I’ve written several times over the last few days not only about the scourge of political violence which we must not only denounce but be genuinely against in every way. Notwithstanding my own personal inclination to say little of the dead for a respectful period, I want to note a particular dynamic that the right is creating in the reign of firing terror it’s unleashed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. On X over the last few days, countless numbers of high-profile right-wing accounts’ feeds are made up almost entirely of screen grabs of random people’s reactions to Kirk’s murder and demands that they be fired from their jobs. In many cases the demands are heeded and then that fact is triumphantly posted as well.
Needless to say, when people do this they’re not only trying to get these individuals fired but are also unleashing a wave of harassment, doxxing and possibly worse. It’s all intentional. Sometimes the reactions they’re highlighting are legitimately gross, even awful. More often they’re just rude or unkind. And in many cases they’re simply not sufficiently reverent or respectful. I’ve seen a number of cases where it’s simply saying explicitly that the killing was wrong but also all the very real reasons why Kirk’s role in our public life was bad, malignant, destructive, etc. It runs the gamut.
Many of these cases involve people none of us have heard of. They’re school teachers, college administrators at colleges or universities you’re only dimly aware of, assistant bank managers — people in ordinary walks of life with a few dozens or hundreds of followers at most. In addition to being a perverse kind of sport, perhaps a kind of maleficent blood sacrifice, the right is clearly trying to impose a new standard of public decorum so that everyone will be on notice about anything and everything they say about any high profile chieftain of the MAGA movement. They are also, perversely, contaminating and discrediting ordinary respect for the dead, respect for a period of mourning, the simple impulse to say nothing even about discreditable people when their friends and loved ones are grieving. Through a degenerate alchemy they’re transmuting it in a form of obedience.
Karen Attiah, the columnist and opinions editor at The Washington Post, announced this morning that she’d been fired for her comments about Kirk’s murder, or rather her comments about Kirk in the aftermath of his murder. I have disagreed with Attiah on various subjects. But as nearly as I can tell the comments which got her fired included a mix of the following: first a categorical denunciation of Kirk’s murder, a general and pessimistic take on America’s routine acceptance of horrific levels of gun violence, the kind of meaningless bromides we greet it with (“thoughts and prayers”, etc.), the double standard that is applied to political violence targeting Republicans and Democrats and finally at least one tweet simply quoting Kirk in a statement that can only be called unabashedly racist. She didn’t call it that. It spoke for itself. (You can read Attiah’s account of all this here in her Substack.) These are bold, even perhaps edgy comments. They aren’t remotely inappropriate and certainly don’t endanger her colleagues, as the Post appears to have claimed. I guess my only caveat to that last point is that Trump supporters are, let’s be honest, frequently vicious and not infrequently violent. So in a way maybe she was endangering her colleagues? Only not in a way that should have led to her termination.
Private institutions can do whatever they want. But we can also judge them on the basis of their actions. Their freedom to do what they want as private institutions is also severely eclipsed by a climate of fear and retribution backed not only by MAGA’s online mobs but also by the awesome and terrifying power of the President of the United States, and by this particular president, who has shown a willingness and eagerness to abuse those powers for criminal and malign purposes based merely on his whims.
I imagine there are some from what we might call the supercilious center who are tempted to both valorize Kirk and denounce this behavior by saying Kirk wouldn’t have wanted this. But let’s not kid ourselves. He would have loved it. Kirk literally got his start running a database and tipline for the purpose of harassing purportedly liberal or anti-conservative college professors and trying to get them fired. Kirk, in my mind, is a quintessentially American figure. But so were P.T. Barnum and Father Coughlin. Being a quintessentially American figure isn’t always a good thing. I love this country with all its warts. Over the weekend I saw Willie Nelson, now 92 and with a singing voice not terribly far removed from a speaking voice, with my younger son. He performed in front of a backdrop American flag doused with stage lights. Seeing it filled me with inspiration and love for the work I do every day … or let’s say every weekday.
Kirk is dead. That’s a great loss for his family and his friends. But we’re here among the living, and the new reality is what the right is doing with his death. Cataloguing Kirk’s execrable views and frequently vicious public statements is fine. His heirs, figurative and literal, may not like having a light shown on his less creditable side. But they can hardly have much cause for complaint since he literally said these things. By their own actions they are turning them from “fine” into something more like obligatory. Because anything else becomes a forced march lining up behind MAGA’s cult of obedience. That’s not America.