Canceling for Kirk

A weight in my core, sinking my center. A countervailing force up on my arms, which feel thin and floaty. The pressing dread creates a bilocatic effect, like I’m remote viewing my own stasis from outside my corporeal confines. Like the poet, I felt a funeral, in my brain.

My body’s pretzling reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk came as a shock. As with most Americans faintly familiar with the late viral personality’s gotcha-dunk clips, I found him to be dweebish, even, at times, grating. Who talks in hypercircles around a bunch of book-toting, TikTok-taught college juniors and calls it a “debate”? The William Randolph Hearst of the internet, that’s who.

Now Charlie Kirk is dead. Charlie Kirk is dead.

Typing, uttering, even whispering that very statement of objective reality feels strange. Heidegger termed this disorienting rush geworfenheit, which translates as being “thrown” into an unfamiliar state. A week ago, as of this writing, Charlie Kirk was alive and rhetorically kicking undergrad keister. Seven days later, he’s snuffed, o dead, dead, dead, sniped off this mortal plane. Denied his destiny of growing gray, corpulent, and bald, hawking supplements and gold ingots on AM radio.

“By whose trigger finger?” was the anxious question that obtained the anxious 48 hours following the bloody dispatch. Our intrepid Federal Bureau of Investigation, known best for its crumbling gothic headquarters, a paranormal investigation television series, and harassing Catholic school teachers, nabbed two bystanders before collaring the alleged killer. A sterling op, Ka$h! Thank goodness compunction and fear of an accessory charge won out, with the father conspiring to turn his son over to what will certainly be the hangman’s desert.

Kirk’s assassin turned out to be right-wing paranoia reified: a resentful video-game nerd with a transgender boyfriend. Worse: he reportedly harbored a “furry” fetish. Baroque sexuality paired with an internet obsessive’s tenuous grip on reality, then mixed with ill feelings towards his traditional Mormon family—an aflamed casserole of consternation intensely liable to melt down. The shooter’s name, Tyler Robinson, rings with a main-street earnestness that makes his premeditated murder, possibly hatched in the digital meetups of Discord, disturbingly Lynchian.

The Right is grappling with Kirk’s grisly wetworking by defying stunted expectations. Whereas the Left plays Calvinball—rhetorically supporting restraint when in the wrong, pursuing remorseless destruction of its enemy with righteous conviction—conservatives eagerly jumped off the sidelines, tossing aside their padded helmets, itching for some ruthless, ruleless play.

First move of every counterrevolution: mass firings. Screenshots of baying liberals basking in Kirk’s demise were taken. Lists were compiled. Publicly viewable databases are in the works that will immortalize your local elementary school’s cafeteria ladeler posting “Charly had ti coming!!11 Dumb stupid FACSISst!” on Instagram. Wall Street is likely pricing in a recession once the next jobs numbers drop—September’s report is going to show a shock jump in unemployment claims. The pedagogy profession will see the most drastic slice. Always the sign of a hale and hearty country when sadists are responsible for inculcating our children with good, productive values!

The conservative embrace of fire-them ledgers isn’t wholly out of the blue, or, red, as it were. Kirk’s death was an upfront example of the fear anyone to the right of Rachel Maddow has about a political camp replete with psychopathological twenty-year-olds. Of course, the radlib screechers did themselves no favors in heartily reveling over the gruesome homicide. Footage of a Texas State University student mocking Kirk at a vigil went nearly as viral as the artery-shot itself. The clip, which caromed into the feeds of those already bombarded with shaky footage of Kirk’s corpse, is beyond many things: the pale, decency, infuriating. The student, either acting asinine for views or out of hatred, was expelled. A better punishment would be a good wringing of his neck—not lifetime career ruination.

Does such dogged pursuit of those spouting churlish exultations over Kirk’s coffin count as right-wing “cancel culture”?

And does it render the conservative defense of free speech mute going forward? More importantly, should Attorney General Pam Bondi, in flopping for attagirls, be relieved of her post for nonsensically stating hate speech is illegal in America?

To the latter inquiry, yes. (Who put Elmer Fudd at the helm of the Justice Department?) For the remaining questions, yes and no. Cancel culture is not merely demanding walking papers over differences of opinion. It is, as Matthew Continetti argued, “a set of practices used in the digital era to enforce progressively coded norms and figures of speech.” The karet campaigns used by progs in the past were mostly focused on rendering normal, if contestable, opinions verboten. Right now, Kirk antagonists, some in professional echelons like the military, are drafting econiums to the heinous bloodletting of a political figure. In some instances, such cruel-hearted statements violate corporate codes of conduct, which typically contain clauses about not being a public sociopath.

The standards are different, but social termination is still the end. Such ruination should render the right wary. Creating another class of dispossessed, unhirable miscreants won’t bode well for the larger polity. Vengeance, though we may spoil hungrily for it, exacerbates darker longings. Mimetic lizard-brain reflexes feel so damn good, tickling a fortified lobe in our head where ancient instincts remain stored, which is a sure sign they are spiritually ruinous.