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By now you’ve heard—along with the entire country—the grimly ironic twist that could only happen in America: right-wing propagandist and MAGA extremist Charlie Kirk was onstage at Utah Valley University trying to shift the blame for mass shootings to Black people when he himself was fatally shot in the neck.
Violence of all kinds is abhorrent and should be condemned in all circumstances, but no discussion of this event can be had without acknowledging that Charlie Kirk became a victim of the grotesque and nihilistic culture of gun violence that he himself spent his entire career celebrating — and his killing is being used to advance that same political project. Time to log on.
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Kirk’s last words offer a rare glimpse into the role that the gun violence epidemic Republicans have so carefully incubated plays in advancing their political goals. “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?” asks a student. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responds right before he is shot.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
“Gang violence” is a clear dog whistle for “violence committed by non-whites,” so by asking “counting or not counting gang violence,” Kirk is at once being extremely racist while deflecting from and downplaying the staggering death toll of needless gun violence that Americans suffer every year, because he understands the critical role that wanton gun violence plays in advancing the greater Republican political project.
Kirk himself explicitly articulated this at a 2023 Turning Point Faith event when he said:
"I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
The invocation of the Second Amendment and “other God-given rights” is a socially appropriate stand-in for what he really is saying: it is “worth it” for American society to live in constant terror and grief from school shootings committed by white shooters, the mass murder-suicides, and the horrific number of femicides and suicides committed by white men in order for the Republican political machine to exploit gun violence that can be blamed on Black and brown people and drive propaganda narratives with the eager collaboration of a for-profit news media hungry for ratings.
This political project’s objectives include upholding white supremacy, stripping rights away from marginalized communities, expanding the carceral state to reimpose de facto slavery on huge swathes of nonwhite Americans and expanding the police state in order to facilitate the use of state violence against any popular pushback.
The link between crime in urban centers — the violence used by people like Kirk to demonize and dehumanize Black and Brown people — and our nation’s egregiously lax gun laws is well defined. [ [link removed] ] It’s the guns, moron!
But the vampires in the Republican Party feed off the chaos and senseless deaths that widespread firearm proliferation inevitably produces, because it gives them enough material to craft deeply racist and wildly overblown narratives of widespread urban crime and gang violence that are then used to justify the draining of city budgets to fund ever-expanding police forces, horrific police brutality and abuses, and most recently the authoritarian invasions of Washington D.C, Los Angeles, and Chicago by federal troops at Trump’s behest.
On top of that, the conspiracy theories, misinformation, and inciting rhetoric that propagandists like Charlie Kirk push leads to political and racially motivated violence by right-wing agitators, who have easy access to guns thanks to the Republican Party’s utter refusal to impose any kind of commonsense gun reforms that the vast majority of the American public supports. That political violence is then celebrated by people like Kirk and the MAGAsphere, as all the violence caused by lax gun policy is worth the chaos, pain, and death because it serves their ultimate political project.
Charlie Kirk’s death will inevitably be exploited to excuse some fresh fascistic impulse by Trump and the MAGAsphere to further expand their power and cut off avenues of resistance. Before the shooter was captured, the right-wing social media machine was almost unanimously calling for monumental reprisals against “the Left.”
This being an America caught in the throes of a never-ending reaping of innocents, as Kirk was getting shot there was a school shooting at a different school just a few states away in Colorado. Three students were hospitalized with gunshot wounds at Jefferson High School near Denver. Their pain and suffering will be ignored and forgotten by the people howling for vengeance, because, after all, it’s worth it to them.
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