🏛️ Hail the martyr and prepare for holy war

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Who would have guessed that he would play a central role in the final fracturing of reality?

Who could have ever predicted a YouTube personality—who selectively edited clips of him “owning” unprepared college kids—would now be hailed as a saint in the church of MAGA?

Who would have thought that his murder while filming one of those videos would be a bomb taking out what remains of the bridge between two opposed political ideologies?

In the moments, days, and weeks following Charlie Kirk’s murder, the United States has been forcefully yanked into the world that MAGA-adjacent folks have been living in for years. We’re given the choice to either glorify a deeply problematic college dropout or face the consequences.

This thing only makes sense when you remember that everything is stupid and will continue to get progressively dumber until there is no turning back.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a way only he can, captured this moment for me perfectly in a recent column for Vanity Fair:

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to ‘End Racism’ and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the things, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in (Ezra) Klein’s column was that for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

When one of our greatest commentators and voices is stumped, it’s safe to say we’ve got problems.

Since wading in the depths of this moment did little to explain things or ease my worried mind, I turned instead to the past. At the behest of a stranger on the internet, I investigated the history of German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. His work was understandably controversial, as it was used to justify the rise to power of the Nazi Party. 

One of Schmitt's most potent themes, a theme that lasted well beyond the Nazi Party, is that politics is, at its core, about distinguishing between friend and enemy. There is no such thing as objectivity, compromise, or mere administrative work in politics, he argued — friends and enemies must be established, and action must be taken with only that framing in mind.

I know it’s becoming a bit controversial to call the modern-day right-wing Nazis, but the sentiment above is pretty much the whole game for MAGA, whose very existence seems to be their endless quest to “own the libs” and see anyone to their left as foes.  

Allow me a brief pause in the doom and gloom to tell you about what my partner does whenever we meet new people. Immediately after the meeting, they express curiosity as to whether those potential new friends vote Democrat or Republican. When the new person shares something on social media or elsewhere, indicating they lean right on the political spectrum, there’s always a deep, heavy sigh. 

The sigh doesn’t come with hatred—at least I don’t think so. It certainly doesn’t lead to eliminating the friendship. It mostly leads to disappointment at the realization they probably can’t truly share everything about themselves with this new friend. Their political affiliation becomes a barrier preventing true and deep connection with a person whom, only moments before, they thought they could be close to.  

Although I understand where this comes from, I try my best to take a different perspective. Instead, I ask myself if this is a person I enjoy spending time with, if their interactions with others align with the worst rhetoric of their political party or not. Most importantly, I ask myself—if shit hits the fan, is this someone I could call for help?

I’ve been fortunate to have people who check all those boxes throughout my life. I’ve had passionate debates with those people that didn’t always come to satisfactory conclusions. I’ve called some of those people out when they too easily spew talking points that I know do not align with who they truly are. I’ve maintained deep friendships and shared the entirety of myself with people who, on paper, I strongly oppose.   

And, unfortunately, I’ve cut some people off when it becomes clear that the worst rhetoric of their political party does, in fact, represent who they are.

That approach to life is very different than what Kirk is being lionized for. We will never know, aside from anecdotes shared to push a martyr narrative, what the man was really like in private. We can only judge his public persona and the impact he had on the world.

His public persona could have been ripped directly from Schmitt’s playbook. Kirk otherized, he demonized, and he smugly—and over-confidently—told the world he and his friends were arbiters of truth. He rarely, if ever, tried to find common ground with the students he debated. He sowed division through an unwavering belief that his principles must be defended from the enemies of white conservative Christian ideology.

Now his name is being used to sow division further and punish the perceived enemies of the MAGA movement. His name is being used as total justification for a holy war the right has been frothing at the mouth for since their golden manchild descended the escalator and announced he was getting into politics.

I wish I were being overly dramatic for the sake of this column’s main thrust: that the bridge has actually collapsed this time. If you think I am, look no further than the memorial service for Kirk recently held in Arizona.

Here’s just a selection of the rhetoric spewed in Kirk’s name:

The day that Charlie died, the angels wept, but those tears had been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.

Stephen Miller said, doing his best Goebbels impersonation, before Donald Trump said:

[Charlie Kirk] did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don't want the best for them, I'm sorry... I can't stand my opponent.

The language of friends and enemies was present throughout the memorial. Sometimes, it was cloaked in the language of Christianity, and other times, it was veiled in more tame, political terms.

But it was always there and it always elicited cheers from the tens of thousands of people in attendance.

As this theme becomes crystallized further, particularly with Trump labeling Antifa—not so much a formal organization, but a group of people united under a common ideology—as domestic terrorists, things are only going to get worse. It’s not hard to imagine going from people being fired for using the language of “the enemy” to people being prosecuted and imprisoned as terrorists for their political beliefs.

As we march ever rapidly toward a future our history books label as fascism, what are those of us who refuse to bend the knee supposed to do? How are we supposed to fight when all of the guardrails have fallen off and there’s no formal resistance in sight?

I’m not sure. And that’s what scares me the most.

So, in the meantime, I will keep close those whom I know I can rely on when, not if, shit really hits the fan.

Praise be to our lord and savior, Charlie Kirk!

—Baron