MAGA's mandatory canonization of Charlie Kirk
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| Former Charlestown state Rep. Blake "Flip" Filippi jumps on the bandwagon |
—Aaron
'O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston,
with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Four.’
‘And if the party says that it is not four but five—then
how many?’
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ Winston blubbered. ‘How can I help
seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes
they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It
is not easy to become sane.’
The moment that news of Kirk’s shooting hit the internet, MAGA—its influencers, podcasters, media figures, Republican elected officials, cabinet directors, Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump—immediately began insisting that two and two make five. Their gaslighting around Kirk’s death has been so extensive—and so speedily promulgated—that it’s hard to fully grasp the sheer magnitude of their mendacity.
Here’s a very brief summary of some of the self-evidently false assertions the right has been feverishly proclaiming in recent days:
- Kirk’s
killing was organized by the American left. (The alleged shooter, Tyler
Robinson, is a 22-year-old gamer from a conservative Mormon family who did
not vote in the 2024 election. All evidence suggests he acted alone.)
- Robinson
became indoctrinated by radical leftists while at college. (Robinson
attended Utah Valley University—a relatively conservative school whose
student body identifies as
70% Mormon—for one semester, before enrolling in an electrical engineering
program at Utah’s Dixie Technical College.)
- The
left celebrated Kirk’s killing. (Every significant Democratic elected
official, including all leading progressives, immediately condemned the
shooting and called for an end to political violence.)
- The
left is responsible for most political violence in this country.
(Unequivocally, the vast
majority of extremist mass killings in the U.S. are linked to the
far right; the vast
majority of U.S. political speech praising or inciting violence
comes from rightwing politicians; and it sure wasn’t a Democratic
president that actively instigated a violent attack on the Capitol several
years ago.)
Though all of these lies are shocking and dangerous, the narrative that has been most troubling to me—or at least has most caused me to feel like I may actually be losing my mind—has been the right’s insistence on the universal public canonization of Kirk.
They have endeavored to make his
mourning mandatory, enforcing it through threats—backed by the full power of
the state—against anyone who dares to share truthful observations of who this
man really was. Participate in the hagiographic whitewashing of a dedicated
provocateur’s career, or suffer the consequences. (Unless, of course, you’re
Donald Trump, who had already gone back to obsessing over the White House
ballroom within hours of Kirk’s death, and skipped his
Kennedy Center vigil to go golfing.)
Kirk was an extremely talented communicator and activist whose efficacy in building up the organizing infrastructure of the far right has materially affected American politics.
He was also, by most reasonable
standards, a demagogue whose espousal of Christian
nationalism, platforming of racist attitudes, attacks on free speech,
and support for political
violence made our country a more dangerous and unjust place.
That doesn’t in any way make his murder less vile. Kirk was
a human being, and his life was sacred. It is tragic that he was murdered, as
it is tragic every time a human is murdered—whether it’s a student struck down
in their school by another mass shooting, or a civilian shot in their car by a
police officer, or a child killed in Gaza by an American-made weapon. We live
in a nation where gun deaths are a dime a dozen. For many of us, this is a
desperate moral catastrophe and an eternal shame; for others, it’s just the
price of living in a “free” society.
The effect is that these tragedies are overwhelmingly forgotten within days, hours, or even minutes, as was the case in last week’s shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado, whose victims had the added bad fortune of being killed by a far-right teen the same day as Kirk.
We barely mourn these tragedies anymore,
and—as Kirk himself demonstrated regularly in his posthumous
attacks on victims of police violence like George Floyd—we certainly
do not accept that the circumstances of someone’s death rewrite the facts of
how they chose to live their lives.
But this rewriting of Kirk’s life is being forced on us all
the same. Today, Kirk is being framed as an elder statesman and a free speech
champion, a model of positive civic virtue. Anyone who resists this false
characterization now risks being targeted, not just by MAGA trolls online, but
by literally the most powerful people in the world.
Vice President JD Vance, recording “The Charlie Kirk Show”
directly from the White House, ended the episode by exhorting listeners
to respond to “someone celebrating Charlie’s murder” by “call[ing] their
employer.” Attorney General Pam Bondi proclaimed that
employers “have an obligation to get rid of people, you need to look at people
who are saying horrible things, and they should not be working with you.” She
also announced that the DOJ would be looking to prosecute any businesses that
fail to support the mourning of Kirk: “Businesses cannot discriminate. If you
want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil,
you have to let them do that. We can prosecute them for that.”
These are not idle threats. Already dozens of
Americans—teachers, professors, U.S. military members, even a Washington
Post columnist—have lost their jobs for sharing messages that were
critical of Kirk’s stated beliefs and conduct. And far worse free speech
crackdowns look to be on the horizon. As White House policy advisor Stephen
Miller put it, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we
have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this
government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make
America safe again for the American people.”
It would be bad enough if those of us who are ostensibly
opposed to MAGA authoritarianism were facing this assault on the truth with a
united front. But we are not. Too many Democratic leaders and liberal pundits
have preemptively given in to the far right’s framing. The highest-profile
example of this was New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s
now-infamous essay arguing
that Kirk “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” The Kirk of
Klein’s imagination, a free speech advocate who abhorred political violence,
bears very little resemblance to the actual Charlie Kirk, a “Stop the Steal”
champion who sent “80+
buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president” on January 6th
and encouraged supporters
to bail out the man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.
Equally shocking were decisions by Democratic governors
like Josh
Shapiro and Jared
Polis to copy President Trump in ordering their state’s flags to be
lowered to half-staff in honor of Kirk—a sign of respect and public mourning
that Polis notably did not extend to the victims at Evergreen High School in
his own state. To get a sense of how insane this Democratic folding to the far
right is, try imagining the political response we would see if, God forbid, a
high-profile leftist like Hasan Piker—who, unlike Kirk, has not worked
to actively incite political violence or trafficked in blatant bigotry—were
murdered. I find it difficult to imagine Governors Shapiro or Polis engaging in
any sort of public mourning for Piker; the idea that any GOP governor would fly
their state’s flags at half-staff for him is beyond laughable. It’s
similarly impossible
to imagine the Trumpist right enforcing a period of public mourning
for a murdered liberal figure—which we saw clearly with their response to the
assassination of Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman by a
Trump-supporting anti-abortion extremist in June..
The affirmation of MAGA’s false narratives by high-profile
Democrats and liberals greatly reifies the far right’s goal of severing our
nation’s grasp on the existence of an objective reality. Because let’s be
clear: that is their project. As Winston’s torturer in 1984 put
it, “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to
see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact
that you have got to relearn, Winston.” By mobilizing the power of the state to
force the nation to see Kirk through the eyes of the Republican Party, the
right is using his killing to escalate its war on truth. George Orwell
understood the radical dangerousness of such efforts: “The implied objective of
this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling
clique, controls not only the future, but the past. … This prospect frightens
me much more than bombs.”
We cannot allow ourselves, like Klein, Shapiro, and Polis
did, to help construct that nightmare world. We must fight to hold onto an
understanding of reality that exists outside of MAGA’s dictates. As Winston
insisted to himself in a moment of clarity, “The solid world exists, its laws
do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards
the earth’s center.” Two plus two do not make five. Two plus two make four,
and—regardless of the costs—it’s never been more important for the enemies of
totalitarianism to stand up and say so.
Aaron is a well-known progressive Rhode Island politician. In 2018, he ran against then Lieutenant Governor Dan McKee and came within 2% of upsetting him. Aaron ran with the endorsement of the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee. He also ran in the primary in the 2023 Special Election for RI's First Congressional district, losing to Gabe Amo who went on to win the seat. A dedicated activist, Aaron has organized on a broad range of progressive causes and has never been bashful about speaking his mind. - Will Collette