Entangling the Kirk Assassination in Romance
What would be shocking is a killer who killed for politics that didn’t loom large in his or her life.
“Here's how this will play out, here's the meta-script, and please don't laugh it off. How this all started is not how it will end. A story that began with a clear traditional moral shape, an innocent victim, a vile perpetrator, will be transformed using secondary characters, new revelations, and other dramatic elements into its very opposite -- a story of forbidden love, persecution by religious bigots, a poignantly rebellious heartfelt protest against a World that Doesn't Understand. There will then be a total split, far deeper than mere "politics," between the segments of the public that were captivated by two incommensurate tragedies.”
-Walter Kirn
That Kirn Tweet has the embedded video of Matt Gutman fawning over texts between the man who murdered Charlie Kirk and his not-so-alleged-anymore lover, Lance Twigg, he described as “a very intimate portrait into this relationship between the suspect’s roommate and the suspect himself.” I’ll cut him slack on “into” because he was speaking on live TV, but that’s forgiveness for the least of his trespasses though I can’t decide which of two possibilities he’s also guilty of. Either he’s just discovered that people capable of terrible and evil acts don’t twist their mustache ends and sneer every moment of their lives, that they are capable of normal behavior despite their defining acts, or he believes his audience a bundle of fools who’ve never discovered it themselves. If the former, he should be embarrassed, take an inventory, and then take whatever steps are needed to catch up with everybody else his age. If the latter, he should take a much more thorough inventory and reconsider his opinion of himself relative to others.
On the whole, Gutman made a goof of himself. At least I hope he did. A part of me is terrified that the audience he looks down on is as mushy headed as he might think. Kirn predicted the rise of Saint Luigi damn near right after video of Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson. We’ve got a kernel of a folk hero murderer already. We don’t need a bloody-minded Romeo.1
On cue, a few hours later this video of Montel Williams makes the rounds.
"There are people who are trying to pigeonhole this as a leftist thing and a right thing and what we're really talking about -- hear me, because I'm going to throw you when I say this, we're talking about a love torn child, a kid. This is probably his first real relationship. And somebody was disparaging the person that he loved. He sat on that building for 30 minutes before he took the shot. Why do you wait until the first word trans came up? Then he took the shot. I think he could hear it. I think he also -- I don't believe he was motivated politically. I think this was motivated emotionally. I think this was a emotionally stunted person who literally, when I say it this way, just hear me, tried to defend his significant other, not trying to defend some ideology."
That’s a remarkable take. Charlie Kirk was killed because of his politics. The killer was angry because of the political message Charlie preached and successfully defended. That the murderer felt personally threatened by a political message doesn’t make his an a-political murder.
“I killed him because he wanted to cap Social Security payments to adults over the age of sixty-five who have a net worth of a certain amount. It wasn’t political because that would affect my grandmother who I love very much.”
“I killed him but he wanted to cut deductions for small businesses. It wasn’t political because my uncle owns a pizza place and I love him very much.”
“I killed him, but he supported legal abortion. It wasn’t political because my girlfriend is pregnant and I love our unborn child very much.”
Government actions affect people personally. That shouldn’t take explaining. We discuss what actions government takes in the public square. That’s politics. People who kill because of how politics affects them – and remember that Kirk was only talking about what he believed should be done – kill for political reasons. What would be shocking is a killer who killed for politics that didn’t loom large in his or her life. “It’s not politics if it affects me,” is narcissism.
A lot of media energy is being spent blaming the right for this. The right needs to tone down its rhetoric, those stupid Nazis. Of course, the claim is that the right is more often politically violent than the left. It’s not working very well. We’ve all seen business owners not boarding up shop windows when the right comes to town. One of the thrusts of this a whataboutism (a form of argument that gets unfairly dismissed) involving the murder of Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota legislator who was murdered by Vance Luther Boelter.
Boelter registered as a Republican in 2004. That’s significant. In 2019 he said he had no party affiliation, which for reasons, is not. There are pictures of him at Resistance (TM) events wearing a Resistance (TM) message shirt next to a woman wearing Resistance (TM) message shirt. He was a non-political member of Minnesota’s Governor's Workforce Development Board appointed by Tim Walz, the state’s Democratic Governor/Spirit Leader. Also, for reasons, not part of the motive calculation for reasons. In a letter to the FBI he claimed he killed Hortman and her husband and shot another Minnesota House member, John Hoffman, and his wife under orders from Governor Walz. He rambled that he was clearing away competition for his imagined Walz Senatorial bid. He was a lunatic, but that’s not allowed into the calculation, just like the lunacy of the diagnosed schizophrenic grammarian who shot Gabby Giffords because, among other gripes, she answered his semantic gadfly letter with a form response and that the gold standard wasn’t tied to the metric system, is not brought up when categorizing her murder as right wing violence.
Both are thrown up as evidence of a dangerous right-wing polity. Tellingly, both are thrown up prominently.
Tyler Robinson killed a popular and effective right-wing evangelist for his political views. He was in a relationship with a man who, it isn’t clear to me, was either undergoing treatments to present as a woman or was living as a woman or both. His family said he’d taken a turn to the political left. He frequented “anti-fascist” message boards. Again, he shot a popular and effective right-wing evangelist for his political views. Not exactly Alex P Keaton.
But he’s white and his family votes Republican. Therefore his, it is being argued, motives are murky, but likely another example of right wing violence, we may never know the motive, the boy was in love.
JD Vance filled the now vacant host seat on “The Charlie Kirk Show” on the 15th and decried the radical left. Twitter filled with left wing “Actually”s immediately after because the arbiters of what the public has to believe got upset. Lots of graphs. Apparently if you look at a graph going back to 1975, the right is far more violent.
If it’s a sticking point that the murder of a Democratic legislator by a lunatic who believed he was acting under orders by the most recent Democratic nominee for Vice President be presented as a definite example of right wing violence but it’s a contention of dying media twitter litigation that an Antifa adjacent, transsexual dating, dinner table insurgent, ammunition graffitist, text message confessor of the public murder of a popular and effective right wing speaker, organizer, and debater isn’t an example of left wing violence, your data set is shit. At the risk of pissing off Antifa brown-shirts, your graphs are shit.
The appetite for indulgence isn’t what it used to be, even for hopeless romantics.
More viscerally:
I know. Romeo killed Tybalt and Paris so he was already bloody minded, but all the literary lovers worth a damn killed someone. If it makes you feel better: Mr. Darcy.