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The failed martyrdom of a professional provocateur and what it says [1]

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Date: 2025-09-13

I have a short take which I thought I’d pass on FWIW. With the arrest of a suspect in the shooting of Charlie Kirk, the right wing narrative about who the likely killer was has fallen apart. It appears it was not some angry left wing trans lunatic after all. So here we are.

Here’s a question that should be asked. Why were so many prepared to believe Kirk’s killer was someone from the Left? It’s because those on the Right have been deliberately dehumanizing them for decades. They need scapegoats and enemies to excuse their failures and justify their crimes. They want to play the victim while they do this so they can claim they are acting in self defense. This is one of the fundamental means by which authoritarian movements operate. Kirk was a professional provocateur who knew exactly what he was doing. There’s an ironic justice in that Kirk fell victim to the calculated hatred he was exploiting and nurturing. Watch how quickly he fades from the news now that it’s been revealed his killer came from the Right. It’s going to be a lot harder to market him as a martyr to the cause - although there will be plenty of conspiracy theories to ‘explain’ away the ugly truth of the matter.

This is a comment I submitted at the Paper of Record. I figured I would post it here since I don’t know if they’ll accept it, or more likely wait hours before approving it.

It was on a discussion by some of their opinion columnists, The ‘Fork in the Road’ After Charlie Kirk’s Death.

Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Cottle, and David French are trying to make sense of what happened. Of the three of them, I think Bouie gets to the heart of the matter.

…I also think that some of the remembrance of Kirk is edging in the hagiography, and it seems that people are forgetting — if they ever knew — the kind of work that Kirk did: which was the maintenance of watch lists for professors who violated conservative orthodoxy, which was demands for the state suppression of his political opponents, which was spreading really awful stuff about racial and gender minorities. And so, I’ve also been somewhat troubled by the eulogizing of Kirk as a champion for discourse and dialogue, because I don’t think that stuff constitutes the kind of discourse and dialogue we want to see in our country. I guess I want people to hold two ideas in mind: that this was a tragedy, but that doesn’t somehow mean we should airbrush Kirk’s legacy.

Bouie gets it. He makes more good points in the rest of the conversation.

I would suggest that although Kirk’s death was a tragedy, there’s a larger tragedy in that what Kirk was doing has become so normalized, the President of the United States, the Republican Party, and right wing media can continue doing it.

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