I knew that Charlie Kirk had said some heinous things in his short life, but wanted a list so I googled it. This excerpt is from The Nation:
“Kirk had every right to his views and to the way that he expressed them, even if he did not support that right for other people. He founded the Professor Watchlist, committed to singling out academics he believed discriminated against conservative views, scholarship, and students, leading to threats against some of the instructors named. He regularly attacked the LGBTQ community, saying, “God’s perfect law…[says gay people] shall be stoned to death.” He claimed the Civil Rights Act was “a huge mistake,” and called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “an awful person.” He mocked the 2023 political assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, and even suggested someone should bail his assailant out of jail. Kirk even attempted to link Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the assassination of Walz’s close friend and ally, State Senator Melissa Hortman.”
& that’s just for starters.
No one should die by assassination & not while exercising their first amendment to free speech. However, before the 22-year-old assassin was even caught, trump was declaring that the “radical left” had created this divisive atmosphere in the country that led to Kirk’s assassination. Yet, trump himself is the one who sows more division daily through all the obvious ways he’s seeking to topple democracy.
Why is it that the U.S. has a convicted felon for president, who also tried to overturn the 2020 election that he lost? Yet, Brazil’s ex president, Jair Bolsanaro, who lost his election in 2022 , was convicted of attempting to plot a coup and sentenced to 27 years in prison?But criminal justice system failed miserably and here we are.
In fact, when you read about Bolsanaro’s crimes it sounds like trump was following his sick playbook.
Charlie Kirk was just one more casualty in trump’s authoritarian takeover. He was not a hero.
He can’t even be a martyr for the other side since it was a republican who assassinated him. This is a strange wasteland time period in which we can’t sustain any extremes. Liberals are mostly middle of the road. Conservatives are on a spectrum in which trump is the extreme. tyler robinson was apparently a radical conservative. Certainly he believed in the right to bear arms. Unless you believe that assassination is okay as a method of removing your opposition, he’s not a hero either. I would be interested in hearing what gun rights advocates have to say in his defense.
It’s tragic that people in this country are still assassinated and trump never says a word about gun control.
America has cancer.
excellent way of putting it Caren!