Do You Have a Right to Exist?

“Only One Side Thinks You Have the Right to Exist,” Bad Crow Review

I really just want to be in Japan. Help a brother out.

The thing that sticks with me about the guys surfing the Sada River is how powerful the waves were rolling inland and up the river from the bay. They were small, probably two feet on average, but really energetic, and the currents running along the shores, particularly the one nearest me, looked vicious.

One Side Thinks You Have the Right to Exist

I kinda thought I was done with Charlie Kirk, but a couple of things came up today, one being newsletter pal (and one-time real-life meetup) Ed Kazala’s pithy take on Ezra Klein in the comments on a recent post. Which reminds me, if you like a post or don’t like a post feel free to say so, and hit the goddamn like button if it’s the former. I crave the button. Anyway, Edward:

One other possibility is that Klein is one of those liberals who genuinely believes that there’s good in everyone, and that if we just talk to each other about our beliefs, all of our differences will magically disappear. People like him do not get the fact that Kirk’s followers want him, and others like him, dead.

That echos something I read the other day from Jacob Weindling at Splinter, characterizing Klein as a mark for guys like Kirk. I was writing about that in the context of some guy on Nextdoor wanting to beat me up and put me in a concentration camp because I quoted Kirk on the guy’s RIP thread, which I acknowledge was provocative and intentionally so, but in the ordinary way of things quoting from a guy’s biggest hits on a thread eulogizing him wouldn’t be an issue.

Ed’s comment reminded me of a thing from Jamelle Bouie, a Klein colleague at The Times, seemingly in response to the original Klein piece following the assassination. I’ve been checking the paper for a followup from Klein too, given the massive unfavorable response to his opinion that Kirk had been doing politics right; he reacted today, tied to a conversation with Ben Shapiro recorded for Klein’s podcast before the assassination. First, Bouie:

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

I think Bouie understates the case against Kirk, and he ends with kind of a boilerplate statement about it being possible to mourn the guy without whitewashing, as it were, his politics. I don’t mourn the guy; I mourn the circumstances because I think political killings are acceptable only in the most dire of times and we’re not there yet—headed there, certainly, in no small part thanks to Kirk, but not there yet—but I don’t mourn him in any personal sense.

Klein’s conversation with Shapiro is headlined “We Are Going to Have to Live With Each Other.” The podcast introduction (this is from the transcript, as I don’t generally listen to podcasts) is unusually long and concludes with Klein essentially doubling down on his sentiments about Kirk.

A few days before Kirk’s murder, I had taped an episode with Ben Shapiro. Shapiro is well to my political right, a person with whom I have had many disagreements — yet also a person with whom I’ve had good conversations over the years.

This conversation was no different. It was about his new book, “Lions and Scavengers.” And talking to him surprised me. You learn things talking to people that you don’t expect.

So I left this conversation as it was. It’s about Shapiro’s new book and the political moment before Kirk’s murder. I wanted to let it live as it was, because talking to one another about our disagreements isn’t only something we should do in grief or in horror. It’s just something we should be doing.

The thing is, Klein is in a position to chat with Shapiro, and there’s value to Shapiro in showing up for the conversation; Klein has a large audience and Shapiro gets to sound reasonable, or at least not rabid, to them. He’s getting Klein-washed. This is in contrast to much of Shapiro’s video and print output, where he often enough denigrates the usual suspects—trans people, Black people, immigrants and the like—to the point of dehumanization.

Klein can have that chat. Most of us can’t, because there’s no value to Shapiro in being civil with the likes of us. He gains nothing from it; in fact, it could cost him readers, viewers and revenue. But I suspect Klein now thinks of himself as a necessary model for how to co-exist more or less peacefully with the opposition, rather than as one of a relatively few people privileged enough, insulated enough—for now—to do that with people who are determinedly leading us down a path to hell.

There is no model of liberal or democratic socialist government which ends in expulsion or concentration camps for or the wholesale killing of people who oppose that government or those philosophies. There just isn’t. But that’s the goddamn essence of what the regime and their supporters propose. Can’t we all just get along? Ultimately, no. Somebody has to prevail and there’s only one side with repression and bloodshed as a foundational principle.

Seems like Kirk’s assassin is, in most respects, just some guy

Ken Klippenstein got hold of some Discord chats involving Tyler Robinson, with which the press and in particular right-wing figures have been much obsessed. Klippenstein says that other media outlets have them too but won’t publish them. He also talked at length with some of the people who knew Robinson well.

Though the family was generally supportive of Robinson (a claim corroborated by his mother’s Facebook account, brimming with praise for Tyler) they didn’t seem to know about his relationship with a transgender person named Lance, the friend said.

When I asked if his family would have been accepting, the friend replied: “I don’t think even Tyler knew the answer to that question, which is why he kept it so low key between themselves.”

Tyler’s bisexuality, the friend said, was coupled with openness on LGBT issues. But his wasn’t some cookie cutter lefty position on every or even most issues, his friends say.

“Obviously he’s okay with gay and trans people having a right to exist, but also believes in the Second Amendment,” the friend said, referring to the right to bear arms.

The friend described Robinson as fairly typical of a young man his age from Utah: someone who loved the outdoors, was a gamer, and into guns.

This is not the rabidly political guy postulated by people on either side of the political divide.

The federal government, the Washington crowd and corporate media (based in Washington and New York) see the country in wholly partisan terms, Republican versus Democrat, Red versus Blue, old media versus social media, liberal versus conservative, right versus left, straight versus gay, and on and on. Charlie Kirk’s assassination (in Utah!) should remind us of the actual diversity of the nation, and of the cost of polarization that demonizes the other side.

No one in Robinson’s group is cheering or justifying the murder in any of the messages I reviewed. They’re just struggling to understand what their friend did. But Washington has become obsessed with the Discord chat, convinced it’s some kind of headquarters for the murder and cauldron of radicalization and conspiracy. Today FBI Director Patel vowed to investigate “anyone and everyone in that Discord chat.”

What I see is a bunch of young people shocked, horrified and searching for answers, like the rest of the country.

I’ve been pulled this way and that as dribs and drabs about Robinson’s life and views emerged. I bought into the early suggestions, based on descriptions of etchings on the unspent ammunition found by the feds, that he’s a fan of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. I never bought into the theories of the killer as a crazed radical leftist, but the news that he was in a relationship with a trans person seemed to put paid to the Fuentes notion. I mean, people sometimes do have terrible political views completely at odds with their personal relationships, but this looked to me like the bridge too far.

So it seems he was just some guy, with motivations that were much more personal than political, and not a poster child for Fuentes-like insanities. The odds were always quite low that he was a dedicated leftist killer, because there haven’t been many of those. I tend to be a skeptical guy, and I wasn’t this time and I regret it.

And who knows, maybe I’m wrong again. I hate when that happens, I really do.