A Tale of Two People

The events of the last week have captured the news media, the commentariat, and the online amateur philosopher sites — TwitteX and suchlike. Though they are connected, I think therein lie two separate compelling stories. Here, I hope to tell both of them, separately.

The Bloody Shirt

Familiarize yourself with the phrase, “It’s what Charlie Kirk would have wanted,” because you’re going to hear it a lot.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. “Jesse [Jackson] put his hands in the blood and wiped it on the front of his shirt,” said his associate Andrew Young. Jackson used that shirt as a campaign prop, and claimed untruthfully that King had died in his arms. He has been accused of “waving the bloody shirt” ever since.

That phrase, though, predates Jackson by a century. Going back to the Civil War era, it has been used to criticize those who point to a particular incident to rile up a crowd in favor of some proposed action. It has been busy all that time, justifying a variety of mostly unjustifiable things. The burning of cities over the Rodney King arrest and the death of George Floyd are two examples of bloody shirts in action. Likewise, in living memory, the John Birch Society.

(While we’re here, let’s note that both King and Kirk were shot in the neck with .30-’06 rifles, which I’m sure somebody will use to “prove” some sort of conspiracy.)

Last week a new bloody shirt factory opened. The assassination of political-religious evangelist Kirk was something everybody wanted a piece of. The demand for bloody shirts exploded. Kirk’s death is being and will be used to justify a lot of things that would normally be rejected out of hand. It might work because, after all, if you do not acquiesce to what you’re told Charlie Kirk would have wanted, you hate Jesus. Congress gathered to discuss granting itself extra security because, you know, Je suis Charlie.

I have neither brief for nor criticism of Kirk. He seems to have been an amiable, likable, virtuous guy who made a career of gathering political influence to himself, which he used in support of populist causes as he saw them. He tied his Christian religion to his support of Donald Trump. He comported himself ably. He was militant, but in the fashion of songs that got the blood churning before World War II.

Living in a college town where loudness of voice and ferocity of outrage are inverse in proportion to sense being made, which has extended to the current administration, I’ve grown accustomed to disregarding a lot that people say. (Timothy Butler is the OFB expert on the strange phenomenon of “Christian Nationalism,” and those who champion it, of which Kirk was either part or on the close periphery, so I’ll leave it to Tim, noting only that we were warned, in Matthew 24 if you’d like to check my work, to be careful not to get misled.)

But as I said, I’ve learned to largely ignore loud political voices. And due to the coverage of Kirk’s death those voices have been busy trying to outdo each other to the point that I would not be very surprised to hear someone say that the purpose of Jesus was to prepare the way for Charlie Kirk. They’re taking their new bloody shirts out for a spin.

Before last Wednesday, to my mind and that of many, I suspect, Kirk was one of a coterie of Trumpian evangelists, along with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Tim Poole, Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, and various others. Though the details have varied, a general sense has been an attempt to reconcile Donald “I drink the little wine and I eat the little cracker” Trump with actual religious worship, combined with the suggestion that Jesus voted for Trump and if you don’t, too, you’re against Jesus. Which to me is as odious as the chants of “from the river to the sea, let’s kill all the Jews.” Connecting Trump with Christianity requires a very long and heavy cable. Anyone who holds the view that Christianity demands worship of Donald Trump, as with anyone who seeks to justify Islamic terrorism, is to me irrevocably non-serious and to be avoided. Trump Derangement Syndrome is insanity. So is Trump Adoration Syndrome. Trump’s election being due to Kirk’s influence with young voters is not necessarily to his credit. Yes, it might be his responsibility.

It is admirable that he engaged in rational conversation, and tragic that this low bar is nowadays cleared by so few. The faint suggestion that one “should love Jesus and in so doing become more like me” was probably unintentional.

That’s where we are. Politically, we’re being dragged toward those extremes. There was an attempt to make a George Floyd holiday and we can expect an attempt — that might well be passed into law — to establish a Charlie Kirk national holiday. (Maybe they and others could be combined into a single “Deaths Exploited for Political Advantage Day.”)

No, people should not be murdered because of the opinions they hold.

Nor should their opinions be overlooked during postmortem canonization.

Call it whataboutism if you want. I call it the same rules applied evenly to everyone. I’ve seen numerous people who quail at giving a full endorsement of Kirk’s widely stated opinions nevertheless pointing to a grieving wife and two tiny children and agonizing over it, as is entirely appropriate, in my view. His family’s situation is heartbreaking.

Perhaps we could all spare a tear, too, for the thousands of times that same situation has been played out in Ukraine during the last three years. Kirk opposed American aid to the beleaguered Ukrainians. Along with many of the others mentioned above, his comments on the subject were sometimes pro-Russian and always against the U.S. doing anything to help Ukraine. (Russia is aligned with Trump in placing the blame for Kirk’s assassination on lefties. Oh, and Ukrainians — Trump hasn’t gotten there yet, as of last night. Give him time.)

I’m sorry for Kirk’s wife and his innocent little children. I’m sorry, too, for those we never hear about in Ukraine, whose mourning Kirk held was none of our business.

We need just to make sure that the bloody shirts were all made in the USA.

Rekt in The Digital Cesspool

Then there is the matter of the probable assassin.

During the extensive coverage of the assassination of Kirk, various commentators ventured as usual outside their area of knowledge, which is often limited to their own hairstyles and wardrobes.

It is always a little exasperating to see anyone whose voice is deemed worthy of broadcast holding forth on issues related to technology. It is as if they are speaking to rest home residents in about 1995. If the opinion lasts longer than a couple of minutes, the phrase “make the VCR stop blinking” inevitably arises. They are talking through their hats, to put it politely, though the actual emissions are from a place much lower on the body. And who knows, maybe they really do have video cassette recorders that have flashed “12:00” for the last 45 years.

This has been most especially and most recently evident in the discussion of the fellow who was arrested for shooting Kirk. From the evidence proffered to the public so far, in all likelihood he’s the guy.

But the coverage after that quickly wandered into raging ignorance.

I saw on “social media” a mention in a formerly conservative, now largely Trumpian, political group that the website Reddit might be to blame. That claim tells us only that the poster knows nothing about Reddit or the internet and its truly dark recesses. Reddit is a site that resembles the internet writ small. There are discussions there about practically everything. In the last month I have gone there to ask about an obstinate configuration issue with an obscure, obsolete computer. Within a few hours I had received the equally obscure answer, which fixed the problem. This was in a group devoted to that obsolete computer. It was all totally friendly and apolitical. Like most of the internet Reddit is an advertising and information-collecting company.

Yes, there are fever swamps on Reddit. There is filth, too, though the company attempted some years ago to get at least some control of it. It was weirdly controversial when, 11 years ago, it announced that people could not post nude pictures of other people without their consent. I think is was the first most of us had heard that there were nude pictures on Reddit at all. That people argued that they had the right to post unauthorized pictures of other people naked was unfortunately no surprise.

There are far worse places on the internet. Far, far worse.

A sister of the apparent assassin wrote a decade ago that she had almost forgotten to mention her brother (in some family discussion to which we have not been made party) because he had gotten some computer stuff he had wanted and was now in his room, seldom to be seen thereafter.

That almost certainly means stuff for online gaming. Where not many years earlier a kid who spent hours at his computer was likely writing actual programs for it, often games, even 10 years ago that was no longer the case. With the improvements in computer graphics, the realism of games, especially “First-Person Shooter” games became more vivid. You could literally feel as if you were pulling the trigger on your opponent. You would become inured to it. And now, with high-speed internet, you could play against others. (I’m not here to criticize video games but instead a malignant culture they have sprouted with the note that this culture does not include everyone who plays video games).

People proudly call themselves “gamers,” which at least seems better than “incels” (involuntary celebates, which is to say without a girlfriend and with no hope of ever having one) or “NEETs” (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). They live an online existence, which is to say that “irl” (in real life) they make a point of not much existing at all. Some of them, and I think it’s most likely that the fellow who said online that he had killed Kirk is one, are wont to “larp” (live-action role play), which is pretending the real world and the digital world are interchangeable.

Much has been made of his participation on Discord, which is a site for young people to play games and form groups online. Some graduate to Twitch, which is also for gaming and other activities and also largely for incels and NEETs. As with YouTube, it is possible to make money on Twitch. But that’s not everyone’s goal.

Because it is also possible to venture to the dark side. Not the “dark web,” a favorite of television scriptwriters, but truly dark places located on the web. In some of these places, “POTUS” (President Of The United States) has been replaced, when applied to Donald Trump, with “GEOTUS ” — God Emperor Of The United States. It started as a joke but not everybody got it.

Our first poster child in this regard is 4chan, where any form of decency is frowned upon. The people there are called “anons” because everything is anonymous (though in that people can be banned from the site apparently they are keeping track). Do you remember the absurd and absurdly powerful “QAnon” that drew a lot of political clout among young people and losers a few years ago? QAnon began life on 4chan — as a joke. It was an attempt to see how ridiculous a “movement” could be and still gain support. It succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of whoever made it up. It proved, too, that incels and NEETs are gullible and eager to believe in anything that purports to impart power without effort.

On 4chan there are threads with videos of various people, groups, races, sexes, animals, getting “rekt.” These are videos of violent accidents and crimes. Getting rekt is also what happens to your immortal soul if you enjoy those videos. Anons on 4chan think they are hilarious.

There are other related sites, some even worse. The “-chans” are the pits of vast amounts of untreated sewage. Anyone can go there. They are popular with kids who think going there makes them cool. Various meme images seen on “social media” originated there. Click the link to learn more without actually going there, which I guarantee you do not want to do.

They are neither left- nor right-wing. They are devoted to wherever the desires of their posters take them, usually limited only by the limits of the law. (And they are not by any means the worst the web has to offer. One site I know of has made a point of doxxing and harassing people, leading to suicides and lives otherwise being ruined. Its politics seem to be either Trumpian or what posters imagine Trumpianism to stand for. The last I heard, it was hosted in Russia.)

But these are popular gathering places for those who fancy themselves as being the cutting-edge elites among those who live their lives online while eschewing the real world. People who nevertheless want to impress their friends. People who are excited by what parents and cops used to call “bad influences.”

The sites are a vacation from notions of right and wrong. They are the perfect breeding ground for pure evil. Wherever they take you is your own doing, right?

Young people and those who should have outgrown pretending to be young people have forever been known to behave differently in groups than they do individually. Someone who would never do such a thing on his own is perfectly happy to join in with others in, say, smashing store windows. When my mailbox and the mailboxes of neighbors were knocked down by someone with a baseball bat or something a few years ago, you can be sure there was more than one person in the car. Mob psychopathy is a lot more common than individual psychopathy is.

A great deal is being made of his association with a fellow who holds the view and is apparently acting on it that God got it wrong and he was meant to be a girl. Perhaps it will emerge that the assassin thought that the shooting would somehow defend or improve their relationship, whatever it was. By all accounts of people who actually knew him, the assassin had become a seething leftist. Accounts to the contrary are pulled out of the commenter’s . . . hat.

Internet associations surely played a part. He went from a scholarship-winning, 4.0-GPA student into . . . this.

When the dust settles and the facts are shown, I think it is likely that the fellow who assassinated Charlie Kirk may have done it out of particular political animus, but it was surely exacerbated by a desire to become a hero in the deeply flawed recesses of the internet. He went out on a larp, which he planned with great precision. His target was chosen because Kirk was a leader of something — in real life! — and the assassin is not. If the goal were making a political statement, someone as bright as the apparent assassin obviously is could have done so more effectively, even legally, and without the damage to his family and friends that they now will endure forever. But his kind of I’m-all-that-matters narcissism is found in only three places: Hollywood, the White House, and the internet.

The most intelligent observation of all of this came from Ben Domenich, who tweeted: “Classic high IQ assassin behavior to plan out all the logistics and not touch anything and then hit up a friend on Discord with ‘yo can u get my rifle, it's in a towel in the bushes’” Exactly so. What point is there is performative assassination if you can’t claim credit, er, responsibility? It does not seem to have impressed his confused, never-again roommate.

Even if sexual, romantic, and political considerations were motivations, I’d bet that it was his internet experience that tipped him over the edge. A lot of people are lefties, and a lot are involved in unconventional relationships, but only a small percentage of them plot and carry out murders.

I think that if we ever get to see through the waving bloody shirts, that’s what will be revealed.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.