I’ve written three things related to the Charlie Kirk assassination so far.
The first was a condemnation of the murder and anyone cheering it — something I felt compelled to do for both moral and practical reasons, even though very few, statistically, were celebrating, and no one of prominence on the left was.
The second was a critique of those in the MAGA-verse insisting that somehow it is we on the left who need to tone down our political rhetoric, even as the right has demonized their enemies for years, none more so than their hero, Donald Trump, and, frankly, Kirk himself.
The third was a response to those who think Kirk’s love of debating on college campuses was an indication of his own openness to dialogue and an antidote to political violence, even though neither claim is valid.
Interestingly, many who only saw the first of these seemed confused by my insistence that Kirk had a long history of racist, misogynistic, and other hateful rhetoric. I hadn’t included links to such material in the first essay, although I did in the two follow-ups. As such, many people seemed to think I was unfairly smearing the dead.
These weren’t rabid Kirk fans, to be sure. Those folks had far harsher things to say to me, and they know full well — and agree with — the hateful messages Kirk often spoke into the world. Instead, these were just average everyday people who were, like most Americans, shocked by the horrific act that we could all see, up close, on our social media feeds.
When the first person accused me of making up these “unjustified slanders” against Kirk, I was confused. How could you not know that Kirk had spent hours each day on his podcast saying truly hateful and cruel things about Black women, LGBTQ folks, Muslims, and immigrants of color?
How could you not know of his soft-pedaling of slavery, his claims that Black people were better off under segregation, and that the civil rights movement had been wrongheaded, with its signature achievement, the Civil Rights Act, having been a mistake?
How could you not know that he had called for Joe Biden to be executed?
That stuff is one Google search away.
And it’s not as if this is just the left-wing spin on otherwise innocuous comments, which we’ve taken out of context. They are all things you can see him saying with his full chest, proudly and without the slightest hesitation.
At first, I chalked it up to the singular ignorance of one solitary person. After all, there are people out there on the low-information side of things, and perhaps that’s all it was.
But then it happened again. And again. And again.
Not people arguing from a discernible right-wing political perspective, but rather, people who hadn’t really known much about Kirk before his death, but who were now convinced that this open-minded, Christian “proponent of respectful dialogue” had been felled by someone who despised political debate, choosing to end Kirk’s life with a bullet rather than engage from the microphone as others were doing when he died.
And then I went on Facebook and came across the following. The individual who posted it was not someone I knew, but it came across my feed because it had been commented on by one of my followers.
Upon reading it, I realized that the naïveté appearing in my own e-mail inbox was hardly unique. Here’s what it said:
One thing that has become really clear since yesterday is that we live in at least two different realities. Talking to a friend who only knew Charlie as a Christian motivational speaker because that’s all that ever came across her feed. Showed me videos I’ve never seen before of him saying perfectly reasonable and empowering things.
I showed her videos she’d never seen before of his racism, misogyny, homophobia, and advocating for violence against specific groups of people…She was horrified by a number of things that he said, but she had never seen or heard them before, the same as I had never seen or heard the generalized clips of him sounding like a perfectly nice, loving man and father.
The person who posted this went on to say that although none of the clips her friend shared with her, in which Kirk was talking about finding your purpose and doing good in the world, had changed her mind about who Kirk had been, she nonetheless found the exchange instructive.
And I agree.
The fact that reasonable and intelligent people might not know what many of us know often doesn’t occur to us.
We figure everyone has seen and heard what we’ve seen and heard from someone like Kirk, which means if you liked him or mourn him now, you must be someone who endorses all of those hateful and odious views for which he was known (at least by us).
But the truth is, millions of people live in a FOX News bubble, or worse, a bubble of very little news consumption at all.
We’d probably be shocked — those of us who obsess over political and social issues — how removed from that world many of our country-mates are, or how insulated millions are from the kinds of things we see on our social media, because theirs is primarily filled with cat pictures, images of whatever they just ate for lunch, or a photo album of their latest family vacation.
Remembering that most folks aren’t nearly as keyed in as you think they are, or perhaps should be, is vital, if you hope to reach people or build support for the things you believe in.
If we assume everyone knows the deal, not just about Kirk but about systemic racism, the corruption of wealthy elites, the absurdity of our health care system compared to others around the world, or the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law, then the only possible conclusion we can reach is that if they aren’t in the streets with us protesting these things or raising their voices against them, they must be OK with whatever is happening.
Once we decide that, however, we give up on millions of people whom we assume have chosen to throw their lot in with fascists and racists and sexists and nativists who care nothing for the poor, actively support genocide in Gaza, and who carry all the same political toxicities in their brains that Charlie Kirk held firmly in his.
But this is dangerous and wrong.
First, because it unfairly presumes uninformed people to be consciously evil just because they aren’t (as of now) seeing things the way we do.
Second, because it constricts our willingness to struggle with people, to inform them, to patiently show them the things we’ve seen, and to give them time to integrate that learning into their worldviews. We end up shaming them for not getting it, or when they finally do and the lightbulb goes on, we attack them for not seeing things sooner.
Seriously, assholes did things like this all the time during the racial justice uprising after the murder of George Floyd.
There were legions of people — primarily young Tumblr and Insta-radicals, but also some writers on this platform — who saw millions of white people joining in solidarity with Black people, and then decided that the most helpful thing they could say in that moment was:
“Oh, so now y’all get it? But where were you for the last 400 years?”
And most of the time, it was other white people shaming white people that way: wannabe leftists performing their own radicalism, and shaming people on Friday for not knowing some shit that their ass had just learned on Monday.
Real genius.
We need to think seriously about what it means to live in a world where we can choose our own reality by the media we consume (and don’t), and the social media following we curate (or don’t).
And of course, we have to consider the impact of the algorithms that profit-seeking companies use to keep us hooked, our eyeballs fixed on their pages, ingesting whatever rage-bait they feed us, or whatever utterly apolitical content gets pushed our way because that’s what we normally consume.
Because what all that means is that we can reside in the same country, the same state, the same city or town — hell, live on the same block, maybe even next door to one another — and operate in entirely different universes of knowledge and awareness.
That should be humbling.
After all, if and when we actually do know some things, it’s hard to be haughty about our wisdom when we only came about it thanks to the people we know, the things we were taught, or the stuff that someone else shared with us.
Because for all of us, there was a before time. A time before we understood what we think we know about the world, about politics, about this issue or that one.
About Charlie Kirk.
And if you had never seen the vile things Kirk said about others, you might also be confused by the unwillingness of some to feel as mournful as you do about it. You might accuse those who point out the poison he contributed to our political system of being hate-filled, or spreading “fake news.”
This all has implications for how we organize around a wide range of issues.
We can’t assume that white people all know about the history and impact of white supremacy and simply choose not to challenge it, or actively choose to perpetuate it. That history has not been taught to us.
We can’t assume that men all know about systems of misogyny and patriarchy, and the damage they do, but simply choose to ignore them or actively support them.
That too hasn’t been taught to us.
We can’t assume that Jews are all perfectly aware of the moral crimes of the state of Israel and thus, by not speaking out more clearly about Gaza, are showing themselves to be willing genocidists.
As a Jew, I can tell you, pretty much none of us were exposed to Zionism-critical perspectives growing up — not in our homes or in Hebrew School or anywhere else — and as such, no one should be surprised when some among us have a hard time swallowing the facts that others find so obvious.
We have to extend more grace to people: not to the bigots, but to the everyday folks who get up, go to work, try to do right by others, raise their kids, and live a decent life.
This means we have to allow that they might not see what we see.
And then we have to be kind enough to share those things with them, without contempt, acrimony, shame, or the aggravating snark that is the hallmark of our narcissistic culture.
Because at the end of the day, we can’t win the things we’re fighting for with only the people we have on our side already. The right knows this. Charlie Kirk knew this. Indeed, he even admitted once that there were things his own side believed in that most Americans weren’t down with.
Yet.
And he sought to change that.
For the worse, of course, but the point remains.
It’s a lesson we could learn from him.
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Previously Published on Medium
Gage Skidmore on Flickr under CC License
