More On Charlie Kirk: Speaking Ill Of The Dead

*“Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.” – Maxim Gorky*

As a rule, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” works pretty well for keeping things peaceful in a community.

But it’s not a good rule.

It’s a very bad rule when someone horrible has died, and public discourse fills up with lies from other horrible people about how great a person they were.

It’s not fun to speak ill of the dead, it’s uncomfortable and it should be. But when a horrible person dies and the lies start about how they were so perfect and peaceful and just all-around wonderful, speaking ill of the dead becomes an obligation for anyone who isn’t horrible themselves.

If they would just shut up about it, not-horrible people wouldn’t have an obligation to point out how horrible the recently-deceased actually was and we could all just move along peacefully.

But they won’t, and we do, and that’s that.

Not entirely unrelated to that, I said yesterday:

Charlie Kirk was married, and had two children; presumably his family loved him and will miss him. I know nothing about how he treated them or behaved in his personal relationships, but in public he was frankly a horrible person.

And that is certainly true.

Charlie Kirk was a bigot.

And he was the absolute worst kind of bigot: one who sets out to reshape the world to be as bigoted as they are themselves.

He was an evangelical bigot, traveling the country preaching bigotry wherever he went.

And he was pretty successful at it, making what seems to be a pretty good living doing it and inspiring the Bigot in Chief to order federal facilities to fly their flags at half-staff to mourn his death.

He was also a jerk about it.

He was one of those modern “own the libs” bigots, not content to just hate for stupid reasons and to spread the hate around but being as obnoxious as possible about it.

This is probably one part of why he was so successful in spreading his bigotry and becoming a well-known and sought out figure in the bigot-American community.

Modern bigots do so like a performance, and they idolize success.

And he was dangerous, not personally but systemically.

He wasn’t particularly imposing or threatening personally, but he spent his life publicly encouraging people to hate and harm others.

And he created and supported projects that enabled them to do exactly that, with his web sites carrying lists of college professors and school board administrators to target them for harassment by other bigots.

And it was his choice to be so horrible.

He didn’t have to be a bigot, and he didn’t have to spend his life encouraging others to be bigots too.

Bigotry, like any other social philosophy, is a choice.

But he was and he did and he was good enough at it that it got him fame among other bigots and infamy to everyone else.

On the whole, the world is better without Charlie Kirk in it.

The lives of his family will probably not be, unless he was one of those bigots who secretly also abuses the people close to them. Such people certainly exist, though I know of no reason to think that he was one of them.

Humans are shockingly good at being horrible to outsiders while also being kind and generous to insiders. It’s quite plausible that he was a loving husband and father while also being one of the more significant drivers behind the growth of bigotry and hate in this country for the past decade.

Humans are complicated and often quite contradictory.

And it doesn’t do society any favors to pretend otherwise.

Obviously, Kirk’s fellow bigots have good reason to celebrate the things they liked about him and his life .

But the outright lies about him from other bigots and the lying essays from quislings like Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom do a disservice to the country. Trying to hide how horrible a person he was in falsehoods is just infantile, and debases our public discourse.