fuck their outrage

A world without political violence demands a world where every human life is equally valued. This hypothetical world is free of racism and bigotry, free of dehumanization, and free of treating human beings as disposable. Charlie Kirk did not wish to live in this world. He routinely espoused racist beliefs, thought trans people shouldn't exist, claimed the Civil Rights Act was a "mistake," and cheered for the continued massacre of Palestinians while simultaneously trumpeting antisemitic conspiracy theories. As the right-wing intelligentsia trips over itself to valorize Kirk in the wake of his killing, liberals (and even some leftists) have struggled with their reaction to this event.

The people claiming that the left is demonic for their reaction to Kirk's death are the very same people hooting approvingly at Trump rallies during his repeated calls for public executions. They're the same people celebrating when human beings are shipped off to foreign countries on the other side of the world from their families and locked in cages. They're the people gleefully naming their sites of torture "Alligator Alcatraz" and "Speedway Slammer" in attempts to normalize human suffering and desensitize us to the human rights abuses that they are committing at scale across the entire country. These people somehow believe that they can go seamlessly from cheering an ICE sizzle reel of a mother or father being ripped from their children to demanding reverence for the sanctity of life when one of their most notorious propagandists falls victim to the very violence that they spent every moment of their adult life enabling.

The point of this post isn't to encourage people to celebrate or not celebrate his death, but rather to point out that we shouldn't give a single fuck what right-wing hypocrites and opportunists are saying in the days/months/years that follow. Their outrage follows the conservative blueprint: one rule for me and another for thee. This ethos permeates everything from their media ecosystem to how the conservative bloc of the Supreme Court abandons legal precedent to suit their ideological priors. No amount of fealty to the right's demands will change this. Rather than play into the outrage cycle that the right is attempting to generate as a pretext to crack down even further on ideological opponents, we should be vocal about rejecting their framework entirely.

People who villainize immigrants, who call for the torture of their enemies, who root for public executions and the abandonment of due process, aren't truly concerned about the sanctity of life. They care about control and punishing anyone whom they believe is worthy of suffering. They will utilize every tactic they can to further these goals - such as appeals to emotion (he has a family!) and the revisionist history (all he did was debate people!) that they are currently deploying. The democratic party has long been too concerned with triangulating the proper amount of capitulation to the right, when they should be looking these bad-faith actors in the eyes and telling them to go fuck themselves.

I am not going to shed a single tear for an individual who fought for a world where people are treated as subhuman due to the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, or the country in which they were born. I refuse to condemn violence against a monstrous person who is responsible for spreading hatred throughout the world. This is especially true when their side is elated to wield violence against people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, migrants, and anyone who they think deserves it. Conservative outrage, while largely performative to further their ideological goals, is real in one sense: these people are hurting because they truly believe that their side isn't supposed to experience the harms that they are free to enact on others. Someone who holds this core belief falling victim to violence simply does not animate my capacity to feel empathy.