"When do we get to use the guns" and "kill these people?" — a Charlie Kirk enthusiast

On Thursday, Trump said that “We have a radical left group of lunatics out there. Just absolute lunatics. And we’re going to get that problem solved.... We just have to beat the hell out of them.”

On Wednesday, Trump said we'll find the “organizations that funded and supported” political violence. He needn't look far. With the U.S. government's unlimited finances in hand, his regime is the only organization explicitly promising to solve the problem of political violence by beating the hell out of people.

Sorry, I shouldn't waste space noting Donald Trump's chronic incoherence, as though it's some sort of heretofore-unrevealed national secret. At any rate, with my redundant deed done, let's move on.

On Wednesday, Trump said that "This type of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today," by which he meant Charlie Kirk's murder; the rhetorical perpetrators, of course, the radical left. 

On Thursday, Trump said "[Kirk] was an advocate of nonviolence [and] that’s the way I’d like to see people respond" — that being in violation of his same-day pledge to beat the hell out of people. (Again, noted incoherence, so again, sorry). Yet Kirk was also an advocate of appalling falsehoods likely to agitate the violent pushback propensities of his truest believers, such as:

"Joe Biden wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently"; "[Democrats' HR 1] would allow the Boston bomber to have a right to vote"; and "The great replacement strategy ... is well under way ... to replace white rural America with something different," while "in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact."

On the day he was killed, Kirk also posted that "If we want things to change, it’s 100% necessary to politicize the senseless [Charlotte, N.C.] murder of Iryna Zarutska because it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her."

If, as professed by both sides, Kirk was politically astute, that, in itself, carries a troubling definition, given what the Trumpist far right honors as political astuteness - i.e., Kirk had to know that his followers would read we must politicize this senseless murder as a call for countervailing senselessness.

If, on the other hand, Kirk was oblivious to the danger his words posed, then so much for all the praise of his tactical mind. But oblivious he could not have been.

At an October 2021 "Critical Racism Tour" event in Idaho, an audience member asked Kirk, “When do we get to use the guns [to battle] corporate and medical fascism? That’s not a joke, I’m not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?"

To that, the website "Charlie Kirk" observed that "Kirk immediately shut down the question and condemned the comments and demanded any cheering from audience members stop." (Italics mine. The site also took care to observe that "Many in the crowd and social media speculated the individual could have been a leftist plant.")

Yet, back to Kirk's post — it was politics that allowed a savage monster to kill — what reasonable conclusion is to be drawn from his exhortation to engage the necessarily unmitigated politics of disallowing savage monsters enabled by savagery-happy Democrats and the amorphous "radical left"?

Considering the kill these people reaction by the attendee et al. at the 2021 event — part of a national tour in which Kirk argued that an academic theory threatens the very survival of Western society, essentially our survival — I submit, as one reasonable conclusion, almost precisely what Trump said:

That Charlie Kirk's was the "type of rhetoric [indirectly] responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today."

Most emphatically, in no way do I also submit that he should have had the hell beaten out of him, as Trump proposes, or shot and killed because it’s "worth it to have ... some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment," as Kirk proposed.

* This piece is cross-posted at Substack. Subscribe to be notified of new posts.