by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
I don’t spend any time on social media nor do I have any interest in the mainstream conservative movement, so I’d only been very slightly aware of Charlie Kirk prior to his sudden assassination on Wednesday, shot dead at the age of 31 by a sniper while speaking at the University of Utah.
I’d vaguely known that Kirk was a young conservative activist who had dropped out of community college as a teenager about a dozen years earlier to found Turning Point USA, an activist organization intended to draw youthful Americans into his ideological camp, and heavily funded by mega-donors, it had grown large and successful over time. Those bare facts exhausted my total knowledge.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Given that I’d paid so little attention to him, I was initially shocked by the enormous outpouring of media coverage his killing generated, seemingly greater than might have been accorded many important American elected officials or even major world leaders under similar circumstances. All our top newspapers gave his story large, front-page headlines, and the discussion of Kirk’s assassination and its implications entirely blanketed much of the Internet.
I’d always regarded Kirk as a rather bland mainstream Trump conservative, hardly the sort of figure most likely to inspire lethal hatred. I wondered whether my impression had been mistaken so I sought to assess his views and positions, and get a better sense of why he might have been targeted in that deadly attack.
Given his brutal slaying at such a young age, I was hardly surprised that a large fraction of the commentary amounted to hagiography, with even most of his erstwhile ideological foes mourning his death as a tragedy and casting aside any past criticism. Indeed, when Matthew Dowd, a prominent former Bush-Cheney Republican political consultant made some disparaging remarks about Kirk, he was immediately fired from his longstanding position at MSNBC, demonstrating the risks of straying from that widespread position.
Fortunately, I found some important exceptions to this pattern of unremitting praise.
I’d occasionally read pieces by Michael Tracey, a prominent moderate or liberal-leaning Internet writer and the day after Kirk’s death he published a harsh 1,400 word column providing a very different perspective on Kirk.
Many of Kirk’s supporters had described him as a political truth-teller, with President Donald Trump declaring that he had been “a martyr for truth.” But Tracey was scathing in his criticism, portraying him as essentially a political propagandist, someone who regularly shifted his positions to conform to those of Trump, his leading patron:
He was a government functionary. A mouthpiece. He trafficked in ludicrous propaganda on behalf of the Administration he loyally served. And was doing this basically 24/7, in the extremely recent past.
Perhaps most notoriously, after taking a personal phone call from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk hopped on his podcast the next day and proclaimed, “Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” He then bizarrely tried to deny that he said this, or insist it had somehow been taken out of context — which it hadn’t. The context was that Trump got annoyed that a bunch of people had criticized him over Epstein at Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” conference, and then Trump called up Kirk, and then shortly thereafter, Kirk announced he was going to do the government’s bidding. That’s just what Kirk was, and the role he played in US political affairs — notwithstanding how people might now want to exalt him as a paragon of truth-telling virtue because of his untimely death.
