There is a correct way to respond to the recent murder of Charlie Kirk. One should pray and offer condolences for him and his family. One should denounce unequivocally those who praise or downplay the murder. One should be clear that political murders have no place in America—or in any civilized society—and that those who supported them have made themselves an enemy of civilization and democracy.
That is all fine and good. It is even fine to criticize irresponsible statements made by pundits and politicians who stoked the flames. Even though no specific remark can be blamed for the killing, and it isn’t even yet super clear what the killer’s motive was, we know that irresponsible statements can beget violence. People should be careful with their words, and refrain from saying things that might make people prone to violence. Even though no person other than the shooter can be directly blamed for the shooting, some sentiments make these kinds of events more likely.
But what is not fine is to abandon peaceful settlement of disputes and post vague innuendo in defense of violence. Horrifyingly, that has been the response of a dispiritingly large fraction of the main figures on the American right—declaring that after Kirk’s death, the time for peaceful settlement of disputes is over, and that this means war. For example:
Nancy Mace, in perhaps the least surprising development conceivable, immediately proceeded to blame Democrats and declared “It sounds like the shooter was a tranny, or pro-tranny.” This despite the fact that at the time there was no evidence the shooter was trans and the shooter isn’t trans. Really uniting Nancy Mace’s three chief loves: being pointlessly cruel to trans people, lying, and engaging in histrionic stunts for attention. Similarly, Matt Walsh declared:
Charlie tried to have conversations with you on the Left, and you killed him for it. You're killing us in our churches. You tried to kill our President. You celebrate Charlie's death. It's time for good to fight back against evil.
This is the kind of illogic that one only engages in when attempting to vilify an entire group of people. Every mainstream Democratic figure has condemned the shooting. One news anchor made an offensive statement along the lines of “he asked for it with divisive rhetoric,” and was promptly fired and denounced by the entire internet. Influential left-wing pundits have been in tears over the killing. It can’t be that every Democrat inherits blame for anything a Democrat ever did. This is the kind of collective blame that conservatives are supposed to be against—the kind that is utterly antithetical to a free society. As Richard Hanania rightly notes “The Left” Did Not Kill Charlie Kirk.””
If one applied similar logic, Democratic politicians could make similar charges of Republicans—saying “you tried to kill us,” and then mentioning the disproportionately large share of right-wing political violence. This is not what we do in America. We do not vilify an entire group, claiming we need to go to war against them because peaceful speech is not enough, based on the actions of fewer than one in ten million of its members. And the Trump shooter doesn’t even seem like he was a Democrat!
You cannot complain that the Democrats have been irresponsible with their speech—too eager to inflame and say things that direct people towards violence—and then declare “I’m ready for civil war,” or “the Democratic party must be classified as a domestic terrorist organization.” You cannot blame Democrats for saying things that make violence more likely and then call for bloodshed in the streets.
In the wake of Kirk’s shooting, influential left-wing figures have been vastly more responsible than influential right-wing figures. Among prominent left-wingers, condemnation has been near universal. On the right, irresponsible statements have been the norm. Dinesh D’Souza, for instance, declared “I’d like to know the names of the professors who radicalized this young man. I wonder if they too could be charged with abetting this political assassination.” This in spite of the fact that:
There’s no evidence he was radicalized by any professors.
He dropped out of college after one semester.
His writings on the bullet seemed to indicate that he spent time in very online memey communities.
His one semester of school was online school at a school in Utah!
D’Souza’s calling for finding the names of private citizens and prosecuting them despite not a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing. This is despicable! It has no place in America! We are a society of rules and principles, not of mob justice, and we must not give up on our principles because we are angry.
Matt Forney even declared that Kirk being killed is “the American Reichstag fire.” While I am not a PR expert, I would have thought that comparing yourself to Hitler is typically ill-advised. The first-rule of using a tragedy as your own personal Reichstag fire: don’t compare the tragedy to the Reichstag fire!
Similarly disturbing is all the misinformation that has been spread across the internet by amateur internet sleuths possessing no relevant information. A guy next to Charlie Kirk tipped his hat right before the shooting occurred. People all across the internet speculated that this was a hand signal to perform the shooting and declared that we should look into the guy. Now, this was very stupid:
Why would he need a hand signal for the shooting? There was no specific reason it needed to be done at any specific time.
The guy, as it turned out, was Frank Turek—an influential Christian apologist and friend of Charlie Kirk. He was obviously not involved.
Thus, an innocent man was smeared and investigated by large numbers of people because some random sleuths on the internet were suspicious that he moved his hat. Other instances of amateur detective work have been even more pernicious. A totally innocent girl has been accused of celebrating the murder based on a photoshopped image. Her life will likely be turned upside down because some Twitter psychopath wanted to drive engagement. Sick stuff!
Another innocent person called Skye Valadez was accused of being the shooter when 4chan sleuths thought the two looked similar (Valadez had also allegedly made a song, a month ago, called Charlie Kirk dead at 31). So another person was accused of being the murderer and likely had their life seriously disrupted because people on the internet couldn’t wait until more information came in. Other people who share the name of the shooter have been falsely accused of being the shooter. Still others have falsely claimed he was a DSA member, and photos of another random unrelated guy have been spread across the internet.
This is evil! We should wait for information to come out before coming to conclusions. False accusations like this ruin lives, and people on the internet don’t have the same information that official sources do. You don’t get to “just ask questions” with the lives of random internet strangers.
It’s psychologically understandable why people have reacted badly. Many of them just had their friend be murdered in cold blood, and heard people praise it. Such a thing can lead to unhinged responses. But even though one can understand such reactions, they are absolutely counterproductive and unacceptable.
Not everyone has reacted badly. Surprisingly enough, I think Nick Fuentes had a mostly decent response. So did Ben Shapiro. But a dispiritingly large number of people have either explicitly endorsed violence or made veiled and unclear calls to “fight back” in a way that is not supposed to involve debate. These people are behaving recklessly, pouring fuel on an already raging fire, and should cease immediately.
Debate was Charlie Kirk’s big thing. He thought arguments were the way to settle disagreements. To turn your back on liberalism, individualism, and peaceful dispute settlement in the wake of Kirk’s horrific murder doesn’t just raise the probability of horrible violence breaking out, but in a deep way, it dishonors Kirk’s memory. We owe him—and the world—better than to turn our back on the peaceful settlement of disputes that he stood for.
“There’s no evidence he was radicalized by any professors.
He dropped out of college after one semester.
His writings on the bullet seemed to indicate that he spent time in very online memey communities.
His one semester of school was online school at a school in Utah!”
Another thing to add here is that for the one semester that he did spend in college, he was studying engineering. Engineering isn’t left-coded the way that, say, gender studies or cultural studies are, and as far as I know it is one of the few fields of academia that conservatives actually approve of (although maybe that’s changed in the last few years).
It was not Frank Turek. I saw a post on YT from his org, CrossExamined, saying he was not the man in the video. It definitely looked like him, so easy mistake to make.