As we often say, if it wasn't for double standards, the Left wouldn't have any...
Perhaps it was these noble gestures toward generosity and sympathy that led some commentators to be more laudatory to Kirk’s memory than an honest recounting of his life would allow. In the days following Kirk’s death, several bewilderingly inaccurate postmortem hagiographies have appeared, including from prominent voices on the left and center, that seem to wish that the tragedy of Kirk’s death could retroactively have given him a more honorable life.
Not as egregious as raising monuments to a fentanyl-addicted long time career criminal who wasn't even 'killed by police' in any case, but by the consequences of his own addition, surely?
The most egregious of these came from Ezra Klein, a center-left columnist at the New York Times known for his ability to channel and influence elite opinion. In a piece published the morning after Kirk’s death, titled Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way, Klein made a series of strained, bizarre and outright untrue assertions about Kirk’s career and character. Kirk, Klein argued, was, if anything, an example of civic virtue. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein said. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Klein’s point was that political persuasion – the rational debate of ideas between equals in which violence is unthinkable and good faith is presumed – is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, the kind of thing we should all be striving for, the kind of thing we need more of.
And...shouldn't we? What happened to 'it's better to talk'? The left csn'y possibly disagree that that's what Kirk spent most of his time doing, can they?
Fair enough, I suppose, on its merits, but such a description of reasoned, honest, good-faith debate is so inaccurate a description of what Charlie Kirk engaged in on college campuses – in his series of large, staged events where he “debated” untrained liberal undergraduates with cameras rolling – that it reads as willfully naive, if not outright dishonest.
Reader, it appears they can.
Charlie Kirk’s “debates” were aggressive, unequal, trolling affairs, in which he sought to provoke his interlocutors to distress, shouted them down and belittled them, spewed hateful rhetoric about queer and trans people, women, Black people, immigrants and Muslims, and selectively edited the ensuing footage to create maximally viral content in which his fans could witness him humiliating the liberals and leftists they perceived to be their enemies.
Ah, the Left's 'argument' is that when he spoke, people got upset? Maybe ask why these people couldn't argue their points calmly and logically and without bursting into tears at the mean man who failed to agree with them that men could become women and vice-versa?
In the rush to canonize Kirk and revise his history, honest accountings of his life have not only become rare – they have also become dangerous. In the days since his death, journalists, media personalities and others who have not been sufficiently laudatory to Kirk in public have lost their jobs for telling the truth about his life.
No, they've lost their jobs because in celebrating political murder, they've brought the brands they represent into disrepute, and thus breached their terms of employment.
It is easy for me, even, to show sympathy for the humanity of Charlie Kirk, who, for everything else he was, was a human being who has now been robbed of the opportunity to learn, grow, and repent. But such commitments – to human life, to nonviolence, to a faith in the possibility of redemption and reconciliation – need not lead us to lie to ourselves about Charlie Kirk.
But you've already introduced the concept of lying about people's lives, even if these people you are complaining about were actually lying, you'd have no leg to stand on.
