Charlie Kirk devoted his life to the capture of state power by a fascist movement, with the goal of using that state power to hurt you and impose his fascist vision on society—one in which members of the in-group could hurt members of a powerless and subjugated out-group with impunity.
Despite his death, his efforts are in the process of succeeding. The US political and economic status quo was already violence. Under Kirk’s fascist partners, it is becoming more openly and explicitly violence.
Exclaiming “political violence has no place” is the sort of thing that one can only do if one is, or has chosen to be, blind to the actual material status quo of violence.
Sometimes I think that autism is my superpower because it is very difficult for me to mistake pretense and artifice for fact.
Treating Kirk’s murder as “the violence” that has no place in US politics requires us to imagine that all the rest—the concentration camps, the military occupations, the disappearances and deaths in captivity, the foreign torture gulags, the assaults on protesters, the persistent and perennial police violence, the foreign wars and acts of state terrorism abroad, the material support for genocide, all of it—does not somehow even count as violence.
It’s just the natural order of things. Background noise. It doesn’t even register. Can’t be helped. But one fascist is shot and suddenly we’re experiencing unacceptable violence.
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