After Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk was murdered on Wednesday. 

I read this news item and thought "I've heard that name before," but it didn't mean anything in particular to me. That shows what a rut we middle-aged people in cyberspace can get into. I follow as many of the "conservative" blogs, and of the really "liberal" (as opposed to hate-filled left-wingnut) blogs, as possible; somehow the ones with forums that appeal to me seem to appeal to people who are currently over age 50. We share and discuss content from Joe Rogan, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Naomi Wolf; we don't keep up with the younger news bloggers. I think Russell Brand is the youngest "conservative" I've seen linked. And that gives me a lot to read and listen to, and meanwhile people like Charlie Kirk, Lara Logan, Anna Paulina Luna, Saurabh Sharma, Michael Knowles, well, they're out there somewhere. Older "conservatives," or moderates or classical liberals who are currently labelled "conservative"? It might be interesting to Google "conservative speakers under age 40" and see how many you've ever read or listened to. Time has its way of creeping up on us. We're not in the habit of thinking how long it's been since we were under age 40.

So I've learned about this man only last week. He was thirty-one, not much older than some of The Nephews (yikes!). He left behind a picture-perfect nuclear family, wife with lovely long blonde hair, two children barely old enough to talk; very reminiscent of President Kennedy's family. People in the commercial media who had met him remember him as the voice for free speech and open discussion. "A Christian," I'm told he was, who wanted to debate people and win on facts alone. His last public speech (on Fox News) and X-post were about the Ukrainian girl who was murdered in North Carolina: "It is 100% necessary to politicize the murder of Iryna Zarutska." In other recent speeches he spoke against Sharia law, and accused women who want to wait long enough to be sure they're getting husbands with fatherly characters of "choosing careerism, consumerism, and loneliness." That's not a very insightful summary of what they're choosing but it probably is an accurate summary of what Kirk was rejecting by marrying young. A nice, wholesome, Young Republican.

Conservatives are rumbling, even saber-rattling, across the land. Suddenly two young people most of us didn't know, had never made time to listen to, have become everyone's favorite niece and nephew simply because they were murdered. I have to wonder how some Rs' real nieces and nephews feel about that. 

I think we who didn't know either Kirk or Zarutska will probably have cause to miss them. There are three obvious ways to spin the Zarutska murder story. 

The one that appeals to me casts Zarutska as a poster girl for women's long denied civil rights. Andrew Tate, I can't believe that old blowhard is still being allowed to speak, much less that anyone's listening, blatted, "What was that GIRL doing OUT ALONE AFTER DARK?" He doesn't think women should have jobs, much less the right to commute to and from their jobs in peace. I think Tate's argument, that men are inherently violence-prone so women should be cowering indoors, not daring to earn our own room and board, just starving in a ladylike way if we can't live on what our male relatives make I suppose, is actually a very good argument for not allowing men to be on the streets without responsible female supervision. As in, not merely a sympathetic friend or relative, but an armed police officer. If anyone needs to be locked up, it's the violence-prone ones, not the potential victims. Unfortunately all women have been trained to see all men as potential assailants, no matter how much love and trust we feel for the ones we know personally. The brother you love and trust may be someone else's mugger or murderer. So if we listen to Tate, all the men in America need to be either working on their family farms, or working in labor camps with armed guards in towers along the razor-wire fences, or in institutions. Women have the right to use the public streets. Women do better in the skilled professions and are far less likely to commit violent crimes. Women would miss being able to learn from male co-workers or flirt with men in clubs or hear men preach in church, but if that is freedom's price, we might not mind.

The one that clearly appealed to Fox as being even more sensational casts Zarutska as a poster girl for White victims of Black violent criminals. If you saw the train's surveillance video you know how that works out in real life. Three Black men were in that end of that railcar. The smaller one was cringing against the wall. The older one was staring into space, not letting himself see, The big one clearly scared the other two men as much as he did the surviving woman. Most White Americans already see little difference when they look at men like those three. A Black man is a Black man is a Black man. So the two nonviolent Black men in that railcar have to go through life not knowing whether to be more afraid of Black men like that violent one, or of White people who see no difference between them and him. No wonder Black men have such high rates of hypertension and early death. This web site apologizes in advance to all law-abiding Black men.

Then there's the one Charlie Kirk apparently had in mind, which was simply that after a certain number of violent offenses an offender should be considered incorrigible and locked up for life. How reasonable. How fair. How ethical. How...boring? Was that why he was murdered? Some other young man found his ideas boring? Nothing radical or polarizing or revolutionary?

Those who think we need no more radical, polarizing, revolutionary blather added to the existing supply are likely to miss Charlie Kirk. He seemed the type of young man who could, calmly and politely, explain where, how, and why Fox had got his message wrong. 

I think I may have to give up reading one of the North Carolina blogs I've been following. People who may need to ride a train in Charlotte understandably have very intense feelings about the fact that no armed railcops burst into the railcar before Zarutska was dead. Some people at that blog seem to have intense feelings about life in general, at best. They seem to forget that in recent years people who still make noises like a "White Supremacist" are likely to be paid informers.

The "Trump Train" consists of a mad mixture of right-wingers, moderate Rs, fiscal conservatives, classical liberals, Independents, true Greens, sober Libertarians, conservative Ds, and people who had no politics before concerns about their or their relatives' health drove them to the Children's Health Defense movement, who are now lumped together as "conservatives." Everyone but total left-wingnuts now seems to be classified as a "conservative," which of course gave the Trump campaign a big boost. Being a good "liberal" in the sense of enjoying the mood of these diverse elements all stewing together, I've stuck to reminding people that we "conservatives" do not need to act like the idiotic stereotype the clueless Left would like to stick to us, that one Civil War was more than either Virginia or North Carolina ever needed...

...That old people don't make the best martyrs for a movement. As mentioned in the introduction to a short story I posted here some years ago, at 

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/short-story-influencers.html ,

If anything is ever going to stack up against financial interests on the scales of public opinion, it's the untimely death of a promising young person. The violent death of an older person can also be effective, but nothing else hits hoi polloi as hard as the loss of someone who was young and fresh and promising, all her (or his) road before her (or him). Like Iryna Zarutska. 

Charlie Kirk's X profile does not show evidence of much original thought, but it shows clear thinking. He was in favor of free speech and objective debate and fair fighting. He also understood the value of a martyr to a movement. Iryna Zarutska doesn't seem to have stood for anything in particular; she was just a half-grown pizza flipper. She was not a world-class Beauty; her face showed imperfect symmetry, her bleached hair didn't make her look credible as a blonde, and she was letting the black roots of her hair show at an uneven parting; but she was young-and-therefore-pretty, with good Slavic cheekbones and big brown eyes. Young men would have stopped to look at her. Kirk wanted to make her famous as a martyr for some movement related to commuter safety. 

And then he, too, became a martyr for freedom of speech and objective debate AND FAIR FIGHTING. I want my saber-rattling e-friends to let that sink in. I don't want to hang around there nagging at them. I want them to think about him and fight for their cause "the way Charlie Kirk would've done," with reasoned arguments and courteous manners. 

Something that came to mind recently was a clip from Secretary Kennedy's testimony in the Senate. He was speaking with Senator  Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren. She was clearly treating him as an equal; at one point she called him "Senator." But then she...I'm not sure that "lost it" is the phrase. She was in control of her manners but she lost control of her image. Kennedy has a major speech impairment. Warren has none. She wasn't exactly yelling, she wasn't standing up and leaning across the table, she wasn't even shaking a fist or pointing a finger, but she was...spewing out words. She spoke fast and furiously while he was trying to force words out. It was a painful scene to watch. 

I don't know that Charlie Kirk would instinctively have had better skills than that. I think--hope--he had. I think it was an instructive moment for all us "conservatives" who think it's time for a "turning point" in the way people understand the word "progress." We want to make progress back to the American idea that all people are created equal, with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which people may or may not define as wealth. (According to legend, Thomas Jefferson originally wanted to say "wealth," but Benjamin Franklin reminded him that the radical Christians in Pennsylvania weren't pursuing wealth, primarily, so our Declaration of Independence says "happiness.") 

That means nobody has the power to arbitrate equal outcomes; people have to take the natural consequences of their actions. It means nobody is so superior to anyone else as to be a "gatekeeper" to what other people are allowed to read or write or think or say. It means most people have a right to be armed, and are likely to be armed, so it's good to avoid fights even if you think you could win a fair fight with the other person. It means debates need to be won on facts, not on extraneous factors like the ability to talk faster than another person. It means people are innocent until proven guilty--although the man who murdered Iryna Zarutska had been proven guilty fourteen times and released from prison on a technicality that was probably considered only out of a misguided sense of race loyalty. 

Metaphors of violence may be built into our language, into most human languages. We are keyboard warriors. Right. We're fighting for reforms. Right. We want to kill bad bills. Right. We should avoid throwing those metaphors around in ways that suggest any interest in physical violence. 

There is a movement, originating in corporate trade associations whose representatives have tried to recruit "influencers" and politicians, aimed at "destroying" Robert Kennedy. Well, anyone who even looks sidewise at the Irish Chieftain of Glyphosate Awareness is also likely to meet my Inner Mama Bear. Someone in Washington annoyed me enough to get a message recommending that the person leave Kennedy alone or I'd call out something less than admirable that the person has done. I think that's within the ethical boundaries for us who have recently, and to our surprise, been designated as "conservatives." We can embarrass people, if we have some good "dirt" on them. 

But with Charlie Kirk as poster boy, those of us trying to preserve freedom of speech should feel reminded to keep it polite, keep it clean, keep it nonviolent, leave people's parents and children out of any disagreements, and generally "fight" like gentlemen, or -women. Use language that won't embarrass those of us who live with young children, or the children. Never stop saying, "This is wrong. This won't work. This didn't serve people who tried it very well in some other time and place, and it's likely to be even worse for us." Try not to start saying "You're an idiot. You're a traitor. You're an evil person." 

Left-wingnuts were saying horrible things about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Let's assume that they were in emotional denial that the murder was real. "Next time can we do [an older "conservative" writer?" Let's just say, not if I catch you, you can't. 

We can do better than this. We're right. Some prog-trog posted something that looked like a statistical argument on X in support of a specious argument. Something about the statistics didn't look right to me. Hello? This is cyberspace. I Googled. Trog's statistics didn't look right because they were blatantly bogus. I quoted accurate statistics at him. I think the trog's running yet. 

Go and do likewise, Gentle Readers. Be best. In memory of Charlie Kirk.