Charlie Kirk is/was a vile person whose presence in this world made it worse. A world without him is a better world. If he dies, just as with, say, Osama Bin Laden, my feeling will be “good riddance.” I’d celebrate his death, but…not so much his assassination.

2/

The assassination of a vile person indicates a failure of all the more just, more humane sorts of systems that should have stopped such a person from ever being in a position of power in the first place. Popehat compares celebrating political violence to celebrating war, and I think he has a point: both war and political violence are an indication of failure.

3/

The first tragedy here is that we’ve all even heard of Charlie Kirk in the first place.

That dude should have spent his long useless life holed up in his basement ostracized by his neighbors, shunned, shamed, legally constrained, and anonymous to almost everyone.

4/

The pearl-clutching centrist crowd likes to imagine that shaming and shunning are the slippery slope that leads to political violence.

They have it backwards.

Shaming and shunning are the •alternative• to political violence. So is meaningful democracy. So is a free press that remains steadfastly grounded in reality. So is a judiciary that applies the law, however flawed, with actual judgement and justice.

5/

When social opprobrium fails to stuff a turd like Charlie Kirk into some powerless far corner of society where he can’t hurt people, that’s when a turd like Kirk gets shot.

When democracy and the law fail to reign in corporate greed and harm and cruelty, that’s when you get a Luigi.

When the press and civil society fail to stop a rising authoritarian, that’s when you get WWII.

6/

And when all these mechanisms — the “more just, more human systems” I’m talking about — fail to do their job, what can we do? Go to war, I guess? But I’m not happy about that. I don’t like war.

I am quite willing to celebrate a world without Kirk if in fact that’s what we get. (Last I heard was “critical condition.”) But I can’t get •that• happy about it. Whether we celebrate his death or denounce gun violence — both are important, both are appropriate! — we must above all notice the failure of everything that should have prevented us from even getting here. •That• is the real crisis.

/end