The horrific Charlie Kirk murder immediately found the hard Right setting up this youthful conservative agitator as a martyr comparable to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The instant hagiography was accompanied by very loud braying for retaliation, even for retaliation against anyone who dared to ask whether Kirk was, in fact, an inspiring figure and positive change agent at the level of Dr. King.
This blood-for-blood clamoring began well before the shooter was apprehended and before it could be known whether the assassin was politically motivated. Even here where I live in normally tranquil Rhode Island, a retaliatory bomb threat was directed against the Democratic leaders of our state senate just hours after the Kirk shooting.
It concerns me, and it should concern all of us, that nearly all major media outlets went right along with the false idea that violence and threats of violence from the Left are every bit as dangerous as violence and threats from the Right. That simply is not true. Yes, there have been ghastly attacks against conservative leaders in recent years, including attempts on the life of President Trump.
But progressives in general do not spew hate or demonize whole groups of people; they do not single out individuals for attack at anything close to the level of vituperation and threat coming from the Right. There is nothing remotely close to symmetry between what has long been a locked-and-loaded Right and a fragmented and demoralized Left that broadly eschews and deeply abhors hate speech and violence. To my knowledge there were no armed rioters storming the United States Capitol when Donald Trump was sworn into office for a second term.
Although he is being lauded now as someone who respected all viewpoints and welcomed honest debate, Kirk was a demonizer who called for the elimination of political and cultural enemies. He described the Bible’s Levitical or Holiness Code as “God’s perfect law” in relation to queer people (a code that requires death for people committing homosexual acts); he strongly supported the Great Replacement theory, which holds that minorities are crowding out the white people who should forever be in charge; Kirk also claimed that Jewish financiers were ruining U.S. higher education and supporting the influx of illegal aliens; he poured out his contempt for Black people and singled out Black women for special scorn, making it clear that they could not be trusted to hold positions of authority.
And for someone who is now being praised as a champion of free speech on campuses, it should not be forgotten that Charlie Kirk created a Professor Watchlist, which still exists and invites the silencing and punishment of academics who deviate from accepted verities. Kirk would never say the word “Palestine”; in his campus appearances, which were more like hate rallies than debates, he always used the Zionist label “Judea and Samaria” in reference to the West Bank of the Jordan River.
Kirk’s highly effective organizing vehicle was called Turning Point USA. And because his story is also necessarily a story about white nationalist Christianity, I will close by inviting us to think about when the actual fatal turning point took place within American Christianity. Theologicallyconservative Christianity in this land is as old as the hills, needless to say. But the intense organizing for public power—the overt and effective politicization of the faithful—began toward the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s.
Markers of what was to come included James Dobson’s founding of the Family Research Council in 1977 and both Jerry Falwell’s launch of the so-called Moral Majority in 1979 and also the conservative coup within the Southern Baptist Convention that took place during that same year.
The rise of a visible and vocal gay rights movement, along with the appearance of Black people within more diverse schools and workplaces and in public office, is what first lit the fuse of fear and resentment among conservative white Christians.
Very soon after, opportunistic politicians like Ronald Reagan—and corporate types who were not bothered in the least by sexual difference—were happy to welcome the newly mobilized conservative white Christians into a broad-based and well-financed and years-long project aimed at stopping the clock on culture change while also slashing taxes, canceling regulations, and ensuring the perpetual rule of wealth.
So here now is the great irony: according to all reports, Charlie Kirk’s most ardent mourners in this moment are young white men who are worried about where they stand in life and whether they can ever earn enough to support a family. But the right-wing Christian movement that greatly helped to boost Kirk’s brand of resentment is the very same force that helped to create the insecurity and precarity in the first place.
I do not rejoice in this irony, and I take no satisfaction at all from the trials and challenges facing these young men. I hope and pray for a brighter future for them and for us all. And I long for an actualturning point in this vitriolic and insanely violent culture: a turning point that will finally bring us out on the other side.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
