Did Charlie Kirk Really Strap Kittens To Rockets And Launch Them Like Legonauts?

No, he didn't, and they're not even saying it on social media because I just made it up. But for even just a nanosecond, did you believe it?

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Until September 10th, all I knew about Charlie Kirk was enough to exclaim the sum total of all I knew about Charlie Kirk: “The right-wing guy?”

I knew his name, but nothing about him. Immediately, my social media feeds exploded with gratitude and rage against the ‘Nazi, fascist, racist, misogynist, Satan’s fluffer’ guy.

On the right, it was all outrage. So, that at least confirmed Kirk was right-wing. How much, I didn’t yet know.

Now that I do, I’m pissing everyone off by denying he was absolutely, positively, no-holds-barred, the worst fascist Trump-cozying Nazi puppy-eating Kamala Harris-abusing asshat in this particular multiverse.

My Substack inbox vomited Charlie Kirk headlines. I’m as sick of hearing about him as you, but, what’s one more brilliant or dumbass opinion? Charlie Kirk was a complex individual just like ourselves with whom many of us strongly disagreed,—who also don’t deserve to be murdered for beliefs others find offensive.

I find it interesting that so many who disavow much of what Kirk stood for, are still defending his right to exist. One of my favorite Real Liberals™, Helen Pluckrose, even wrote a firm and brilliantly liberal denunciation of killing people whose free speech one doesn’t like.

To be fair, Kirk’s critics can point to things he’s said (and have been fact-checked by Snopes) to bolster their arguments that he was often out of step with a fair chunk of America. Or just flat-out wrong, like linking the rise of transgenderism to inflation.

The smirkiest I will get about his unforgivable assassination is to note that yes, Chuckles said a few gun deaths were worth the ‘small’ price to pay for the Grand 2A. ‘Collateral damage’ as Timothy McVeigh might put it. I’m sure Kirk would agree. Especially since he already approved of assassinating one’s political enemies. Wonder if he’d make the same plea for Tyler Robinson?

There’s plenty to loathe him for and you’ve probably already seen his Top 100 horrendous hits on social media.

But….

Where did you agree with Charlie Kirk?

Kirk described his parents as ‘moderate Republicans’, which isn’t exactly seig heil territory, regardless of what your college-age niece tells you. He was raised Presbyterian, was a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout. He rejected university to form Turning Point USA to fight what he felt were the excesses of woke progressivism.

This so-called dog poo on your Birkenstocks was pretty sympatico on free speech with myself and many others on both sides of the divide. He said, and he was right, [ellipses not mine]:

“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens. Because you start to think the other side is so evil and that they lose their humanity. Marriages break apart when you stop talking, churches fall apart. … And I think what makes this country on the verge of going to a place we don’t want it to go right now, is we’re afraid to go to places like this and have these conversations.”

Nailed it!

"My wish for the left is that you’ll become liberal again and no longer leftist. Free speech is a liberal value. It is not a left-wing value. …as of today, Lucy Connelly is going to jail for two and a half years in this country [Britain] for a social media post that she apologized and deleted about a migrant hotel. That is not a free speech value at all. You should be allowed to say outrageous things. You should be allowed to say contrarian things. Free speech is a birthright that you gave us and you guys decided not to codify it and now it's poof, it's basically gone."

Fuckin’ A, man.

Speaking as someone who’s been liberal for longer than Kirk was allowed to be alive, I can tell you that this is what almost all of us libs thought thirty, forty years ago. I was there, man. My free speech views were tempered and forged by atheists and freethinkers I encountered in the early years of online, back when communication all happened in text. No video, no photo images, no downloading anything unless you were lucky enough to be attached to, I don’t know, Microsoft’s server farm.

Hold up bad ideas to the light, they said. Let’s examine them. Let’s see what works better. The Constitution does a good job of delineating what shouldn’t be legal. You have to prove what you claim. And you can’t threaten to kill the President, even if he’s an asshole.

‘Hate speech’ was so strictly defined you practically had to be a card-carrying Nazi and David Duke’s BFF to get arrested.

If you want to know what un-reined woke progressivism looks like, just cast your eyes east across the Big Drink. You can get arrested for shit even our crazy-ass wokies here in North America can’t pull off (yet).

The U.K. is now one of the worst places to be if you have an opinion. At all. You can literally be arrested for talking shit to your friend in a pub that offends someone who overheard you. Maybe it’s safer to go tip a pint in someone’s woodshed.

Chuckles the Klaüen and I wouldn’t agree on most everything besides free speech. But a self-defined ‘liberal’ (his word) on free speech at least wasn’t the cardboard Nazi monster your TDS-addled sister-in-law with the nose ring and five divorces behind her tells you.

I couldn’t stand Kirk’s hero Rush Limbaugh, but when a liberal acquaintance emailed me many years ago crowing that he was losing his hearing, and isn’t it ironic that he can no longer hear when he refuses to listen to others, I told him I was sorry to hear that because it’s tragic, even for Rush Limbaugh.

We love our schadenfreude; wanting to find virtue in the misfortunes of our enemies while damning them when they find the same in ours.

The Great Debater. Not.

Politico, left-center-biased but highly factual, analyzes Kirk’s influence by observing that his real superpower was “intuiting — and deftly exploiting — the institutional hollowness of the Republican Party under Trump.” He also, they claimed, filled the gaping holes in the campus environment opened up by dogmatic academia.

I agree with Charlie Kirk very much that so-called liberals have abandoned free speech. I have to laugh watching him take on dumbass college students who can’t define or defend whatever they just called him.

Not that he was a great debater himself. In addition to some of his more illogical comments, he ‘manterrupted’ and often wasn’t interested in actually hearing anyone out, or helping these poorly-educated college students currently bankrupting their future by pointing out the flaws in their logic. But, don’t take on a dude like this if you’re incapable of original thought because he could think on his feet, while most of his biggest critics, I’m pretty sure, can’t even locate their own feet.

Love him or hate him, he knew which way the wind was blowing without raising a moistened finger. He embraced social media and podcasting early on. According to Politico, he turned from “Tea Party-era libertarianism in favor of a Trump-inflected populist nationalism.” Apparently with more time on his hands during the pandemic, he embraced conservative Christianity which undoubtedly increased his influence more with the Jesus set.

(I do wonder if he became more radical for the likes and Instagram glory rather than evolving personal principles.)

I’m not the only liberal who doesn’t believe Charlie Kirk straps kittens to rockets and sends them into space just because some idiot on a newsletter platform suggested it. California governor Gavin Newsom took real grief from the left for being congenial, if not necessarily BFFs, with Charlie Kirk. One point of agreement between them: They both believe transgender women in sports is unfair.

Who has the right to play God?

I wonder if the shooter consulted anyone else’s opinion on Charlie Kirk before he took it upon himself to decide who lives and dies. Like, maybe, Kirk’s children.

I wonder how evil they thought Father was.

Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s self-appointed judge, didn’t know what his target would be like ten, twenty, thirty years from now. Maybe Kirk wouldn’t have changed much. Maybe he’d be worse. Or maybe he’d have softened his extremist views with the wisdom of greater experience, like Malcolm X did toward the end. We don’t know. And neither does Kirk, because he got cut down by someone who had no right to make that decision for him.

Those who believe it’s okay to murder another human being because they don’t like their political views legitimate those who might want to eliminate them for theirs. Soon you won’t even need to be famous for eligibility.

I’m speaking to everyone who defended any assassination by perfunctorily condemning it while adding that hypocritical ‘but’.

There are no ‘buts’. It’s either wrong or it’s not. It’s either open season on everyone or not. Laws are for all of us, or none of us.

Anarchy now? Or do you want to see your children grow up?