At NFL games across the United States this past weekend, tributes were made to a man who claimed Black women like Michelle Obama “do not have the brain processing power” of their white colleagues. In the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, three days of mourning, with flags at half-staff, were ordered by the Democratic governor “in respect for the memory” of an activist who called for “a ban on all third-worlders” — some 50 million Americans are foreign-born — “legal or illegal,” citing a racist conspiracy theory about how “they” are seeking to supplant God-fearing Caucasians with altogether inferior people of color.
“They want to replace white, Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants with Mexican[s], Nicaraguans and El Salvadorians,” he said over the summer, lamenting the size of the Latino population in a former Mexican territory called “Los Angeles.”
Enough has been said about Charlie Kirk, who was killed not by an immigrant, police say, but by a 22-year-old white man from Utah. Too much, even: the founder of Turning Point USA was an important ally of President Donald Trump, but most people had never heard of him before he was shot and killed last week. That, in fact — that the murder of a MAGA activist has been given a full-court media treatment as if he were a nonpartisan national hero or an actual pope, with liberals from The New York Times to the governor’s office dutifully performing their subservience to Donald Trump’s hegemony — is what now requires scrutiny.
It was just three months ago that democracy was directly and explicitly attacked. Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House, was gunned down in her home, alongside her husband and golden retriever, by a right-wing, anti-choice assassin who friends say was a devoted follower of the president of the United States. The 57-year-old admitted killer, who also wounded state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife and was subsequently given a platform to justify his actions on MAGA pundit Glenn Beck’s website, tilted the balance of power in what had been an evenly divided House of Representatives.
But the liberal opposition was largely unwilling to be so uncouth as to connect the dots. While the Trump White House has leaped to exploit the murder of a political ally before their blood was even dry or the killer’s motive established, seeking to justify a longstanding desire to purge the left from public life — something now being accomplished with the help of media owners and college administrators — Democrats responded to the cold-blooded stalking and murder of one of their own with sheepish paeans to shared, bipartisan responsibilities.
“Leaders across our country must speak and act with the moral clarity this moment demands,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said at the time. “This is unacceptable — we all have a responsibility to stand up and work to defeat the political violence that is tearing through our country.”
Fine words — indisputable, even — but also out of touch with the times, when only one side feels a responsibility to uphold democratic norms and the other is led by a man who openly rejects them; who, rather, encouraged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in an effort to retain power after losing an election, and then proceeded to pardon each and every man who assaulted a police officer that day on his behalf.
Shapiro, himself a target of political violence, did not lower his state’s flags, either.
As for Trump, asked Monday why he didn’t do for Melissa Hortman what he has done for Kirk — ordering flags to be at half-staff at government properties across the country — he responded: “I’m not familiar. The who?”
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Trump could almost be forgiven for not remembering the targeted killing of a Democrat. The slaughter, just 90 days ago, was not observed with a moment of silence at a New York Yankees game, nor was remarked upon as “a turning point for us as a society” by a Supreme Court justice; even the deceased’s own colleagues felt it vulgar to attribute blame for avowedly right-wing, anti-abortion violence, even as Trump routinely charges Democrats with murdering babies.
The disparity is more grotesque than that: while the right falsely accused Hortman’s killer of being a left-wing extremist, Trump openly defends, in his own words, the “radicals on the right,” claiming they “oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” or are motivated by simple, American xenophobia. They just don’t “want these people coming in,” he told Fox News last week (he’s not wrong: the neo-Nazi who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in Trump’s first term did indeed blame Jews for bringing “invaders in that kill our people”).
What is there to say? One side is too timid to weaponize its martyrs, while the other denies that the extremists who create them are even a problem. And America’s largest institutions, from its sports leagues to its universities, play along with this farce in the name of national unity.
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While those on the left are sometimes perpetrators of political violence, if not the most likely, what is increasingly clear is they are not allowed to be its victims, as any such national tributes would be divisive. Recognizing a dead Democrat, on national television? It would be provocative, and certainly partisan, in a country where no facet of life is now considered outside the purview of the American president and a federal government willing to investigate each and every one of his irritants.
The killing of Charlie Kirk did not just show that the United States is a violent country with too many guns; it showed that those who see a future for themselves in politics and society are now eager to display their submission to a man who would, in turn, not even notice if they died. That’s an indication that, a decade after the country began its descent into right-wing autocracy, America’s culture is now as degraded as its democracy.
