Counting or Not Counting Gang Violence?

I originally became aware of Turning Point USA when I was in college (the first time). In 2017 there was an article in Michigan Daily about a conservative student organization called TPUSA that had published a “Professor Watchlist” which included two staff members at the University of Michigan. The list was compiled to identify college professors that supposedly discriminated against conservative students or preached “wokeness” in the classroom. Many people on the list received threats and harassment from TPUSA’s cretinous supporters. It’s for this reason that I never took TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk seriously as a free speech warrior. In fact, he was quite the opposite. 

That same year Charlie Kirk would block me on his official Facebook account because I had sent him an edited TPUSA meme featuring him saying, “A while back I was in a car accident and my dick and balls switched places. My dick is on bottom and my balls are on top.” I included a message, “Did you really say this, Charlie?” I’ll never forget his response before getting blocked: “I hope you find your soul.”

Charlie’s soul lives on through the Kirkified meme, which is basically editing his face onto anyone or anything. One Kirkified meme I saw featured a segment of the “What Did I Miss?” music video from Drake’s album Iceman. Someone used AI to edit Charlie’s face on Drake’s head as he sang the words, “Nobody cares until they in front of your tombstone.”

The assassination of Charlie Kirk spawned an outpouring of love and support from the conservative sphere of influence, as well as a severe backlash against anyone who dared critique the legacy of the right’s favorite MAGA podcaster. Their contention was that Charlie Kirk was merely a warrior for speech and that his assassination was celebrated by rotten liberals and communists who were giddy to see Charlie silenced. But the idea that Charlie was killed for his ideas obfuscates who he really was. He wasn’t just a podcaster. Charlie Kirk was the leader of the youth indoctrination wing of MAGA. He directly advised the President. He sent his supporters after college professors for the crime of being “woke”.

The so called defenders of free speech wasted no time going after anyone who had anything negative to say about Charlie in the wake of his death. Laura Loomer proudly bragged about calling the employers of people who had posted Charlie Kirk memes to get them fired from their jobs. A South African man by the name of Nota Baloyi had his visa cancelled for simply tweeting that, “Charlie Kirk won’t be remembered as a hero. He was used to astroturf a movement of white nationalist trailer trash!” A man in Tennessee won a settlement of $835,000 after spending over a month in jail for making a flippant post about Charlie’s death.

Maybe this is controversial to some, but I believe you are allowed to be happy when an evil person dies. These days it feels like that’s all we have to look forward to. The media backlash against people celebrating Charlie’s death, or at least critiquing his legacy, comes from people that see themselves in Charlie. Someone like Laura Loomer or Nick Fuentes understands that if a similar tragedy were to befall them, their memory would be subject to the same kind of humiliation.

A year after Charlie’s assassination it’s clear that the frenzy has died down. There were attempts to create national holidays, rename streets, and otherwise make public dedications to MAGA’s fallen soldier. The right greatly overestimated how much ordinary people cared. The day of the assassination a Twitter account with the screen name Graham Linehan infamously posted, “They just created a million Charlie Kirk’s.” The problem with this sentiment is there already were a million Charlie Kirk’s, and they’re not the kind of people you want to associate with. 

I wouldn’t describe what Charlie Kirk did as debate. What he did was closer to aggravated sophistry. The people he would debate during his events were 18 to 22 year old college students. It’s hardly a feat to dunk on people in their early adulthood, but Charlie didn’t want a challenge. He was a college dropout and had to overcompensate by returning to the college campuses that defeated him to spar with snot nosed liberals that were still developing politically.

The attempts to canonize Charlie failed spectacularly. At first, they tried to make his widow Erika Kirk the main steward of his legacy, but Erika had dollar signs in her eyes. She was more focused on securing the bag. A leaked TPUSA conference call from 11 days after Charlie’s murder featured a giddy Erika bragging about how much merch TPUSA had sold at Charlie’s funeral. Erika’s public feud with Candace Owen’s over Charlie’s legacy largely stemmed from a dispute over which one of them had the right to make money off of Charlie’s murder. I do believe Owens genuinely cared for Charlie, but she is so violently schizophrenic and committed to the grift that she couldn’t help but spin conspiratorial fairy tales in an effort to find the “real” killer. Candace blamed Israel and the French legion for Charlie’s death. She suggested that Charlie was the first casualty of the Iran war. She even implied at one point that Erika might have had something to do with it. This presented a problem for Erika: Candace was cutting in on her action. People were more interested in what Candace had to say, and they resented Erika for not wanting to find the “real” killer.

Trump couldn’t be bothered about Charlie’s death. When asked by a reporter, Trump immediately pivoted to talking about the construction for his ballroom addition to the White House. Many right wing media personalities like Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, and Nick Fuentes were all jockeying for position, trying to inherit the mantle of what Charlie represented for America’s neofascist movement. All of them are scantless, conniving, careerist vultures picking at the bones of their fallen comrade.

Despite the right’s best efforts, Charlie’s death became one of the internet’s most enduring jokes, and maybe that’s what he deserves. It’s a unique kind of spiritual humiliation to have his image plastered all over the internet in such disgraceful ways. But at the end of the day, Charlie will be remembered as a MAGA dead ender, because that’s what he was. His last words were very ironic, as many have pointed out. His final breath was spent attempting to trivialize an audience question about mass shootings. The audience member asks if Charlie knows how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years. Charlie responds, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” a moment before (allegedly) getting shot in the neck by Tyler Robinson. His attempt to deflect towards race was cut short by a white Mormon man. Charlie once said, “I think it’s worth it. It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights. That’s a prudent deal. It is rational.” But of course, Charlie made this statement thinking he would never be on the receiving end of gun violence. In a tragically ironic way, he got what he asked for.