A weird thing happened yesterday afternoon while I was listening to MSNBC’s coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, which morphed into its coverage of the murder of Charlie Kirk. I hadn’t been paying close attention to the discussion, but at one point after it was confirmed that Kirk had died, host Ari Melber closed a panel discussion before a commercial break by saying that Kirk’s career involved “goin’ around to talk to young people about ideas and society. […] He was peacefully engaging people in discourse, and he was shot down and murdered today.”
This is an accurate quote, because it was such a weird way to describe the late professional bullshit artist that I paused the DVR to make sure I got it right. To hear Melber describe him, Kirk was some kind of itinerant Buddhist monk traveling from campus to campus, challenging young people to examine their cherished beliefs and assumptions, or perhaps engaging them in Platonic dialogue to probe difficult concepts and come to an understanding. But then he was cut down as he tried valiantly to bring enlightenment.
WTF??? It was embarrassing. Charlie Kirk “debated” like people on Twitter do: to score cheap points and to DESTROY your opponent by trying to make them look foolish, logic and evidence be damned. His tour slogan, emblazoned on the awning above where he was shot, was “PROVE ME WRONG,” not “Come, let us reason together.”
But it turns out that a lot of people who should know better are talking about Kirk as if he were some kind of serious thinker, not as the low-rent troll he actually was. It’s really weird how rapidly the narrative switched from “Political violence is unacceptable” or even “Like any of us, he had the right to speak without being murdered” to “This victim of (apparently) political violence was a good man cut down in the prime of life, and we should all be more like him.”
Let’s be clear here: Charlie Kirk’s murder was a tragedy for America because it’s likely to lead to more political violence, and because we should be able to resolve political disputes through politics, not killing. But being the victim of a senseless assassination doesn’t ennoble anything the man did in his career of trolling, lying, and pushing hate.