How to Canonize a White Supremacist

Obviously, I have to start this week talking about another senseless act of gun violence. On Wednesday, an unidentified teenager shot two of his classmates^[4] at Evergreen High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. The gunman then turned the weapon—which authorities describe as a revolver—on himself, and took his own life. Both of his victims remain in the hospital, one in critical condition. 

School shootings have become such a consistent feature of our society that we react to them almost casually. Only the family and friends of those involved mourn the victims. Flags are not lowered to half-mast out of respect for innocent young lives taken in places of learning and education. Politicians do not address the tragedies with compelling ideas to fix the problem. Presidents do not address the nation from the oval office to offer their plan for getting guns out of schools and keeping our children safe. 

Unlike some people, I do not think the constant drumbeat of death and violence at our nation’s schools is an acceptable price to pay for the freedom to own a private arsenal. I don’t think the Second Amendment should be interpreted as a murder-suicide pact. 

Every life lost to gun violence is a preventable tragedy. Our country refuses to prevent it. These shootings are not inevitable. We have chosen to live this way, under the oppressive threat of gun violence. And our choices are terrible. 

The Bad and the Ugly

• Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered^[5] while giving a speech in Utah. His last words^[6] were “counting or not counting gang violence” as he responded to a shouted question about the number of mass shootings. He is survived by a wife and two children. My condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones. 
• Late Thursday night, Kirk’s alleged assailant was taken into custody. We do not yet know the shooter’s motives, but that has not stopped white-wing media from going into overdrive^[7] with calls to go to “war” with the left. 
• President Donald Trump responded to the death of his political ally in the only way he knows how: with threats^[8] and promises of retribution against his political enemies. 
• The purging of media voices unwilling to venerate the hateful, racist career of Kirk has already begun. MSNBC fired^[9] analyst Matthew Dowd, who said in response to the shooting: “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” Telling the truth on television is never the smart career move. 
• Meanwhile, HBCUs in the state of Virginia were forced to cancel classes^[10] after they received a number of credible threats. To recap, a white man was murdered by another white man^[11] for reasons we don’t yet know, but somehow that means Black people have to catch hell. 

Inspired Takes

The Nation’s Joan Walsh refuses to forget^[12] who Charlie Kirk really was, and what he really stood for. This is the only thing I’m going to link to in this space this week. Not just because it’s so well written, but also because it refuses to accept the white-wing sanewashing of Kirk’s career. The fact that The Nation published this piece, as opposed to, I don’t know, firing Joan Walsh for having the power to remember things that have actually happened, is a pretty good example of why I work here, and not at other places. 

Worst Argument of the Week

The internet is awash in bad takes about Charlie Kirk right now, but there is one man who decided to use the ingredients of every bad take and dissolve them into a slop that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with mainstream, white media in this moment. That man is Ezra Klein. His piece, unconscionably titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics The Right Way,”^[13] goes beyond the mere hagiography of a guy whose literal last words were a racial insult to achieve a level of intellectual detachment from reality that I believe can only be reached by a white man in America.

Klein writes: “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” I want people to pay attention to Klein’s word choices here, because nearly every one of them is covered in white supremacist apologia shit. A close read: 

• “Dislike”: You see, for a white man like Ezra, politics and political discourse is a matter of taste. Klein no doubt disliked when Kirk said that gay people should be stoned to death, but to him that’s merely a matter of preference. For other people—say, for instance, the gay people who would have been stoned to death had Kirk been more effective in his political goals—Kirk was not merely a distasteful provocateur, his ideology was a threat to their very existence. Whether or not an entire class of people have a right to exist is not a game to some of us, as it is to Ezra. 
• “The following statement is still true”: I feel like when a guy prefaces a statement with something to the effect of “what I’m about to say is true,” they’re about to lie.
• “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way”: First of all, “exactly the right way” is not a fact that can be shown to be “true.” It’s a value judgement. And value judgements can be questioned no matter how much the white man making them stomps around and claims his judgements are facts. When we look at what values Klein supports through the avatar of Kirk, we see that Kirk was practicing the most divisive form of politics possible. Kirk’s goals were to outrage, not enrich. He practiced the politics of bullying and threatening. He called empathy a “made up word” and said that Black women lacked the “processing power” of their white counterparts. Did Kirk have a right to say these things? Absolutely. Should he have been killed for practicing politics in the way that he did? Absolutely not. But to say that practicing politics in his way was “exactly right” is, frankly, a disgusting statement from Mr. Klein. I don’t even think there is one, “exactly right” way to practice politics, but if there is, I for sure don’t think the one true way is to racially denigrate Black people and threaten the existence of the LGBTQ community. I want people who practice politics to be better than Charlie Kirk. And Ezra Klein. 

Klein’s article goes on to condemn political violence. I agree with that, of course. But condemning political violence as an op-ed columnist is a little bit like condemning the French Revolution when you’re a member of the aristocracy. It is in our best interests to condemn the violent murder of public figures, because we all know we might be next. That doesn’t make us empathetic or graceful or more enlightened than the least common denominator on social media, it makes us self-interested.

Moreover,  it is entirely possible to condemn political violence and mourn the victims of political violence without lauding the political influence of the victims of the violence. Klein fails that should-be-basic test. 

Charlie Kirk represented the very worst American political discourse had to offer, and I wish he were still alive so I could tell that to him, to his face, over and over again. I wish he lived long enough to see everything that he worked to achieve crumble all around him.  

You see what I did there, Ezra? It’s really not hard. 

What I Wrote

Before the shooting, the biggest story in America was the Supreme Court’s authorization of racial profiling against Latinos. I wrote about it here^[15]. After the white media is done celebrating their martyred mascot of racism and bigotry, I hope we can resume our conversation about how the rest of us are forced to live in this white supremacist state. 

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Sorry folks, I don’t have it in me this week. It’s all chaos, all the time, and even my incredible powers of self-distraction feel a little deflated right now. The freaking Yankees held a moment of silence to honor a man whose entire life was dedicated to denigrating people like me and people I care about, but somehow in death that man is a true Yankee? I’ve never been more happy to be a Mets fan in all of my life. 

All I can do is try to weather the storm. Violent whites have their blood up, and that usually means incredibly bad things for people like me. I’ve got public appearances that I probably need to cancel. I hope to survive this by staying as far away from white folks as I possibly can until their fever breaks. 

More from The Nation

The House just approved $892.6 billion in military spending—continuing the march toward $1 trillion defense budgets.

John Nichols^[20]

Federal agents are essentially acting as paramilitaries to fulfill the administration’s violent fantasies. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, they will be empowered.

Column / Sasha Abramsky^[21][22]

The unsung hero of Mamdani’s campaign is its field operation. It may make him mayor of New York City.

Feature / Hadas Thier^[23][24]

In their social circle, Trump and Epstein were so identified as predators that the pair’s trafficking of young women would be instantly recognized as fodder for a joke.

Chris Lehmann^[25]