This article was originally published at In Case of Emergency newsletter and is reprinted here with permission.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated. That is the terrible truth, the miserable reality of the constant violence of the system under which we live.
Kirk made a career out of promoting that violence, directing threats and harassment towards outspoken critics of white supremacy and patriarchy. He trafficked in disgusting white supremacist tropes advocating state violence and repression against racialized groups. He called passing the Civil Rights Act a “huge mistake.” He promoted capital punishment for gay sex. He engaged in Islamophobia that echoed the brutal repression of the “War on Terror” and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He was an outspoken apologist for Kyle Rittenhouse, the white vigilante who shot and killed Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.
We’re seeing the fruits of the policy program he supported play out to devastating effect under the Trump administration, which cut access to health insurance and food stamps for millions, condemned millions more to death with aid cuts, set up a sprawling and arbitrary regime of caging and deporting our hardworking neighbors, many of whom were here legally, and sent troops to occupy cities with large Democratic constituencies. This is the dangerous, deadly work of the white conservative project with deep roots in American history.
In the aftermath of Kirk’s slaying, liberal figureheads like Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom have rushed to put out statements celebrating Kirk and his work, with Klein gushing that “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” and Newsom vowing, puzzlingly, to “continue his work.” They ask us, in short, to ignore or even embrace Kirk’s encouragement of state and vigilante violence against marginalized groups as just normal everyday conservatism. In a way, they’re right, but that’s actually a massive historical and ongoing problem that we should reject, rather than accept as a grotesque cost of doing business.
But conservatives pretend, too, and not only in bad faith renderings of the world that promote the systems of harm they operate. Conservatives are forced to erase their reliance on state and vigilante violence because it reveals their central claims about the world to be a lie.
White conservatism is bound to the presumption that whiteness, Christianity, and Western Civilization are naturally superior to other groups and their ways of living. But here’s the catch: that “superiority” can only exist under overwhelming regimes of violence. Give Black Americans the chance, and they’ll build a Black Wall Street. Give Asian Americans the chance, and they’ll create a rich agricultural system from the decaying white boomtowns of mining country. And so forth.
In every instance, white conservatives met the prospect of successful racialized groups with violence. They led a mob of white veterans into Black Wall Street and burned it to the ground, plundering and murdering residents with impunity. They outlawed Asian immigration, organized pogroms, and stripped Japanese farmers of their land.
This relationship of white conservatism to state and vigilante violence has been arguably the defining feature of what we have called democracy in the United States. It is one that, given our current political landscape, should surprise exactly no one.
If we think all the way back to Trump’s first race-baiting presidential campaign in 2016, one of the central fears he stoked is that Latines were finding economic success. Maybe the most famous instance of this was when Trump surrogate Marco Gutierrez warned that “If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” The horror!
The threat is the economic success of a racially-subordinated group. But the “solution”? State violence that suppresses, plunders, and excludes that population.
And then there’s Trump’s more recent claim that migrant workers are “attacking—and they already are—Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too.”
While it’s worth wondering what in the actual fuck a “Black population job” is (the imagined racial hierarchy is white clear), the threat-solution framework remains the same. White conservatives suggest that a racialized group might find economic success. The solution? Deploying state and vigilante violence against that group.
That framework, in fact, is exactly what Kirk deployed against the queer community. To paraphrase: “it’s becoming safer to be queer and we’ve got to do something about that.” That “something,” as it turns out, just so happened to include capital punishment. In less effete circles, we call that genocide.
Which brings us back to the pretending.
Why are we forced to pretend that monsters like Kirk did not in fact promote this longstanding white conservative project of using state and vigilante violence against targeted groups? It honestly isn’t even possible to hide all the bodies from the long and sordid history of this project—victims of lynching, incarceration and convict labor, dispossession, deportation, starvation, and mass violence. So why do so many seem so hell-bent on this whitewashing effort?
The problem of chronic state and vigilante violence preached by Kirk and so many others is often a matter of denial for millions of us whose lives and livelihoods aren’t directly threatened by these tactics. For those, like Klein and Newsom, it’s easier to pretend that such a system of violence not only doesn’t exist, but couldn’t exist in the U.S. The history be damned!
READ: Jack Posobiec Calls Leftists “Unhuman.” JD Vance Seems to Agree.
This violence and its erasure—what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms “the unthinkable”—must remain hidden in order for society to function. We can’t live and participate in a society we know to be unjust, as Jean-Paul Sartre shows in Anti-Semite and Jew, so those benefiting most from that system of violence erase, deny, and comply with its conversion of human flesh into property and power.
But for many of us, the denial hides something more sinister—that the unfounded, fundamentalist faith in the superiority of whiteness, Christianity, and Western Civilization is not only nonsense, but actually totally dependent on state violence to exist as an idea, an identity, and a mode of power. Erasing Kirk’s legacy and its relationship to violence is an integral part of that project, without which white conservatism—both as an ideology and a political practice—is impossible.
As with mass shootings, if we really care about and want to stop the pervasive violence of this repressive political system and its expression in acts like Kirk’s shooting, the first step is to stop pretending.
