Grifters gotta grift
[Charlie Kirk] was—and this is uncomfortable to write at this moment, though obviously relevant—himself an apologist for political violence, specifically in the matter of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol and the attempted coup d’état of which it was one theatrical component. … Kirk began his career in public affairs criticizing overweening central government and ended it waving away due-process concerns as black-masked agents of the state [are] dragging people away into unmarked vans. Without quite meaning to, he spent his adult life documenting his own intellectual corruption.
…
Say what you will about a young man who made his living filming sophomoric pseudo-debates with hapless randos on college campuses, that isn’t the sort of thing that inspired Col. William Travis to draw his famous line in the sand all those years ago.
To Charlie Kirk’s friends and family, I offer my sincere prayers and sympathy. To his killer and those who make excuses, however obliquely or quietly, for the almost inconceivably imbecilic cruelty at work in his death, only “scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt.”
But save some of that scorn for Kirk’s so-called friends. My inbox is already full of game attempts to commercialize the assassination in Utah. So many people want a bloody piece of Charlie Kirk to wave around for fundraising and public-relations purposes that, if they are to be all satisfied, there won’t be anything left to bury.
Every word of this seems true to me, but there’s an important caveat: Kirk was murdered at age 31, having been in the limelight for 13 years. You could have said a lot of terrible-but-true things about me at that age and older, and I didn’t even have the excuse of needing to keep rich patrons happy.
Indeed, the Old Testament is full of the stories of great (mostly) men, who started off not-so-great but grew.