I finally gathered my thoughts into a Facebook post.
The Left did not kill Charlie Kirk. I don't even really know who people mean when they say that. The Left is a lot of different people who believe a lot of different things. The Left is not and does not have an army. In general, The Left doesn't even have guns. If the school shooting that happened about the same time as Charlie's death had been the big news story of the day, people would be talking about how the Left want to get rid of all the guns, but of course the big story was Charlie's murder, so the Left instead sounds like a militia.
I know very conservative people and very progressive people. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, Facebook, and a message board and I will listen to anyone. I know people who have gotten more conservative and people that have gotten more progressive and I don't know anyone who was glad someone was assassinated or that it was Charlie Kirk. No friend of mine, as far I know, thought Charlie Kirk deserved it or had it coming or that it was a solution to any problem existent in the world. No friend of mine, as far as I know, believes one man or woman has the right to make that call.
In the last week or so I have seen people say Charlie died because he was a Christian, because he was a conservative, because he stood for truth, because he was too effective for the Republican Party. Don't get sucked into that. There was a swirl of facts and rumors and innuendo at first, but enough has come out at this point that I believe I understand it and the simplest answer to the question is Charlie died because he was an outspoken critic of the transgender issue and an unstable man with a sensitivity to the issue took it upon himself to settle a score with a bullet.
Tyler Robinson came from a conservative family who say he has been leaning left for the last few years and I think I can understand their perspective, but the facts are not bearing that out in the way that other media and influencers are picking it up and carrying it on. Tyler isn't in a liberal militia if there is such a thing. He doesn't seem to be in any politics club. He is registered independent and analysis of his online chats finds only two mentions of politics and they are bland comments on Trump's impeachment and the 2020 election, neither of which indicate his position and in any case are both probably before his family thought he was leaning left. He didn't write a manifesto. The engraved bullet casings were an inside joke, because his texts reveal he intended to go back and get the weapon from where he hid it. He has no political footprint out there in Cyberspace.
What he has is a romantic relationship with a transgendered person. The person in question was apparently assigned male at birth and is transitioning to their identification as a woman and I will henceforward be saying she/her and if that is a problem for you, I hope I can explain. To my own values, this is a minimum baseline of politeness. It doesn't matter if you agree with her. It doesn't matter if you think it is a bunch of pretend. It doesn't cost anything to roll with it. Putting your foot down isn't going to make her stop. If your name is Beauregard and you want me to call you Bo, I'll do it. It doesn't make anything true or false, real or fake. The cost of refusal, if it matters to you, is just becoming irrelevant to that person. And it might NOT matter because I could believe that most of the people I know don't even know a transgendered person. I have one transgendered friend. I also know of a family member and a child of a friend, but don't have any relationship with them. What I have seen suggests something a lot more elaborate than a pretense. The commitment level I have seen suggests they are pretty serious about it. Life gets weird and it gets hard, harder for some than others. If life has never kicked you in the teeth, I am so pleased for you, but it has kicked me in the teeth before and it is still running around. A very small percentage of the population are definitely finding some solace from the noise of their lives, identifying gender opposite from their physical sex.
Tyler thought he was standing up for his partner. Their texts have been released. She didn't ask him to do this. She struggled to believe it when he confessed to her. She didn't help him. She didn't thank him. She has cooperated with law enforcement. What Tyler did didn't help her. It just traumatized her and it isn't going to help any of the other transgendered people either. It is no one's rallying cry. It is not the opening salvo in a war. It was just a beastly crime by an unstable young man.
Two things I see in the aftermath.
1) I'm not a fan of Jimmie Kimmel. I've never watched his show. I see clips of him sometimes. I'm not going to call him unfunny, but he isn't my style. I would rather watch any of the other late night hosts. But despite what the Vice President of the United States found time in his busy schedule to tweet, Kimmel's ratings are not in the tank. A lot of people like to watch his show. It's nowhere close to a financial failure. It was been running 20 years and has won 3 Emmys. But I keep seeing that he was fired for his comments about Charlie Kirk. He didn't MAKE any comments about Charlie Kirk. He said Republicans are desperate to prove the shooter wasn't one of them (there were some early rumors about a right-wing group Tyler might be a part of and those didn't pan out), the Republicans are trying to score as many political points from it as they can (I definitely agree, read on) and then he played a clip where a reporter asked Donald Trump a softball question how he was doing a few days after the death of his friend and Donald just says he's fine and immediately pivots to talk about the ballroom they are building at the White House and and how it will be the best ballroom in the world, cutting back to Kimmel who correctly points out that Donald's demeanor doesn't not really match the idea that he is either mourning a good friend or deeply concerned about it. There's just no way Kimmel was fired for comments about Charlie. No. Shortly after, the head of the FCC was on TV saying Kimmel's comments were inappropriate and that if the network didn't do something about it the FCC would, possibly including taking away ABC's broadcasting license. And shortly after THAT, Kimmel was put on indefinite leave. People are calling it cancel culture. Well, I'm not all comfortable with cancel culture either, but that is NOT what happened. The government publicly (if not also privately) demanded punishment for someone who said something they didn't like. Not about Charlie Kirk. About Donald Trump and his actual apparent indifference to Charlie's death. People sometimes start talking about the First Amendment when someone gets cancelled and eventually a pedantic person like me will step in and say the First Amendment protects us from the government, but not from regular people. This time it WAS the government and Kimmel has not actually been prosecuted, but we are right on the edge of infringement of freedom of speech, the very first amendment. The one that started it all.
2) Charlie has been whipped up into heroism. He was among a crowd of influencers whose tweets and stuff got posted where I could see them and I didn't keep them all separated. I first actually put a face to the name just a couple months ago when the White House did its about face on the Epstein Files. Charlie, I learned, had been one of the big voices calling for their release and I was shown a video of him saying we need to trust the President and let it go. In the time since then, Facebook has shown me a lot of his content and other people's content with him in it. By the time he died, I had a much clearer view of him specifically. And I am wondering if a lot of my friends didn't really know who he was until he died. He was NOT someone I would like to spend time with. Charlie Kirk was a pompous jerk without a filter, provoking the public to get likes. You can definitely find videos of him saying good things. You can also find him saying some stuff that I think is really bad and people say you have to make sure about the context. I've seen the context. He said a Supreme Court Justice, a Congresswoman, a TV host, and Michelle Obama, all black women, stole white people's slots and lack the brain power to be taken seriously. He said that he used to point out that if you took a gay person to Gaza, they'd be thrown out of tall building, but now of course Gaza doesn't have any tall buildings and busted out laughing at the destruction of a city. He said his problem with the death penalty is that it takes too long and people get too many appeals. It should be public, quick, and televised, and suggested (or joked?) that Coca-Cola could sponsor it. He said he would definitely tune in to see someone get their head chopped off and it would make his day better. (I have talked to a couple of people who accidentally shot him shot in the neck and it did not make their day better.) When Simone Biles dropped out of the Olympics, he called her a representative of the weak generation coming up, called her selfish and a national disgrace. Following a plane crash in the headlines, he said when he is on a plane and the pilot is black he thinks, "Boy, I hope he's qualified." He said that we should raise the retirement age because he doesn't believe retirement is Biblical. He said Martin Luther King Jr was an awful person. Asked about gun control, Charlie said that some gun deaths each year are worth it to protect the Second Amendment. His last words: an audience member asked if he knew how many mass shootings there had been in the last 10 years. (Mass shootings are generally understood to be events where a person opens fire on a crowd, often strangers, to kill as many people as they can.) Charlie said "Counting or not counting gang violence" a standby talking point that changes the racial picture of mass shootings by mixing them with an entirely different crime where gang members, commonly black, kill other gang members over territory. I'll repeat again, he didn't deserve to be shot. I was shocked to hear about it. But I wouldn't have been surprised if someone had punched him in the mouth.
