Charlie Kirk: A Social Media Reflection

While a gun is powerful and bullets are fast, they lack the ability to reach backward through time and retroactively turn Charlie Kirk into a saint. I’m not going to hunt down the quotes I posted earlier, but there are plenty of racist and bigoted comments that he has publicly spouted. It’s a known, easily verifiable fact. He woke up each morning and doubled down on those bigoted beliefs, enriching himself by playing to those who felt similarly and convincing those on the fence.

“Charlie was a great debater,” you say. Yes, I am sure the person with full-time staff who does this all day is good at debate. But debate skill does not equal truth. Part of debate practice involves arguing positions that are opposite your own beliefs. Furthermore, he used his considerable debate skills by beating up 19-year-old, hungover kids and then doing victory laps like he just saved America. That some of these subjects need debate at all is borderline offensive. Do we really need to debate white superiority and how inferior people are taking their jobs every time somebody makes that claim? Do we have to re-litigate women’s equality each time someone decides to read a bible verse? Do we owe everyone who says the sun revolves around the earth a full, good-faith scientific rebuttal? No.

Now to the religion part. I have heard many of you refer to him as a “brother in christ” or a “soldier in christ,” as if his talk about there being a conspiracy to replace white people was, at worst, a minor faux pas in the larger picture. I cannot begin to express how disappointing that is to hear from you. It’s hard to describe, but in a lot of ways, that’s even worse than the David Duke KKK racism or the people who want to put women back in the kitchen. At least those people actually believe something, however wrong it may be.

You’re just choosing to not care about hate if it does not inconvenience you personally. This attitude is the reason why modern Christianity is largely a dumpster fire.

As far as Charlie Kirk being assassinated, that’s abhorrent. He has kids around the same age as my daughter and it is tragic that they will not get to have their father as they grow up. Barring a few extreme examples, most people believe this and it’s easily provable if you care to pay attention. First, nearly every public figure on the left has denounced this violence. As far as the average citizen: remember when the United Healthcare CEO was shot and Luigi became a cult figure for a few weeks? People made joke posts about how Luigi was hanging with them that day and couldn’t possibly have committed the shooting.

That did not happen here.

People expressed their opinion that CK was not a good guy, and primarily used his own words against him. What manner of mental gymnastics must you perform to believe it’s inappropriate to use someone’s literal words against them when they made a living from broadcasting those words? Yet that’s what’s happening.

People are foaming at the mouth, threatening civil war, and collecting lists of “thought crime” offenders because people dare question the narrative of “the person who told Taylor Swift to submit to her future husband is an all-around swell guy and American hero.” Especially in an era when so many other children and politicians are being thoughtlessly murdered. Charlie Kirk is neither a special case nor better than them.

And finally, I’ll say that Kirk was not a cartoon villain. Very few of us are. I’ve read moving anecdotes of how he cared for and helped people. I believe every one of those stories as true. And while I feel people shouldn’t be forever judged by their worst moment in isolation, it is fair to judge them by the bottom 50% of what they do day in and day out. To take it to an absurd extreme to make the point: nobody discusses the children’s birthday parties that John Wayne Gacy made magical.