I’m not going to be gaslit about drawing hard lines in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination

I’ve guess been struggling to come to grips with the murder of Charlie Kirk. Obviously there’s the gruesome reality of what happens when a bullet goes through a man’s neck, and I’ve watched those few seconds of footage more than I care to mention trying to absorb the sheer, maddening materiality of that instant. There’s that. But worse than that has been the response. And not in the usual “we are so ill-equipped to mourn our dead” sense that I typically feel at the passing of someone who was beloved by many. No, this time it’s much worse, but it had mostly eluded my ability to capture until I read a recent blog post from Kryptogal Kate. The essay in question is simply titled “The Psychotic Monster Who Murdered Charlie Kirk”

and as I read Kate’s essay, much like that video of Kirk losing his life, I felt that there was something that demanded excavation, something beneath the surface that had to brought to the surface.

Kate’s point is a simple one: there is no “they” for conservatives to be mad at. There’s no they because the death of Charlie Kirk are entirely attributable to one lone gunman and that person is simply evil.

Not only is there no “they,” there’s not even a motive for that guy. Sure, sure, I know that (at the time of her article) we’re only in the first couple of days of the killing and they haven’t even apprehended the shooter (again, this is at the time of her writing); but regardless, there is absolutely not a chance that the shooter had any motive for killing Kirk. He could not have had any motive for killing Kirk. And how could you even believe for an instant that there was a motive? 

I’m always a little unsure about how I’m meant to approach things like this. Is it tedious to point out that this is a textbook case of the fallacy of composition? Cobbling together a handful of deranged killers who murdered for no other reason than they wanted to take lives doesn’t not disprove the existence of ideologically motivated killing. It doesn’t disprove the fact of people who target particular people because they may just hate them for one reason or another. Have we forgotten the dude you gunned down a man in Portland because the man was wearing a Trump hat? Cause I haven’t forgotten.

These kinds of arguments that Kate makes have a kind of circularity to them. Whenever a person commits an act as heinous as shooting a “civilian” on a “beautiful September afternoon” then they ipso facto must be motivated by evil and insanity because if they weren’t then they never would have committed this act.  Of course Luigi Mangione seemed to have some pretty obvious motives when he (allegedly) gunned down Brian Thompsan with a ghost gun and then eluded capture for days. Thompson was certainly a civilian. Is Mangione permitted to have motive because he (allegedly) killed Thompson in December? Or is it because he (allegedly) did it at night? Maybe Kate can let us know exactly how her model works so we can get to the bottom of this. 

But seriously, the reason that Kate has to insist that there can’t be any motive beyond insanity is because, if she were to acknowledge this, then causes get implicated, ideologies get implicated, and finally political factions get implicated. 

So rather than acknowledge this, Kate instead chooses to scold anyone who might believe that there actually is motive, that perhaps there is something more going on here that demands a little more consideration than intentionally-thought-terminating abstractions like “insane” and “evil” permit for. 

I am not typically inclined to talk about gaslighting, but I think this pretty well qualifies. It also follows the longstanding tradition in the West of demonizing, not the people creating the problem, but the people who are pointing out that problem. Yes, there are people out there who are currently gloating over Kirk’s corpse. A lot of them have even lost their jobs due to how callously and odiously they were gloating about this man getting killed in front of his family. Ask me how much I care about that. (I don’t give the faintest glimmer of a fuck.) 

And sorry, I also don’t care about the supremely stupid Richard Hanania argument that these sentiments don’t matter because they aren’t primarily coming from “important people” or “leaders” in the left-wing political sphere. I don’t care that this toxicity is “just” coming from “random people.” In fact, I care more about the reactions from those people than I do about whatever is ultimately revealed about the shooter and his motivations. Because what I’ve realized is that anyone that can say those things or create a shirt depicting the moment of Kirk’s death with the caption “debate this”

anyone who can stand by and watch that shit and then attempt to gaslight and shame people for noticing it—that is a person for whom I do not need to have any moral concern. 

Kate may describe this as “animalistic” or “monstrous” and I can see how it might appear that way to a certain kind of person. To a certain kind of person there is really never any reason for violence or brutality. We must always solve our disagreements with words. We must “be civil.” 

Except, there’s this thing about civility. It exists between people who share a necessary degree of respect for each other, and when that bond has been broken, civility is a dead letter. And when the language of discourse fails, we return to an older language. If the people who have done so much to pollute our discourse in recent years have a problem with that, well I’m ever so sorry, but I just don’t care. That refusal, that is the movement of what the Greeks called the thymos, the spirited part of a man, and it is the spirit that recoils at these acts and the duplicitous morons that would attempt to convince you that noticing them is wrong. 

There are actually worse things than monsters. I’m afraid that I have to make a LOTR reference here and I do apologize, but while the orcs might have been monsters and eternal enemies of man, they produce less contempt than a Wormtongue, someone who abuses language and reason to confuse and ultimately poison the spirit.

I hadn’t mentioned it, but Kate began her article by describing how, in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, she wept. Well, Kate, I’m not impressed by your tears. I’m not moved by your exhortations. And I’m not persuaded by your arguments. There is a “they” Kate. It’s you.

EDIT: 

Well, it looks like in the time it took me to write this, evidence has surfaced that proves Kate definitively wrong.  Reportedly, Robinson explained to his trans partner that he’d “had enough of [Kirk’s] hate,” adding “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Kate in turn responded with a note on Substack. It’s very stupid.

Yeah, Kate. Totally inscrutable. What but the eye of the Almighty could ever hope to plumb the depths of such a mystery as you just plainly not knowing what the word “psychopath” means. I don’t even know what to say. If you can read this without realizing that you are witnessing a bunch of flailing cope-brain, then you just aren’t going to make it. Obviously responding to a single person does not provide some kind of broad refutation of anything, but I do feel like Kate’s example is illustrative. I feel like probably a lot of people know a lot of Kate’s right now, and maybe there is some value in running through the arguments so you can know just exactly how unserious these people are.