Heroes and Victims

It’s possible to be repulsed by an act without canonizing its victim.

I’ve made that point in the past with regard to George Floyd and, here in Madison, regarding Tony Robinson. Floyd, of course, was the victim of a murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. That cop was brought to justice and the culture of the department is being reformed.

But the veneration of Floyd is wrong. He was a criminal, at times a violent one. That didn’t justify his killing or make it any less horrific, but it certainly doesn’t put him on the same level as Rosa Parks of Martin Luther King, Jr. The murals and tributes and renaming of public spaces in his honor are wholly inappropriate.

Here in Madison, the elevation of Robinson is also wrong, even more so than Floyd because he caused his own death by cop. Robinson was high on drugs and causing a disturbance when he attacked a police officer in a dark stairwell. The officer acted to protect himself and other innocent people, as more than one official investigation has concluded. So, the mural in his honor on Madison’s east side is ill-considered.

Which brings us to Charlie Kirk. His murder was also awful. His assassin is now, apparently, in custody and I trust that, just as in the Floyd case, justice will be done. But the canonization of Kirk is not justified. Flags should not have been flown at half staff for him, his coffin should not have been conveyed on Air Force Two and he should not be awarded a high honor by the president.

That’s not to say his life is not worth remembering and his loss to his wife and children should not be mourned — just as those things are also true about Floyd and Robinson. It is to say that he should not be held on a pedestal.

I knew virtually nothing about Kirk before his death. I suppose I might have recognized the name, but if you had told me on Wednesday morning that Charlie Kirk was a backup NFL quarterback I would have believed you. I do not live on social media or in MAGA world.

So, I took some time to learn more about him. What I learned was that, like most human beings, he was complicated. There were some things to admire. He showed up on college campuses and in other forums to debate people who he knew would disagree with him — and passionately. In fact, he was engaged in just such a debate when the assassin struck. He organized conservative movements on college campuses where that was, to the say the least, unpopular. That took some guts and pushing back against liberal academic groupthink is a good thing for this country and, ultimately, for the academy itself.

He even took some positions, albeit in an over the top manner, on which I tend to agree. I do, in fact, think DEI has gone astray and that affirmative action has outlived its usefulness and is doing more harm than good. But those are actually mainstream positions as polls show that most Americans agree.

Nonetheless, we should not pretend that his brand of conservatism was the same as that of John McCain or Mitt Romney or even Bill Buckley, who organized his own conservative youth movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This wasn’t just about lower taxes, smaller government and more personal freedom. This was about white Christian nationalism and that is not just another legitimate point of view with which I simply have a gentlemanly disagreement. Kirk was pushing the idea that if you’re not white and not a Christian you are something less than a full American. That in itself is deeply unAmerican and it’s dangerous. It leads to scapegoating and all of the potential for horror that comes from that. And that’s why flags should not have been lowered for him and the other honors should not have been provided.

Cribbed mostly from an analysis in the New York Times and a few other sources, here are some other things that Kirk believed:

He said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a destructive force in American politics, calling its passage a “mistake” that he said has been turned into “an anti-white weapon.”

He called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , an “awful” person.

He called Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson a “diversity hire” who wasn’t qualified to serve on the highest court. 

He once said, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”

In one video, he said BLM stood for “burn, loot and murder” and wrote it should be “legal to burn a BLM flag”. (So much for his passion for free speech.)

He spoke out against the separation of church and state, a bedrock American principle.

He was a proponent of “replacement theory,” a once-fringe conspiracy theory positing that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.

In 2023 he said, “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.” Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

Most ironically, he said, “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Kirk did poorly on US fact-checker PolitiFact’s scorecard, with 90 per cent of checks rating his claims “mostly false”, “false”, or “pants on fire”

And with all of those toxic views, Kirk was apparently popular and influential among young men. So much the worse.

Some try to discount all that by saying he was a provocateur. But what’s good about provocateurs, especially in this environment? Social media and the internet have embellished the rewards for saying outrageous things. It brings attention, clicks, advertisers and money. This does not make one a hero.

Again, none of this justified his murder. It didn’t even justify his being shouted down at a campus presentation. But also, in my book, these things disqualify him for the honors Trump will bestow on him. Can we manage a little nuance here? It’s possible not to be so callous as to celebrate a man’s murder while at the same time not being so clueless as to make a martyr out of man who had some pretty reprehensible beliefs.

George Floyd, Tony Robinson and Charlie Kirk all died under tragic circumstances. Floyd and Kirk were victims while Robinson may have been a victim of drugs and his circumstances. But none are heroes.

Nonetheless there are some leaders who have stood out in this whole ugly event, chief among them Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox. Here’s an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal editorial about Cox’ remarks last week.

Yet perhaps the most important part of the press conference was Mr. Cox’s reflection on the country’s condition after “an attack on the American experiment.” To “my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” he said. “It feels like rage is the only option.” 

But “your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different from what we are suffering through right now, not by pretending differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.”

Then: “I think we need more moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. And there is one person responsible for what happened here. And that person is now in custody and will be charged soon, and will be held accountable.”

This is important wisdom for young Americans whose political formation will now include this assassination, and Mr. Cox performed far better than most of his colleagues in positions of political leadership. “These people are full of s—” is the level of statesmanship America now expects from Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, but the failures are bipartisan. “Democrats owned what happened today,” said South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace. 

The left hasn’t reckoned with what it unleashed when it declared that words are equivalent to violence, which some unstable people hear as an open call to return fire. Yet what the country needs at this moment is leaders who understand that they represent everyone once they are elected, not merely a political faction. This is what the country could also use from President Trump, rather than vows to punish his opponents. 

Mr. Cox told Americans to “log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community,” while calling social media “a cancer.” Don’t underestimate the political salience of this message to voters who all know someone whose mental stability has deteriorated after hours spent marinating in online rage.

“History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,” Mr. Cox said, “but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.” It has been a bleak week for the greatest free society in history. But Mr. Cox is right to tell Americans that their personal conduct can be a starting point toward something different.