The public mourning of Charlie Kirk is more about Donald Trump than the deceased.
At NFL games across the United States this past weekend, tributes were made to a man who claimed Black women like Michelle Obama “do not have the brain processing power” of their white colleagues. In the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, three days of mourning, with flags at half-staff, were ordered by the Democratic governor “in respect for the memory” of an activist who called for “a ban on all third-worlders” — some 50 million Americans are foreign-born — “legal or illegal,” citing a racist conspiracy theory about how “they” are seeking to supplant God-fearing Caucasians with altogether inferior people of color.
“They want to replace white, Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants with Mexican[s], Nicaraguans and El Salvadorians,” he said over the summer, lamenting the size of the Latino population in a former Mexican territory called “Los Angeles.”
Enough has been said about Charlie Kirk, who was killed not by an immigrant, police say, but by a 22-year-old white man from Utah. Too much, even: the founder of Turning Point USA was an important ally of President Donald Trump, but most people had never heard of him before he was shot and killed last week. That, in fact — that the murder of a MAGA activist has been given a full-court media treatment as if he were a nonpartisan national hero or an actual pope, with liberals from The New York Times to the governor’s office dutifully performing their subservience to Donald Trump’s hegemony — is what now requires scrutiny.
It was just three months ago that democracy was directly and explicitly attacked. Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House, was gunned down in her home, alongside her husband and golden retriever, by a right-wing, anti-choice assassin who friends say was a devoted follower of the president of the United States. The 57-year-old admitted killer, who also wounded state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife and was subsequently given a platform to justify his actions on MAGA pundit Glenn Beck’s website, tilted the balance of power in what had been an evenly divided House of Representatives.
