The Life and Legacy of Charlie 4Chan

We don’t know yet how far away the shooter was, what kind of gun or ammunition they used, what radicalized them and what made them choose their target. But, coincidence or not, they had a dramatic sense of timing. The last thing Charlie Kirk ever said before a bullet fatally struck his neck Wednesday afternoon was a racist dog whistle in the middle of smearing transgender Americans about gun violence.

If there is any silver lining for his legacy and organization, Turning Point USA, it’s that Charlie’s job was to mint lots more Charlie Kirks, so service should only be interrupted for a few days. Given that his gig required stoking eliminationist violence toward the right’s enemies, and that his colleagues have spent the last day retributively threatening the same, it’s like he never left us.

Some might tell you that the right has spent the last decade championing unrestricted free speech to smuggle back into the discourse the sorts of naked racism, homophobia and misogyny that academia has repeatedly invalidated and polite society did its best to anathematize. But let us adopt the sincerity they profess and heed their fondness for an apocryphal Voltaire quote — “I may not agree with what you say, sir, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” — by moving on to a real quip from that gentlemen — “To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, we owe only the truth” — and tell the truth about Charlie Kirk. That doing so has already led MSNBC to fire Matthew Dowd and the pay-for-play Florida Politics blog to turf a reporter for asking a smart question should not dissuade us. Nor should the rat king of right-wing influencers demanding the heads of anyone even faintly describing him, or, evidently, the EU Parliament for failing to honor him.

Like most good right-wing origin stories, Charlie’s began in resentment and ended in affirmative action for white people. He allegedly wasn’t accepted to West Point, not for lack of qualifications, but because “a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion” was given his slot by a woke admissions process. (Please join me in calling on the president of the United States to call on the president of Harvard — because that’s how we do these things — to demand that Charlie Kirk’s high school release his transcripts.) Stuck for what to do next, like get a job in the private sector, he instead saw the success of MoveOn.org and found a dad to give him money to copy it. Thus did Kirk found Turning Point USA, a nonprofit dedicated to seeding conservatism in American high schools and colleges.

Success did not come overnight. Charlie’s first video for TPUSA features him talking to Neil Cavuto about the generational theft of Barack Obama’s budgets, professing his nonpartisan objections to an oncoming fiscal cliff and $16 trillion in national debt. (As you can imagine, Donald Trump did not receive nonpartisan criticism from TPUSA for adding $8 trillion to the national debt in his first term and a projected $4 trillion so far in the second or for raising the debt ceiling by another $5 trillion.) Unfortunately, the young ideas wing of the tea party flatlined for much the same reasons as the real thing, failing to translate effectively outside of an extremely gerrymandered atmosphere and the structurally minoritarian features of Congress. The economic and political incoherence and hypocrisy never hit the big time until stripped of polite obfuscations about negative liberty in our fiscal household.

TPUSA took off when it decided to ride in Trump’s wake, when the theory of government became that anything we want it to do is our unalienable right, and anything the opposition does is unconstitutional. We no longer needed an interposing libertarian rationale to make doing things for, or preventing bad things from happening to, minorities or the poor not only unnecessary but illegal. Naturally, the new product needed a new kind of salesman, comfortable stating as a matter of course and without shame that things sure go to shit when a Black person is put in charge, when these fucking Mexicans move in next door, when I have to see a queer person existing unterrified in public, when a woman tells me what to do when I am not certain she’s just repeating something her husband told her.

What TPUSA learned on the ground was something that columnist Alex Pareene spotted all the way from New York City in 2017: that, having adopted an ideology that had literally nothing to offer any young person except racism, Young Republicans clubs in high schools and colleges were recruiting fewer and fewer kids who weren’t racists. Demography met destiny when it was paired with both Kirk’s facility for youth-oriented but otherwise standard conservative memes — mean as hell and dumber’n a pile of pig shit — and a promotional structure up to a nationwide conservative machine that would reward loud amoral trolls.

Combined with some tactically astute modesty and the Bari Weiss-like capacity for convincing wealthy people to give money because he’s the conservative child they never had, Charlie franchised internet chan culture as politics, and the results speak for themselves. The chapters helmed by unvarnished racists. Diaper-based internecine strife. Or the fact that an organization that gained national attention outside the right-wing ecosystem for trolling college campuses about free speech built an apparatus for McCarthyite reporting on professors who teach woke wrongthink. (Or that one of the fastest ways for Charlie to block mainstream journalists’ accounts was for them to correct him in the replies where his followers could see.) It was an online and real-life troll exercise without accountability or facts, built on the most exhausted whack-ass racist beliefs and raining anger comically or cathartically on whichever of the day’s persons of interest had gained traction — just some of the most comfortable malignancies in the world brigading individuals out of the blue, day after day, between ritualistically pausing to cry victim.

Name an oppressed group or protected class, and Charlie said something that sounded like the reason those adjectives were there in the first place. Name an actual victim, and chances are you’ve also found the person he’d blame for their condition one or two tweets away from a pharisaical display of his faith. He would have you believe he was afraid of Black airline pilots and lesbians doing surgery on him because diversity, equity and inclusion promotes unqualified people into positions of lethal incompetence. He took a page from Lew Rockwell’s old racist Ron Paul newsletters and vilified Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights legislation. He called for Nuremberg trials for doctors performing gender-affirming care. He promoted the deeply antisemitic Great Replacement theory, beloved of mass shooters and Elise Stefanik. He spoke at the Stop the Steal rally and later invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege about Jan. 6. He called for the military occupation of a laundry list of blue cities. 

He was a bold tribune of dynamic ideas like Black history month is too long, and affirmative action is part of the Democrats’ war on white people. Democrats are going to trans your children. One day you’ll leave your house, and when you come back Democrats will have already moved in a family of pet-eating immigrants. Democrats are fundamentally weak. Democrats are strong enough to destroy America. Democrats already are destroying America. We have to do anything to stop them. Democracy’s overrated anyway. His X account will live forever; anytime you want, you can scroll it and see how many tweets it takes before you get to one where the outrage and its subject stop being a coincidence.

Today, Democratic public officials who had nothing to say about Democratic lawmakers being executed in their homes by a right-wing lunatic just a few months ago are tripping all over themselves to honor the career of a replacement-level fascist who achieved being on TV for a sustained period. Establishment dweeb Ezra Klein abundantly showed his whole ass in a New York Times column headlined, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” To quote former journalist Ian Boudreau, who if anything is being too generous: “Would it have been possible to quote Kirk at length on any subject and run that headline? I don’t think so.”

As expected, the default message of yesterday and today has been, “Political violence is unacceptable.” Agreed. However, the rest of that message keeps getting cut off. The remainder reads: Militarily occupying American cities to quell a crime wave that isn’t happening is political violence. Attempting a coup that features “hang the vice president” on its to-do list is political violence. Pardoning nearly a thousand offenders who committed that political violence as a reward for it and to intimidate your opposition is political violence. “Swatting” your political opponents is political violence. Bomb threats for doctors, abortion clinics and facilities performing gender-affirming care is political violence. The Supreme Court eliminating the Fourth Amendment for Latinos is political violence. Black-bagging people — lawful American residents or no — and shipping them to torture prisons in countries they aren’t even from is political violence. There will be no unanimity of message today on any of those; for most, we will be fortunate if it earns 50%  uptake.

The void left by those above messages going unrepeated will be filled with shaming. Those glad he’s gone will be shamed for giving conservatives a pretext for retributive political violence. But whatever sentences they utter about the need to extirpate all Democrats from the nation will differ from last week’s only in terms of which proper name they insert as a predicate this time. Critics will be shamed too, because Charlie Kirk was a family man, leaving behind a wife and children. He lost his life while doing his best to save his country from what he saw as the lethal march of communism. The 6th Army widows probably said the same thing about Stalingrad.

Between Stephen Miller retasking the federal law enforcement and military apparatus toward ethnic cleansing and Kash Patel remaking the FBI as an elite squad of coked-up podcasters, Charlie Kirk’s killer is much less likely to be brought to justice. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing for conservatives. When you find the killer, you wave the bloody shirt at the killer; when you don’t find him at all, you can wave it at anyone you want, which is why the right hasn’t waited for a single suspect and has already implicated Democrats so broadly as to put 80 million people on the wanted list. 

A cynic might argue that turning Charlie Kirk into the new proper name you tack onto your “and another thing …” rant without even breaking stride in your vengeance march toward “The Left” is the most disrespectful thing of all. The march isn’t going any faster or slower, and it isn’t changing direction. Charlie Kirk might have been a father and a husband, but to his avengers, he won’t even be much of a speed bump.