Whitewashing the white supremacist
Conservatives are weaponizing Charlie Kirk's death to further his life's work
Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.
I’ve been working on a detailed overview of the growing number of legit primary challenges facing long-serving Democratic lawmakers, and I should have that to you on Sunday or Monday. Tonight, I’m looking deeper at how Charlie Kirk’s murder is being weaponized by a galvanized right-wing movement hellbent on silencing dissent and dismantling liberal society.
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Nearly two full days after the FBI was bailed out by his dad, there’s still no clear motive why Tyler Robinson decided to murder the far-right conservative political commentator Charlie Kirk.
The media continues to fall over itself trying to ascribe traditional political leanings to the 22-year-old assailant, printing and retracting murkily sourced allegations that he was a leftist on several occasions. The reality is that he was so terminally online that his politics and motivations might remain forever inscrutable to anybody whose brain has not been completely poisoned by the post-ironic nihilism of 4chan and the like.
But motivations no longer matter, because the paleo-right’s whitewashing of Kirk’s fringe beliefs and virulent bigotry — assisted by exhausting squish-liberal praise for his politics — has paved the way for the martyrdom that I warned about on Wednesday.
It’s gone far beyond mourning; following a brief period of deleting some of the most bombastic declarations of war posted immediately following Kirk’s murder, the paleo-conservative hive has stood up a rapid reaction mass-cancelation operation that makes a mockery of the persecution complex that animates their politics.
The Trump administration has bombarded government workers with emails threatening employees with discipline for talking ill of Kirk in their personal lives, and has followed through repeatedly: a FEMA employee was suspended for calling Kirk a misogynist and homophobe, a member of the Coast Guard is being disciplined for saying Kirk betrayed the military’s “core values,” and a Secret Service agent was placed on leave for posting that Kirk spewed hatred and racism.
"I am aware of posts displaying contempt toward a fellow American who was assassinated," Navy Secretary John Phelan warned service members on Twitter. "Any uniformed or civilian employee of the Department of the Navy who acts in a manner that brings discredit upon the Department, the @USNavy or the @USMC will be dealt with swiftly and decisively."
Kirk’s murder was tragic and nothing to celebrate, but the circumstances of his death don’t change what he did in life. People should be free to express their disgust with the damage he caused, but that is quickly becoming dangerous.
Teachers in Florida are being suspended for their posts, while an educator in South Carolina was fired for saying Kirk’s death made America greater after famously transphobic Rep. Nancy Mace drew attention to the post. A high school art teacher in Iowa was suspended for calling Kirk a Nazi, and a Black high school teacher in North Carolina is being attacked by Moms for Liberty for pointing out Kirk was aggressively racist.
“Black people stating ‘RIP’ for a Bigot White Supremest is crazy talk,” Idris Abdul-Aziz said in his post. “This dude lived to talk (expletive) about you and yours. What did he say about Black Women again? Let his ass ‘RIH’ Rot in Hell!!!!”
After a teacher in Oklahoma was fired for saying that “Charlie Kirk died the same way he lived: bringing out the worst in people," the state’s Trump-worshipping superintendent wrote a letter to every parent promising that educators would lose their licenses if caught making similar remarks.
In Houston, a high school football coach got axed for calling Kirk “a horrible human being” and reminding friends and family of the Turning Point USA founder’s legacy: “Yes he is leaving behind 2 beautiful little girls and I pray for them. but that man was a horrible f***ing human being,” the coach posted. “He was a legit racist, homophobic, a mysoginist [sic], transphobic nasty person.”
A childcare worker in Wisconsin was fired after public backlash for a post expressing hope that Kirk’s murder would wake them up to the fact that gun violence is a major problem. A judge in Ohio was canned from the board of Cincinnati Bengals QB Joe Burrows’ charity for saying Kirk spread “hatred and division.” Several Delta employees were suspended for undisclosed comments, a children’s hospital worker in Atlanta was fired for criticizing Kirk, and the writer of an upcoming Batman comic book spinoff lost their title for calling Kirk a “Nazi bitch.”
The irony is rich, the consequences chilling: private citizens are being disciplined, fired, and inundated with death threats for accurately pointing out that Kirk spent most of his life spreading bigotry and propagating vicious lies to tens of millions of Americans. After years of denigration and humiliation, members of the communities who have suffered grievously under the politicians and policies that he empowered are repeatedly being punished for expressing relief to their friends and family.
Even the most measured comments, grounded incontrovertible facts, have triggered unprecedented backlash and caused people to lose their livelihoods. In the hours following his murder, Kirk was celebrated for his supposed embrace of free speech and his willingness to confront critics, but for conservatives, that only goes one way: they run on grievance and entitlement, allowing the most privileged to delude themselves into believing that they are under attack and thus entitled to act without regard for anybody else.
It’s that very sense of grievance that has animated almost every policy pursued by this second Trump administration, both officially and otherwise: the efforts to rewrite history in the Smithsonian museums and school curriculums; the war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public and private settings, under the pretense that they are discriminatory by acknowledging race; the gestapo roundups and deportations of immigrants, predicated on the idea that they are taking American jobs and diluting the culture.
Turning Charlie Kirk into a martyr is not simply mourning the loss of a likeminded colleague or a way to ensure his legacy lives on within the conservative movement. His death is being used as a cudgel to silence opposition and further dismantle the cultural infrastructure — schools, nonprofits, federal workers — that undergirds a permanent resistance to right-wing fascism. Shifting these institutions is exactly what Kirk sought out to do by building his right-wing campus infrastructure, and the Trump administration and its allies are using both formal power and mob rule to further that project. It also mainstreams his bigotry and embeds it in the culture.
They are not punishing critics of a fallen demagogue out of a desire for civil dialogue or respect for a common decency. There is no version of what the teachers in question posted that would have been more acceptable. There are never any consequences for the most extreme right-wing rhetoric; Facebook has long since become a wasteland for lies and hatred, and it’s now purposely left unchecked by the executives who have shifted to the right to curry favor with Trump.
The right’s idea of comedy includes crude jokes about murdered Democratic legislators and giddiness over the assault and attempted murder of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and they’ve been dead serious about calling for the deportation of progressive lawmakers and suggestions that homeless people be murdered en masse. This isn’t about respect, but sheer power.
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This reminds me of the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. A Dutch communist, named Marinus van der Lubbe, confessed and was convicted of the crime by the Nazis, and was executed. The “Reichstag Fire Decree” of February 28, 1933, included a list of crimes for which the death penalty was to be imposed instead of a life sentence, as was previously the case. The law concerning the imposition and execution of the death penalty was passed by Hitler's government on March 29, on the basis of the Enabling Act, which had been passed on March 23, 1933. It extended the law retroactively to January 31, 1933, thereby violating Article 116 of the Weimar Constitution which prohibited retroactive penalties. The Enabling Act itself, however, made this legislation constitutional, provided the office of the president and the Reichstag and Reichsrat were not affected. It could thus be applied to van der Lubbe. The Reichstag fire enabled Hitler to rule by “emergency power”. Could Robinson, or someone else later on, be today’s van der Lubbe? Does not all of this sound all too familiar? Remember how Chancellor Palpatine, who was also Darth Sidious, took power in Star Wars? If you have read this far, then you can see where I am headed.
I’ll keep saying it. Nazism. Yes it’s the blueprint of the rise of Hitler
and N A Z I S M