the one about charlie kirk

i guess

I haven’t been sleeping well. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t write about Charlie Kirk last week. Like, back in Miami I was waking up before dawn, between 5 and 6 a.m., early enough that I was waking the poor dog up instead of the other way around. She’d look at me with her big eyes like man, are you serious? Again? And now that I’m back on the other side of the Atlantic, I cannot fall asleep until a couple hours before dawn. Cortisol levels are, I think we can say this, thriving. My gorgeous little mind simply cannot let my body rest.¹

So that’s one reason why I haven’t felt lucid enough, I guess, to delve into the most recent American assassination drawing national attention.

Maybe it's not a good enough reason? I can also tell you that, to be honest, I don’t know what I have to contribute. What else can be said at this point? Sometimes, when you don't rush to respond to something, all you can really do is add your silence. And I wasn't in a position to rush to opine on this one.

I will say: I’ve historically not enjoyed the habit of wrapping noxious people in the respect they denied others in life, simply because they’ve expired. I never understood it, to be honest. Death alone does not imbue someone with virtue, does it?

There's something slightly wishful in this thinking, perhaps. The idea that as we will all die—sorry, Bryan Johnson—we would like to imagine a world in which our demises bring about a softening of our living actions in the memories of those who remain. Our flaws made smaller, fuzzier, and nuanced in a way they couldn't be in life. There is a certain logic in this.

But ... there are flaws, and then there are flaws, aren't there? I will accept looking past a great writer's affairs, for instance, upon their death, but someone with even a litany of personal indiscretions is not quite on the same page as someone who publicly and proudly espoused transphobic, sexist, racist, and yes, violent views on a troublingly regular basis. Made that their brand, even. Profited off of bigotry. I don't need to tell you, because it's been reported ad nauseam, that his last words, in response to how many mass shootings there'd been in the last ten years, were "counting or not counting gang violence?"

Photo: Olga Fedorova/EPA.

If I died tomorrow, I wouldn't magically become a more patient person and a less fearful communicator by sheer virtue of drawing my last breath. In fact, it would be a bit of a shame, wouldn't it, to waste a perfectly good character improvement on a corpse. Why not work on bettering ourselves while we're still alive, instead of leaving the job to the survivors?

What a goddamn tragedy, for a disingenuous eulogy to be your legacy's only hope. A nearly fatalistic perspective, throwing in the towel before the finish line has even been drawn. A disavowal of self-improvement, from the very people who preach the merits of bootstrap-pulling.

So yeah, a lot of the eulogies I've seen have read, to be frank, insanely to me. It's one thing to be a victim of propaganda, it's quite another to pull the wool over your own eyes.

Moira Donegan

, for The Guardian:

… Kirk opposed the Civil Rights Act, calling it a “huge mistake”. He endorsed the racist so-called “great replacement theory”, in which nefarious actors (usually cast as Jewish people) are seeking to “replace” America’s white population with immigrants, saying it was “well under way every day at our southern border”. On his podcast, he hosted a “slavery apologist” and a man who said that after women “got, you know, the right to vote – after that, it all went downhill”. Kirk himself once said that Black women – he named Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson – “do not have the brain power to be taken seriously”.

What a trip, seeing people cast all of this aside for the sake of a sanitized eulogy. Because death apparently triggers a morality shift upon the deceased. A trip.

That being said:

It is not soft or controversial to say that watching someone be shot dead is a social Bad. Debating amongst ourselves whether someone deserves to be assassinated means that we've reduced the discourse to a dangerous level. I'm stating the obvious, I know that, but: it doesn't bode well for the future. This isn’t me mourning, not really, and maybe I’m in my sentimental era, but what does it do to us, those who are left, to discuss death so blithely and tritely?

To that end, I mostly agree with what Hasan Piker said to Politico a few days ago:

Democracy is supposed to be a pressure valve. So when the democratic institutions are not working to meet the demands of the overall population, there’s a lot of discontent. And then I think people find themselves in the throes of desperation, find themselves so angry that they can’t deal with it, that they end up engaging in adventurism, decentralized violence such as this. And I think that’s where these instances of political violence and instability come from.

In growing numbers, people do not feel represented by those elected to represent us. Institutionally, democracy has not been functioning as it should for a long time. We’ve been seeing that. And we’ve been trained to see the natural victims of that disfunction as the least privileged among us, so that when one of its architects succumbs to disfunction’s consequences, we react with the kind of shock not granted to the usual and expected casualties. That’s a tragedy, too.

The irony, of course, is that part of why democratic institutions are no longer functioning as designed is the work of groups like Kirk's Turning Point USA, one that took advantage of rising inequality and disenfranchisement (largely brought about by ultra-capitalistic measures, but that's neither here nor there, I guess) to garner the youth's support for hateful and exclusionary rhetoric. I mean. Genuinely, I can’t help but call it a calamity. No one said the ouroboros was pleasant.

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1. The funny thing is that last night I watched Weapons (2025) and slept well for the first time in weeks. So that’s at least one win for Zach Cregger.