(September 11) Note: The published version of this column is here. What follows is an earlier, unedited draft, but in full.
Calm down, everybody. The murder of conservative organizer Charlie Kirk is reason to restrain impulses to political warfare, not to inflame them.
When Louisiana’s own Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise was shot in 2017, the culprit was not the collective political left or a “they,” but a lone drifter who hated Republicans. When Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords Of Arizona was shot in 2011, the New York Times editorialized there was a “clear” and “direct” link to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s PAC – but the culprit was not Palin or conservatives in general, but a paranoid schizophrenic fixated on Giffords.
After former and soon-to-be president Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania, conservative social media was full of accusations that “they,” the leftist bad guys, had tried to kill him. Nonsense. The shooter was a registered Republican who took conservative positions in school classes, and he also had scoped out the schedule of Democratic President Joe Biden with apparent ill intent.
Likewise, conservatives weren’t collectively in any way responsible this summer for the murder of one Democratic Minnesota state legislator (and his wife) and the wounding of another. Nor were they responsible when a crazed home invader beat the husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California literally within an inch or his life.
Nonetheless, Kirk himself said after the fact, in inflammatory fashion, that some “amazing patriot” should bail out Paul Pelosi’s attacker, while Trump fanned nasty right-wing rumors about the attack. But that doesn’t mean Kirk deserved to be killed, his wife widowed and his toddlers left fatherless.
Conservatives rightly get upset when Democrats repeatedly call Trump (and many others on the right) a “Nazi.” Yet extremely few prominent conservatives spoke out when Trump called Democratic opponent Kamala Harris a “Marxist, Communist, fascist, socialist” or said Biden’s White House was a “Gestapo.”
It wasn’t basic conservative rhetoric that led to a mass shooting at a black church, and it wasn’t basic liberal rhetoric that led to mass shooting at a conservative Christian school. Two recent mass shootings by people identifying as transgender don’t mean that everyone with sexual identity issues is a latent murderer.
And speaking of using sexuality as a pretense, we in Louisiana of a certain age remember when then-District Attorney Jim Garrison falsely and viciously tried businessman Clay Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy largely by focusing on Shaw’s homosexuality.
Come on, people: Get a grip. Tell Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina that Democrats absolutely do not “own what happened” to Kirk. Tell Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida to stop repeating that Democrats “caused this.” Stop electing people like this to Congress. And stop electing Democrats, too, such as New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose first response to almost any tragedy is to “connect the dots” to Republican rhetoric.
The examples could be endless. And the lessons should be obvious: Stop demonizing each other. Stop rushing to judgment. Tone down the rhetoric – way down – but don’t blame the rhetoric for the evil act without proof. Stop the “groupthink.” Let law enforcement officials work, and then blame the individuals found responsible, without regard to their group identity.
The only group identity that should matter is that we are Americans. Americans are better than this.
I write this column on the very anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The firefighters who trekked up the stairways of the towers that day didn’t care whether they were saving Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals. When passengers Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer and others counterattacked the hijackers of Flight 93, it didn’t matter that Bingham was gay and Beamer was straight.
When President Ronald Reagan was victimized by an attempted assassin in 1981, it didn’t matter that he was a Republican when Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill kneeled and prayed at his bedside. When Scalise was shot, his Democratic Louisiana colleague Cedric Richmond was the first congressman to rush to the hospital to be at his side.
When liberal Democratic senator Ted Kennedy was dying of brain cancer, conservative Republican Orrin Hatch spent considerable time with him. When Republican senator John McCain was dying of brain cancer, Biden, then out of office, made a special trip to visit him.
That is how our politics should operate.
Meanwhile, to repeat: Kirk leaves behind a young wife and two very young children, plus a boatload of friends. Instead of assessing blame and vowing vengeance on an entire swath of Americans who had nothing to do with his death, why can’t it be enough just to insist on lawful justice while offering comfort to the bereaved?
Quin’s later post script:
Nothing we have seen since I wrote this, including the identification of the (almost certain) shooter and some of his apparent oddnesses, shows a single indication that this individual was part of a larger “they” who intend violence and murder against conservatives. At this writing, we don’t even really (or fully) know his motive. Either way, every word in this column stands. I do want to add, though, what should be clear from the text above, but just to re-emphasize it: The horror of what happened to Charlie Kirk is sickening and inexcusable. The hearts of all decent people go out to his wife, children, parents, other relatives, and friends. The perpetrator should be penalized to the fullest extent of the law. And nobody, absolutely nobody, should get away with celebrating the death or even saying “he deserved it.” To do or say so is EVIL, all caps. We all must be better than this.
