I missed Charlie Kirk's whole career. I had barely heard of Turning Point USA: never been retained by a client for advice about them. I am not sure why: Kirk founded his own professor doxing site as a TPUSA project, in which profiles quoting a professor calling Trump a Nazi, for example, also include contact information for the schools so the reader can try to get the professor fired.
This very short essay is not really about Charlie Kirk. It was going to be. I was going to use as a hook that, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, he Tweeted "Your body--my choice"; but I got on the Internet and verified in five minutes that he didn't. I check these things. Anyway, that essay would have been dull Whataboutism.
I am more interested in the use Donald Trump is making of dead Charlie Kirk.
The man who shot Kirk stole what might well have been a half century of life from him, the opportunity to cherish his family, to watch his children grow up. Also possible decades of getting people fired from jobs, and harassing and frightening those less powerful than himself. But he might also, I suppose, have had a change of heart. He didn't get the chance. Murder is a theft of agency.
Murder, by the way, also fails the Kantian imperative, of behaving as we would want everyone else to. The killer modelled a world in which bullets would be flying in every direction, at every sort of person that someone really disliked. Actually the world many of us are afraid we live in now, or will by next year.
I have been at work for two full years now defending the most marginalized, imperilled people in America, the students and faculty who are the targets of doxing, who are facing suspension, expulsion, and termination for expressions like "free Palestine" or use of words like "Zionist" or "genocide". As in the anxiety dream I am again having regularly, in which I am trying to warn people something terrible is happening but can barely speak, I have been trying, with not that much success so far, to explain to bureaucrats and judges how superficial, cheesy, tacky, trite, kitschy, their narrative about antisemitism is. You blocked three known bullies, one of them inebriated, from charging in to the encampment, to scream at protestors and shove their phones in their faces, then post the video on doxing sites? You prevented three Jewish people from entering a public space on campus! When three other trolls left a huge Israeli flag over all the small Palestinian flags outside another encampment, and you, a Jewish student, picked up that flag, looked around for the trolls, could not spot them, and placed it in a garbage can, you committed an act of egregious antisemitism! Trolls set both of these situations up, then filed Title VI or student conduct complaints. Very successful ones.
Trump just helped prove my case. Analogizing "antisemitism" to a Lego piece, he just unsnapped it and replaced it with another, "Charlie Kirk". Scores, possibly hundreds of people have been summarily fired for posting anything negative about him (this essay contains statements similar to some of those for which people have already been punished. Oh, by the way, if you want to get me fired, just contact my boss: me.)
The fact that "antisemitism" was so easy to swap out for "Charlie Kirk" proves that it was never that important, just a placeholder, a word filled into a Madlibs blank. Next week "Charlie Kirk" will be swapped out for "woke" or "Democrat" or "ugly" or something else.
In Trump's epistemology/ ontology/ toolkit, both "antisemitism" and "Charlie Kirk" are empty signs. About five minutes before the South Seas bubble deflated, someone successfully took a company public which the prospectus described only as "An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".
Using Kirk that way is not very respectful to him (though his widow doesn't seem to see that). If we could consult Kirk in the afterlife, would he respond like the unhinged Harry Dean Stanton character in Red Dawn, screaming "Avenge me!"? Or quote the Rolling Stones: "Oh don't do that". In the complex humanity he was deprived of, I can't say for sure.