kirk, find his whole life and career distasteful, still condemn his killing and killer. The GOP, who canonize the podcaster, fantasize about an elaborate antifascist Illuminatus dispatching creepy gamer guys to do their murders, and conveniently, their program for destroying that fictional organization involves hurting their political opponents. The correct thing is to blame the boy who committed the crime; truth is the strongest counter to propaganda. Let Mr. Robinson receive maximal justice for what he has done. Let all who commit the violence that Republicans exploit be so condemned. Say they deserve Hell. Otherwise, conservatives think they are entitled to extract whatever righteousness or fury they can from these events and direct that fire toward unrelated actors, generally as informed by their personal prejudices.
To address the obvious: This essay was published in December. Mr. Kirk was killed in September. There are practical reasons for this three-month delay: my desk was destroyed; I thought it wise to avoid the most heated version of the argument; the fall news cycle was so bleak—I have described it as “Democracy’s Autumn” and a “Horror Show” that it was a struggle to keep up; I compulsively revise projects that touch sensitive matters; I hoped there might be one additional piece of information that tied the whole story together; I experience difficulty wrapping up the final details of a project.
But I also—not naively, but foolishly—hoped that the flop of the Kimmel firing might reduce the hysteria, chill out the bullshit. The recent shooting of National Guardsmen Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe outside of Farragut West Metro, and the subsequent attempts to use that as pretext for the most vile immigration actions yet, prove that respecting traditional boundaries around politicizing tragedy is surrender to those like Messrs. Trump, Vance, and Miller, to Nancy Mace and Megyn Kelly, who will freely pick any corpse and fashion its bones into weapons, mix its blood into poison. At my most genteel, I let them have their grief, but in that space, they showed grief is not their desire. They wanted what they always wanted: to hurt people.