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“De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est. (Of the dead, nothing but good is to be said).”
— Chilon of Sparta, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, in 600 BC
Journalists, politicians and academics who rushed to celebrate the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk are dropping like flies. Is their punishment just?
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The Macro
It amuses me to a great extent that the MAGA movement in the United States, which justifies its aggressive campaign to publish “anti-woke” and “anti-cancel culture” activism is, now, actively using the very same tactics they continue to denounce.
U.S. President Donald Trump and his acolytes have long raged against the forces of wokeness who hunted down sexual predators, misogynists, racists and other miscreant creatures for public humiliation and banishment to the fringes of society.
Obviously, Trump himself has an argument to be included in a discussion of all those crimes against humanity. And thus, it’s no surprise that Trump is trying to excise wokeness — as he and other far-right figures refer to it — from all public (and some private) institutions.
What is more surprising, however, is the aggressiveness of the MAGA forces’ efforts to cancel people they don’t agree with. One might have assumed the antidote to allegedly progressive cancel culture was a culture that didn’t cancel anyone for speaking their beliefs.
Those who did assume that are now finding themselves so very, very wrong.
The MAGA response to cancel culture is to find and exterminate as many people who disagree with them as possible, in numbers exponentially greater than previously cancelled by progressive forces. For those who think this is an exaggeration, you need only read about the tragically hilarious reasoning behind Trump’s recent purge of agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In the current context — when the Trump administration is leading an all-out revenge campaign against progressive cancel culture — the tragic shooting death of far-right activist Charlie Kirk seems like a particularly incendiary event.
Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA, speaks during a town hall meeting on March 17 in Oconomowoc, Wis. Kirk was shot to death Sept. 10. (Jeffrey Phelps / Associated Press files)
Having watched the story closely for the past several days, I think there are two fundamental truths about Kirk’s death.
First and foremost, it is reprehensible that anyone living in what is purported to be a democracy should be killed because of what they believe.
And second, Kirk believed and said a lot of dangerous and hateful things about immigrants, non-white Americans, women and the LGBTTQ+ community.
In a civil, democratic society, those two observations should exist in concert, not conflict. You can denounce and mourn the violent death of a public figure and, at the same time, acknowledge who they really were. The first act should not be used as an excuse to alter the truth of the latter.
So, why are so many people getting in trouble for speaking out about Kirk and denouncing his ideas? It mostly comes down to the fact that these people completely bypassed the first notion — that no one in a democracy should be killed because of what they say or think — and went straight to performing an endzone dance celebrating the demise of a despised emissary of the MAGAverse.
There is room for disagreement here, but I believe acknowledging a foundational notion that we should all be able to say what we believe without fear of violence is what gives us justification to discuss the life and times of the person who was killed.
I can feel the rolling eyeballs on both sides of this debate.
Those who really, really disliked Kirk and his ideology — and feel that he represented an existential threat to various groups — will argue he did not deserve to be protected, even in a democracy.
And those who are sympathetic to what Kirk believed will assert that now is not the time to pick through the minute details of what he said in the past.
All of which is to say, we are teetering on the brink of a dangerous moment. The reverse cancel culture unfolding in the U.S. is, as we speak, melding with the outrage over the Kirk assassination to create an ideological tsunami that — I fear — will end up destroying U.S. democratic institutions.
MAGA types are wrongly asserting now that most of the domestic terrorism and mass shooting incidents are being committed by far-left activists and, in a great number of those cases, by transgender Americans. The facts are that most mass shootings are committed by white males, not transgender citizens, and that in most instances the shooters embraced an extreme right-wing ideology. Even so, you can see an argument forming in the MAGAverse for the suspension of mid-term elections because of a wave of transgender violence.
And there’s no getting away from the fact that this desperate, dangerous misrepresentation of reality for political purposes is now being fed by — you guessed it — the people who rushed to dance on Kirk’s grave.
We do not have the right in a democracy to say things that dehumanize a group of people or provoke hatred toward them. But we should never confuse our condemnation of someone saying hateful things with a desire to see them meet a violent end.
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