Charlie Kirk: Crocodile Tears

I am not sure I knew of the existence of Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated in Utah last Wednesday. I saw a tweet from a Muslim account on Twitter which drew attention to his well-known (in the US maybe) stance on gun control, that a few gun-related deaths were worth it to keep Americans’ Second Amendment rights. He was killed by a sniper, believed to be a young man from a conservative Mormon family in southern Utah, as he held court under a marquee bearing his slogan “Prove Me Wrong!”. In the immediate aftermath, Trump and his supporters rushed to blame the “Radical Left”, trans activists and even the Democratic party for the murder, while mainstream Democrat politicians published videos condemning the killing. I saw plenty of content, however, which while not condoning the murder made no secret that they believed Kirk’s death was no tragedy, was nothing to mourn, or was a comeuppance for his pro-gun views. Meanwhile there are also people proclaiming themselves ‘grief-stricken’ by the killing and condemning anyone who does not share their grief, accusing them of condoning murder, or of “virtue signalling” while actually betraying a vicious streak.

Last Thursday, the day after Kirk’s murder, a British lawyer on YouTube calling himself the Black Belt Barrister uploaded a video in which he proclaimed, “regardless of your own personal views, I’m sure you all share a sense of shock, horror and for many of you, even if you didn’t know them, a profound sense of grief for the cowardly and unlawful killings of Charlie Kirk and, of course, Iryna Zarutska”. Iryna Zarutska was a Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death on a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina; racists have posted content alleging that the killing was part of a “race war”, drawing attention to the commuters who failed to act until it was too late (having seen the video, it does not appear that she was in danger of dying until she actually collapsed — she did not appear to be bleeding heavily, for example — and the killer was still in the carriage, armed). The two killings were entirely unconnected, the latter with no political motive, just a random killing by a man with a history of severe mental illness, and thousands of miles apart. He then goes on to accuse people who rail against the far right, racists etc., and accuse them of fostering hatred which leads to incidents like the murder of Charlie Kirk. All this before anything was known about who shot him. As for the reaction to Iryna Zarutska’s murder, the only vile or hateful comments I could see were those that implied that she was killed because the killer was Black and she was white, and that the others in the carriage (again mostly Black) did not spring to her aid for the same reason. There were comments like “don’t take your eyes off these people” as if every Black person was a madman looking to stab the next white person they see. All nonsensical, demented, racist drivel.

But I’m not grief-stricken about Kirk’s death. Not only because I didn’t know him, but also because he actually was a hateful, racist misogynist who also stood in the way of protecting children from violence. His last words, in response to a question from the audience about mass shootings in the US, were “counting or not counting gang violence?”: he was trying to divert the conversation onto Black-on-Black crime, which is mostly irrelevant to the matter of US mass shootings. His supporters want us to be empathetic to his wife and children, but he shows none to families who have lost loved ones, including children, to mass shootings. I am never going to be especially sad about the loss of a person like that. Gun control actually would not have saved him because the gun control being advocated in the USA relates to automatic or assault weapons, which does not appear to be what was used here, and better background checks and safety devices to prevent accidental discharge. Even in the UK, while we have had no school massacres since Dunblane in 1996, we have had a mass shooting by a sniper (the west Cumbria shootings of 2010). However, this was still a man who thought others’ right to their lives — schoolchildren and teachers — were worth much less than his own right to an automatic firearm capable of killing multiple people in seconds. While we may agree that his murder was wrong and that the killer should be punished, it stands to reason that when a person with such contempt for others’ lives loses his own, many people will not be especially aggrieved.

There has also been a chorus of disapproval at the mere use of words like racist and bigot to describe people who espouse racist and bigoted views. We are being told it creates the climate of hatred that leads to such acts as Charlie Kirk’s murder. History in fact shows that racism leads to violence to an extent that accusations of racism simply do not. With the exception of Cambodia, every genocide in recent times has been motivated principally by racism, as have countless other systems of oppression: chattel slavery, segregation, Apartheid. This is not to say that no injustice ever results from false accusations; we only have to look at the history of the Labour Party since 2015 to see that. But in this country at least, nobody died as a result of those false accusations of antisemitism (arguably it contributed to the Gaza genocide by making speaking out against it costly, especially in the first year or so, but nobody was killed because they were called antisemitic, even if they were expelled from a political party or even lost their job). Racism kills, both through direct violence and through the ways prejudice works its way into our police, education and health systems (deaths in custody, higher maternal mortality rates, etc) among other things. Many of the people coming out with this rhetoric are the same people who have been moaning about “cancel culture” for the past decade while enjoying columns in major newspapers, ample time in the broadcast media, ample representation in national and regional legislatures and so on; Kirk himself ran a “professor watch” website, ‘exposing’ academics he disagreed with, while his allies are now trying to drum people out of jobs for failing to manifest the required grief over his death, or repeating his less savoury opinions. These include a female primary school teacher who repeated his views about guns, a stance which results in people like her dying or seeing their pupils killed by young embittered men with guns no civilian can get hold of anywhere else, whose own congress representative joined the campaign to get her fired.

We’ve had nearly two years of watching a genocide on social media, with the most appalling acts of depravity and cruelty plain to see, obviously innocent people shot dead for no reason, doctors, nurses and ambulance staff murdered as they do their job (or the rest of their families killed while they work), stories from visiting medics of repeatedly seeing children shot in the head by snipers, journalists murdered and then slandered by their killers; some of those lecturing or trying to silence us have been “standing with Israel” all this time, openly excusing or justifying it, or even celebrating it and mocking the dead and those who fought heroically to save them — as Kirk himself is on video doing. These include the ‘moderate’ Democrats now publicly commiserating with the Trumpists and falling over themselves to distance themselves from political violence when it’s on American soil. These people have had the past two years to demonstrate the decorum they expect from us when a public figure is murdered; they did not care to do so then but they expect us to now. So, there will be no crocodile tears here. He was not killed by one of ours, but was an enemy of ours and had contempt for us. His death is no great loss and will not be mourned.