Tolerance For The Intolerant - The Question of Thoughts and Prayers
You know who we’re talking about.
So Charlie Kirk, well-renowned professional asshole, died yesterday doing what he loved - promoting gun violence. The world is in shock, because it’s not often that the victim of a school shooting is a single grown, hateful man. Netanyahu tweeted his thoughts and prayers for Charlie, Congress paused for a moment of silence in honor of his memory, the White House flags are at half-mast, saluting a man who dedicated his life to what he believed in - building a more racist, more misogynistic, more transphobic, more bloody America.
His casket is being flown out of Utah on Air Force 2.
Sadly his bright light of hatred and vitriol was extinguished too soon. Never again will we hear him explain how, if his ten year old daughter ended up pregnant as a result of sexual assault, he would make her keep the pregnancy and ‘the baby WOULD be delivered’. Never again will we hear his sweet voice telling us how ‘some gun deaths each year are unfortunately unavoidable but it’s a reasonable price to pay to protect our 2nd amendment rights, which let us protect all our other god-given rights’. Never again will he make us ponder by uttering how ‘Slavery was kinda good for Black people, because they committed fewer crimes then.’
Never again will he guide us morally by explaining how ‘empathy is a made-up, new-age word that does a lot of damage and, frankly, makes him feel sick to even hear it’.
The loss is immeasurable.
Now the reaction of the social media rabble has been, as it always is in these cases, neatly split between those accurately assessing his departure as a net positive for the world at large, and those crying out to ‘THINK OF THE CHILDREN! THE HUMANITY! WHERE IS YOUR EMPATHY!’
The fact that they see no irony in asking for empathy for a dude who specifically expounded in great detail on how he doesn’t believe in the very concept, how the mere sound of the words ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ makes him retch, and how he genuinely believes removing those disgusting harmful concepts from the world would make it a better place, is frankly perplexing to me. The man himself disagrees with you. You wouldn’t honor the life of a vegan by throwing a massive barbecue party. You wouldn’t honor the life of an activist by donating to Palantir in their name.
Why would you ‘honor’ the life of a man literally famous for despising human compassion by insisting everyone should show him some? Everyone roasting the shit out of him from the second his body hit the floor is, frankly, what he would have wanted. All the zingers and one-liners along the lines of ‘Renowned Anti-Vaxxer Finally Gets Shot’ or ‘Charlie Kirk died of a Fentanyl overdose’ (a reversal of Charlie’s claim that George Floyd died not of suffocation under a police officer’s knee, but ‘largely of a Fentanyl overdose’) are doing more to honor his legacy than all the weeping of ‘maybe we didn’t agree on everything but he was still a human being and a family man!!!’
(There is also an interview where he shares how he just doesn’t understand how his wife has these magical powers with their children, to show them patience and understanding and shit. He shakes his head in befuddlement, like man, women are so weird. Having bonds with their own kids. Bizarre.)
He would have laughed at your attempts to humanize him. He would mock you for trying.
But here we start hitting upon several interesting debate points, relating to how tolerance and intolerance are supposed to interact in the public sphere.
Out of the two global social groups - the loosely right-wing and the loosely left-wing, the left is disproportionately more often assaulted by this cry to ‘show empathy’. Which is profoundly weird, because we’re the side that seems to even have any to begin with.
Most leftist talking points are, essentially, based on empathy. We should want to help other human beings. People who are ill should have healthcare. Children who are hungry should have nourishment. Animals that are suffering, nature that is damaged, should be protected. People whose countries have been reduced to rubble should have a new safe haven to rebuild their lives. People who have historically been marginalized should be given safety, and equality.
All of these positions can be boiled down to the very traditional and very Christian ‘do unto others’ tenet. You would not wish to live your life in perpetual pain and danger, so you don’t think other living beings should be forced to either. That is, essentially, ‘the left’.
So how do we come to the position where that same left, who is in any regular situation relentlessly mocked and derided for having these ‘stupid pansy snowflake dumbass bleeding heart’ opinions, is suddenly being sternly reminded how ‘a person losing their life is STILL SAD, and we should treat their passing with respect and kindness’? The same respect and kindness that very same person, before becoming a corpse, did not extend to one single other living being on this planet?
……why?
And here is really the crux of the matter - should compassion be universal? Should love be unconditional? Can it be?
Does the old adage about how ‘tolerance must be tolerant towards everything except intolerance’ not ultimately hold true? Do you not see how being ‘tolerant towards intolerance’ is an oxymoron at its core? Could we have, in fact, won WWII with compassion and understanding?
Now anyone who has ever loved can, I am pretty sure, confirm that most love is not - cannot be - unconditional. Love arises for reasons, and it wanes for reasons. If love were unconditional, we would just all love everybody, right? Like if there is absolutely no conditionality to your love, what would ever get in the way of you loving every single person you encounter?
Now I don’t know about you, but I do not love every single person I encounter.
Quite the opposite in fact. It is difficult to find people who will move us to love. And I don’t here mean just romantic love, but any sort at all. Platonic, collegial, spiritual, intellectual, you choose. There is an alchemy to love. Human attachment is ultimately a mystery.
Someone can introduce you to a person who, on paper, hits every single thing you respect and admire, they could share all of your hobbies and love all the same authors and root for the same sports team and you might still simply not feel it - not even a friendship. The spark is simply not there.
Another person might make one random throwaway joke and you light up inside like a pinball machine going ‘this is it, they are the right thing!!!’
It’s magic.
Now obviously we do not need to go quite to ‘love’ levels to wish someone remain safe and sound. One of the stupider ‘support the genocide, you guys’ takes during the last two years has been the ‘hey, LGBTQIA community!!! Palestinians hate gay people, but Israelis love them!!!’
Now without getting into the quagmire of moral corruption that is this particular bad-faith argument, we can witness myriads of queer people daily who keep responding to this ‘point’ by saying how empathy actually isn’t transactional, and they don’t want two million people suffering and dying in a brutal extermination EVEN if those people don’t share all of their moral beliefs.
‘Oh, empathy isn’t transactional, you say? So then you SHOULD be mourning for Charlie Kirk! Just because his moral beliefs were non-exis….khrmmm…. I mean, different to yours, that doesn’t mean you should spit on his grave?’
And there we come to a new level of expected empathy - Empathy for the Oppressor.
We saw this in spades with the shooting of Brian Thompson. The same slurry of ‘he is a FATHER!!! He is a HUMAN BEING!!!’ was launched at us from every digital orifice of the massive Propaganda Machine we call ‘social media’, but his company still had to take down its fakeass ‘we are mourning the loss of a beloved friend and colleague….’ post because it’s number of likes was skyrocketing and the mean jokes and cry-laughing emojis were racking up under it in the thousands.
A few other billionaires/ billionaire-adjacent people have also died in weird circumstances since dear old Brian, but the Apparatus had learned - we heard not a peep about them. They knew they couldn’t manipulate us into demonstrating sympathy for the devil, and they didn’t want another avalanche of laugh-cry emojis. So they kept their mouths shut.
So, are we bad people if we fail to muster up any sympathy for the devil? If your abusive parent passes away and you feel relieved instead of sad, are you the problem? If a cruel mistress who beats you with sticks for speaking your native language dies of diphtheria, are you weird if you don’t cry for her? If the mafia boss who was shaking you down for ‘protection’ money every month eats a bullet in a turf war, are you supposed to remember ‘he also had children’?
‘Ok Lidija, but you’re talking about direct harm here. Charlie was just a debater. He thought we should discuss and exchange our ideas. He wasn’t hurting anyone directly! He just wanted to talk to people!’
Now the disingenuousness of this argument runs deep. Charlie Kirk ‘wanted to exchange ideas’ the same way Hitler wanted to ‘throw fun parades’. This type of manipulative sophistry is exactly why people like Kirk do spread real harm through the use of words alone. Kirk’s following counted millions. To this following he kept feeding ideas along the lines of ‘if she gives consent but then takes it back, that’s a gray area’ and ‘school shootings are the price of freedom, but gang violence is the real problem’. If you imagine these beliefs don’t spread real, physical harm, you’re…. wrong.
Also I have never seen him concede a point. I have never seen him engage in good faith arguments, or genuinely respond to his opponent’s point. He was essentially extremely shit at debating. Because ‘debate’ is actually not just ‘sticking to your own opinion regardless of what new information you are presented with.’ The person who wins in debates is not the person who can pronounce the edgiest shit-take without blinking and then just refuse to budge no matter what their opponent says.
If Bibi Netanyahu is mourning your passing, rest assured that your impact on the world was not ‘promoting open debate’.
Charlie Kirk’s business was not ‘debate’, it was ‘propaganda’. Couching it in the disguise of ‘open-minded discussion and intellectual exchange’ is par for the course, because when your job is to spread propaganda, you can’t exactly lead with that. ‘Get Your Propaganda Here!!!’ is, weirdly, not an effective way to sell propaganda.
The most effective way to sell propaganda is to make it look as close to ‘hey it’s just my opinion, man’ as possible. Make it vaguely logic-adjacent. And then lay in that deep core of confirming people’s grossest selfish takes. ‘You want to get some but the girl is getting uncomfortable? Hey, if she previously seemed into it it’s totally understandable that you want to force her! Who could blame you?’ ‘Owning guns makes you feel powerful but you’re not sure how to square that with all the gun violence in our society? Don’t worry about it man, it’s totally fine for YOU to have guns!!! It’s those other bad, different color people that do the really BAD things with guns! We’re fine! We would never do BAD things with our guns. Not like those other, BAD people.’
This is pandering. It is justification. He is speaking only and exclusively to his base, reassuring them their shitty, selfish takes are totally fine. Empathy is gross, man. Government handouts are socialism, man. Fuck women, fuck minorities, fuck the poor. And if anyone argues with you about it, here are the talking points you need to drag that conversation down to hell.
It’s not accidental that all these right wing ‘debate champions’ constantly get embarrassed in public by, like, random college kids. Their debate skills are shit. Because they don’t care about debate. All they care about is strengthening The Message. And The Message is not for the people across the isle - it’s for the people who already follow them, and are there to watch them ‘own the libs’. And the reason they can never actually see how badly they are losing is because they, also, do not give a shit about ‘debate’.
Their relationship with The Message is emotional. They just want the dopamine hit of hearing their shitty selfish secret opinion said out loud.
In this sense we can say that Charlie Kirk lived by the sword, and died by the sword. He was murdered by, essentially, a likeminded individual - someone who also believes that guns can be used for the good of society. He was killed by, effectively, a comrade. Because think about it - defending unfettered gun ownership is literally defending the idea that hey, sometimes it’s totally ok to shoot people. In fact, sometimes it is necessary. Right? Because guns serve no other purpose. No one is using their semi-automatic rifle as a walking stick, or a leg splint. No one is tying their climbing runner beans to it in the garden.
The only usage scenario for a gun is ‘shoot somebody.’
Charlie Kirk believed this was an important and useful thing, beautiful even. Definitely necessary.
Apparently, so did his killer.
That said, I personally do not actually think that we should resolve all our disagreements by shooting people in the neck. I do think that level of political violence is harmful for society at large. But guess what - I didn’t shoot him. The people cracking jokes about his death didn’t shoot him. The people trying to genuinely explain how irrational it is to expect oppressed people to mourn someone who was actively participating in and promoting their oppression did not shoot him. It is, in fact, NOT how we approach political disagreements. Let’s remember the wild accusations flying about the deadly left wing ideology of Trump’s would-be assassin before it turned out to be a Republican kid. Because of course it did. Another believer in the ‘Guns Solve Problems’ creed.
So I am not speculating on the identity of the shooter. I have no idea what his affiliations or his reasons were. I don’t think mentally stable, reasonable, rational people generally tend to reach for snipers to resolve their issues, political or otherwise. (Unless they are, you know…. paid to do so. That weird private plane taking off minutes after the shooting with no identifying signs sure was weird, eh.)
But.
Do we really find it weird to see that once the social contract starts unraveling, it unravels on both sides?
I do hate constantly running back to WWII but it is such a clear thing to compare against.
Before WWII, the normal, regular, decent, empathetic people in European countries weren’t going around executing strangers, right? That’s not how society functions. But once the war started, you had regular people joining secret militias and resistance organizations in every single affected country.
In Yugoslavia in the ‘80s, one of our main points of pride was to what degree our totally regular citizens - men, women and children who had up until recently lived ordinary little lives - were suddenly ready to garrote strangers in the woods, or blow up train tracks just as supply trains passed, or slip activated grenades down the barrels of tanks with those delicate little child fingers.
How come?? Did all those people become BAD overnight? Did they lose EMPATHY? Become SAVAGES?
Or did they see that there was no more social order to protect them, and realize that if they wanted to ensure their survival, and the survival of their children, against an oncoming overwhelming violent force - they had to do something for themselves?
‘Heyyy are you inviting people to go out and shoot whoever they see as ‘the enemy’?’
No, I decidedly am NOT doing that. I think you guys should finally get yourself some gun laws to match the rest of the goddamned world because this is just stupid. We’re all over here shaking our heads and frowning at you. Owning an AR15 is not ‘freedom’. Get your head out of your ass.
But I AM saying that, historically, action leads to reaction and pressure leads to resistance. Injustice leads to uprising. These are not moral proclamations, nor invitations to any sort of action. They are observations of the living world. If I say ‘if you keep poking the cat with a stick, she is going to scratch you’, I am not encouraging cats to scratch humans more ferociously. I am telling you your actions can have consequences.
ICE agents crying about random citizens getting into fisticuffs with them as they try to peacefully and lawfully stuff random citizens into unmarked vehicles based on blatant racial profiling is stupid - obviously people are not going to be excited about your ‘lawful’ kidnapping squads. Israel crying about the ‘hateful acts of terrorists’ when six-year-olds throw rocks at the tanks of the people who slaughtered their parents is stupid - what are they going to do, write you a strongly worded letter? About how you shouldn’t be raping and starving their 12 year old cousins in unmarked jails?
So if the people who are used to dishing out the violence but never receiving it - the Charlie Kirks, the Brian Thompsons - occasionally get reminded that they too are squishy and made of flesh - is this truly a tragedy?
And again - whatever the ‘government’ and ‘the news’ are claiming, this is looking a whole lot like a professional hit. I don’t for a second think there is a radicalized leftist blue-haired trans kid behind this particular shooting. But - if we are moving to a more violent society - and at this point it seems difficult to argue that we are not - can the blame for this violence, in general, truly be laid at the feet of those who reacted to it, sooner than those who spent their lives instigating it, gleefully? Just because they thought they would forever be dishing it out, and never taking it on the nose?
Which brings us to another moment of illumination - how come the people who chronically preach no mercy, no empathy, no handouts, no socialism, no innocents in Gaza - how come they suddenly want the handouts, and the innocent treatment, and the empathy, and the respect, and the socialism, when it’s about them?
How can you with the same breath defend Charlie Kirk’s right to say every god-awful thing under the sun, because ‘he is just talking’, but you are giving me shit for ‘just talking’ about what a waste of oxygen he was? How can you defend US ‘pre-emptive defense’ against whatever new world target but feign shock when those targets - GASP - hit back? What makes one person’s lack of empathy their ‘right to their opinion’ but another person’s lack of empathy FOR THAT SAME IMMORAL BASTARD is suddenly some sort of moral failing?
Yeah, no. You can keep it.
‘But he has children!!’ Lots of shitty people have children. I feel bad for his children, of course I do. No child should witness a shooting.
NO CHILD SHOULD WITNESS A SHOOTING.
You think old Charlie would have agreed with me?
Thank you for this sharp piece of writing. I completely agree.
So very well said. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And all the liberal apologists and excuse makers can just .. wallow in their tears.