Enforced Political Correctness and Charlie Kirk

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As usual, last night I tuned in to Chris Hayes on MSNBC to watch the evening lineup of political commentary. I was expecting coverage of the Charlie Kirk shooting. I wasn’t expecting the entire hour to be about the Charlie Kirk shooting, but it was. Same with Jen Psaki’s show — at least I think so; I was tuning out after a while. I didn’t bother watching Lawrence O’Donnell. The two MSNBC hosts I did watch were going out of their way to stress, over and over, that Kirk shouldn’t have been shot and we should all feel terrible about it. Well, yeah, okay, but what the bleep? Didn’t anything else happen yesterday?

I didn’t learn until this morning that, earlier in the day, senior political analyst Matthew Dowd had said some politically incorrect things about the late Mr. Kirk. Dowd was promptly fired, and MSNBC issued an apology. What did he say? According to The Guardian,

During his appearance on Katy Tur Reports, Dowd suggested that Kirk’s rhetoric may have contributed to the violence that claimed his life. Kirk, 31, had a history of rightwing provocation and Christian nationalism, and frequently espoused bigoted rhetoric about Islam, women , LGBTQ+ communities and people of color.

“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said, adding: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”

Dowd also speculated about the circumstances of the shooting, saying: “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration. So we have no idea about this.”

Um, that didn’t seem entirely out of line to me. Kirk was famous for his vile, bigoted rhetoric. Compare what Dowd said to things that were said by major political and media figures about the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband or the assassinations of  Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband. Dowd’s comments don’t come anywhere close. But MSNBC was so freaked out the execs must have ordered that the rest of the days’ schedule be dedicated to groveling to the Right about how sorry they all are. And most of what I’m seeing in media today, including left-leaning media, amounts to the apology fest, continuing. You’d think we’d all conspired to assassinate the Pope.

Here’s another what the bleep news story — Florida Reporter Suspended After Texting MAGA Congressman to Ask If He Still Supports Campus Carry After Kirk Shooting. The text was sent before it had been announced that Kirk had died. That wasn’t an unreasonable question, IMO. Also some upstate New York public school staffer has been placed on leave because of some social media posts, but I don’t know what the posts said.

Frankly, if you had gone out yesterday before the shooting and stopped 100 random people on the street and asked them what they thought about Charlie Kirk, most of them wouldn’t have recognized the name. Kirk was a well-known figure among us politics nerds and the younger MAGA crowd, and that was about it. Today flags are being flown at half mast, on Trump’s order, and Kirk has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The flag thing is grossly inappropriate for someone who was strictly a partisan political operative, but no one dares to say so. And I sincerely hope that once Trump is no longer President and we (hopefully) have a not-sociopathic chief executive again, the Presidential Medal of Freedom will be retired. Trump has contaminated the thing too much. I’d rather start over with some new award that can’t be given to the president’s political cronies and donors, but to people who have made genuine contributions to the nation.

And let me also say that if the shooter, whoever that person is, had come to me and asked whether shooting Kirk was a good idea, I would have said no. Don’t do it. It won’t help anybody. Well, except maybe Trump. Nobody is talking about Jeffrey Epstein right now.

But once again, lefties are held to a different standard from righties. And I’m frankly tired of having to be the one who is reasonable. One of these days I’m going to get very tired of being reasonable.

Trump, true to form, has collectively blamed the Left for Kirk’s shooting. He’s basically invited his hot-heated cuties to go out and shoot Democrats. We’ll be very lucky if some prominent Democrats aren’t killed over the next few days. And see also ‘War Is Here’: The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence by David Gilbert at WIRED.

Ed Martin, the US pardon attorney and former acting US attorney for DC, wrote on X: “For it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord,” citing Romans 12:19.

Elon Musk, the X owner and former figurehead of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), posted: “The Left is the party of murder.” He then quoted a post blaming “the left-wing mainstream media, as well as figures like Gavin Newsom” for radicalizing people against right-wing figures like Kirk. “Exactly,” Musk wrote.

Katie Miller, who worked closely with Musk at DOGE and is the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, wrote on X that even liberals condemning the violence “had blood on their hands.”

Basically, we on the Left are not allowed to criticize anyone on the Right in any way, shape, or form, because doing so is the same thing as inciting murder. We are supposed to just smile and not at everything the Right says or does and keep our mouths shut about it. Got that?

This is my favorite part:

Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, who had his sentence for seditious conspiracy with regards to the January 6 Capitol riot commuted by Trump earlier this year, announced on Infowars that it was time to restart his militia group in order to provide public protection for figures like Kirk.

“I’m going to be rebuilding the Oath Keepers, and we will be doing protection again,” said Rhodes. “If my security team had been at that event, if they had been up there on the high point, looking for potential threats, they would have saved Charlie Kirk from being shot.”

Rhodes then called on Trump to “do what’s right, what’s necessary” and “invoke the Insurrection Act” in the wake of the shooting. “You should declare the left in this country is in obvious open rebellion against the law of the United States. They’re committing insurrection, they’re aiding and abetting an invasion, and they’re blocking the execution of federal law,” Rhodes said.

Well, Rhodes would know insurrection.

And About the FBI — one of the ironies of the moment is that Trump’s politicization of the FBI may have rendered the agency unable to find Kirk’s killer. See David Kurtz, TPM, Insiders Describe the Trump FBI Clown Show in Vivid, Buffoonish Detail.

A new lawsuit containing devastating allegations about the clownish politicization of the FBI calls into serious question whether the bureau — under the nominal control of Kash Patel — is up to the task of investigating a major case like the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Hours before Patel befooled himself by live-tweeting the serial apprehension then release of two different people mistakenly believed to be Kirk’s assailant, three fired senior FBI officials described in vivid detail a bureau nearly crippled by the social media obsessions of Patel and his top deputy Dan Bongino. …

… The entire complaint is worth a read to appreciate the buffoonish of Patel and Bongino, but also of a White House that variously:

used an inexperienced 29-year-old staffer to vet candidates to lead the FBI;
refused to fix a clerical error that made Driscoll the acting director instead of the acting deputy director.

But the overall impression left by the lawsuit is far worse: an FBI supine to the Trump White House, led by feckless loyalists who easily wilt under pressure from the likes of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Some major media are seriously reporting that the shooter used ammunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology. I suppose that could be true, but I’m skeptical. The transgender part especially aligns too closely to the Right’s current obsession with trans mass shooters. A week ago there were reports that the Trump DoJ was looking into a way to ban transgender people from owning guns. Smells like agitprop from the DoJ to me. Let’s see if this claim holds up, assuming the shooter is ever found.

Charlie Kirk with Trump

10 thoughts on “Enforced Political Correctness and Charlie Kirk”

  2. I think Dowd got shitcanned to protect Katie Tur. I was watching live when they started talking about the shooting, both used the reasonable association of Kirk's radicalism to this shooting. There was no blaming Kirk but they simply pointed out that his hateful rhetoric cannot be ignored. So Katie is in the club, msnbc was not going to sack her so they tanked Dowd! The media's reaction to this is I guess predictable when you consider that Kirk really was one of them, he was a political media celebrity on the right.

  3. And consider that this is how they are after they've already won everything. They control a majority of state governorships and legislatures, they control the presidency, and they control both houses of Congress. And they are STILL raging.

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    • I've said many times that righties think "free speech" means the right to not be disagreed with. If you criticize them or their ideas, you are violating their rights. If you understand that's how they think, they sorta kinda make sense. They want a world with no dissent from how they want things. 

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  4. Going around the inter-tubes, it's amazing / frightening to see how many people – not only the half-way famous – have gotten into trouble for having an opinion about Charlie Kirk. This is more than I've ever seen.

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  5. The demand from the right seems to be that the left should idolize Kirk because he was assassinated.  Democrats revered JFK (assassinated) MLK (assassinated), the real Bobby Kennedy, (assassinated). So we have to revere Kirk (in their twisted minds.) It's not working and they are pissed.

    Trump this morning suggested (I paraphrase) that noting the similarities between Trump and Hitler, and likening the actions of his administration to Nazis, is inflammatory. Trump went on, with zero evidence, to blame the murder on the left. (Nothing inflammatory there.) 

    Digby's has a good piece on the kind of things Kirk advocated on video by him.  Zero interpretation – it's raw Kirk, like advocating for the stoning of gays, rolling back the Voting Rights Act, discrediting MLK,  "Black women do not have brain processing power…", "Derek Chauvin did not murder George Floyd…"… The list goes on. 

    All this we are supposed to overlook because it's rude to speak ill of the dead.  If the right would just bury the stinking turd of a human being, I'd not be obligated to bring up the facts. The right is building a false narrative about what Kirk stood for. The vast majority do not realize how hateful Charlie Kirk was. I'd be happy to let it go if the Right was not dead set on building monuments to the racist.

    I don't know who is responsible. Or who the shooter is. They may not be the same person. Was the shooter a mercenary and did someone else order the hit? They still don't have a name – they think they have pictures. Young white male, ball cap, sunglasses. He dressed to be indistinguishable if he was ID'd on camera. The shot was from a distance – I think I read 200 feet using an older bolt-action Mauser 30-06 with a scope. The gun may be impossible to trace. From that description, it could almost be WWII vintage. It looks like the shooter fired one shot only.  So a proficient shot using a hard-to-trace weapon does not look like an amateur.  Neither does getting away for as long as he has, unidentified.  The FBI, as Maha noted, looks like the Keystone Cops. 

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  6. Yesterday, the Second Day of the Post-Charlie Kirk Era, both Chris Hayes and Jen Psaki were absent from their MSNBC shows and replaced by substitutes. I want to believe they refused to do any more apologetic groveling over Charlie Kirk. As near as I can tell — I was flipping channels a lot — MSNBC was still totally devoted to Charlie Kirk Shooting coverage and had dropped everything else. I'm not watching until they move on.

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  7. This seems way too many moments of fame for a here-to-fore unknown to me apparent monger of hate speech.  I question how one with a reputation like that was even allowed on a university campus even in the state of Utah.  Utah is well known as a state run by a theocracy with a university system with a history of what was known as the Utah effect. This reputation was based on a number of "results" of research that failed to be replicable by scientists in other states.  It is most famous for "research" claiming room temperature fusion some years ago.  

    Carl Sagan was quite known for stating clearly that outrageous claims demand outrageous levels of proof.  Utah proof is on the other end of the continuum of proof levels by reputation from outrageously strong.  A bit like the proof given about the shooter being motivated by leftists without a shred of evidence by right-wingers.  

    The NYT is reporting the shooter has been turned in by his family.  Let us just say at this point it looks like motivation was a typical one for youth, when the path to hell was paved with good intentions.  He must have thought the end justified the means.   

    Well, it is a moral error mirrored by many adults in power these days.  You can fill in the outrageous amount of evidence available to support that claim just from current events.  IOKIYAR is well known for a reason.

    • Kirk wandred into a nest of opposition. I read that 1000 people signed a petition at the school to keep him away. Even in Utah.

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