It’s time to close out some of the tabs I’ve had open for a bit.
:: This first grouping is about the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, which I have been reluctant to address in any major way, and I suppose I’m going to keep not much addressing it. It’s phrasing things mildly to say that I was not a fan. I do not think that Kirk injected any particular level of intelligent insight into the national conversation; I found his views to be a typical MAGA blend of virulent toxicity, white supremacy, sexism, creepy evangelicalism, and a general lack of factual correctness. I also think Kirk was Exhibit A in my ongoing belief that debates, as we generally see them in American discourse, are a complete and utter waste of time that reward talking-point facility, quick speaking, and general loudness over developing and advancing serious argument. (I differentiate greatly between debate and argument.) In short, I do not believe that Kirk made America a better place; rather, he played a starring role in the political forces that I believe are relentlessly making everything that has ever been good about America worse.
But I am appalled and disgusted by his murder. The man should be alive. His wife should still have a living husband. His children should still have a living father. And the person who murdered him should never have been able to get hold of the tool he used to do it. (Assuming that the person in custody truly is the one who committed the act, an assumption that I see no reason to question.)
Here are several pieces that I read in the days following Kirk’s murder (which, in a sign of the times, I learned about on Tiktok):
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times: Charlie Kirk didn’t shy away from who he was. We shouldn’t, either.
It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.
But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.
Elizabeth Spiers, The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s legacy deserves no mourning.
Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long as you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege. The man who smeared Black women like Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama, whom he claimed had benefited from affirmative action, saying, ‘you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.
AR Moxon, The Die-ers. (This piece is not specifically about Kirk, and was written two years ago. I think it still applicable to the current moment.)
Supremacy is a belief system that rests on what I’ve called foundational lies: the lie of separation, which insists that we bear no relation to one another; the lie of scarcity, which insists that life must be earned; and the lie of redemptive violence, which insists that those who have not earned life owe a debt to those who have earned life; a debt that is best paid with violence and hard use.
It’s a belief system that lets me believe that other people don’t exist in the same way that I do—that they aren’t people, in fact—and makes that case so subtly, I don’t even have to tell myself that’s what I actually believe; makes it so subtly, I can be outraged and offended when I reveal this belief to others without even knowing I’ve done so, and people who have learned to detect the assumptions behind my mountainous inhumanity inform me that they’ve detected mountainous inhumanity in me.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vanity Fair: Charlie Kirk, redeemed: A political class finds its lost cause. (Amazing piece. You may need a paywall-bypass site to access it.)
Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
Rebecca Solnit on debate (link is to a Facebook post):
Debate is a sport, and some people are very good at it, aand it is not a reliable route to truth or clarity or anything else except who is more ruthless, relentless, has more rhetorical chops, etc. I mean it’s dueling by verbiage and vehemence, and just like dueling with pistols or jousting with lances, all it settlesis better at the sport. (I know there is debate with rules in high schools and colleges, and then there’s the free-for-all versions….)
Was he good at it? He let college students pose questions and then (often, not always; see first comment) trounced them and somehow that was very appealing to a lot of people, which says a lot, but not that he was right or had his facts in line. Someone better than him at the sport–a top-notch courtroom lawyer, a lot of grownups–could have probably destroyed him in a debate not corrupted by interruptions and crowd roars, because he repeated a lot of MAGA nonsense. Adding a link in the comments of him being solidly trounced at Cambridge, thanks to Christopher Knight. Where the Brit is actually using facts and logic and kind of showing what debate should be, and Kirk is flailing.
Laurie Penny: “No, I will not debate you.” (Another older piece, but one which speaks directly to my personal distaste for “debate” as it’s mostly framed these days.)
There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.
Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.
Tad Stoermer, “The Absolutist Trap: How free speech became anti-Democratic” (paid Substack):
Ezra Klein’s argument that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way” perfectly embodies this destructive thinking. Klein celebrates Kirk’s willingness to “show up and debate” as if the form of engagement somehow sanctifies whatever gets said, regardless of its content or effects. This is the abandonment of democratic values — or, at the very least, an ignorance of them — in favor of procedural worship. It’s a genuflection at the altar of democracy as ritual.
What’s most striking about Klein’s position—and the broader discourse around Kirk’s assassination—is how it reveals our complete abandonment of the contested tradition that once defined American approaches to speech and power. Contemporary commentators treat absolute free speech as if it’s some foundational American principle, when in fact it represents a radical departure from centuries of ongoing struggle over what speech deserves protection and why.
Nekimi Levy Armstrong, The Minnesota Star Tribune: “The blunt truth about Charlie Kirk’s legacy“.
When the machinery of the state chooses to grieve selectively, it teaches the public whose humanity is recognized and whose is disposable. That hierarchy is not new. It is deeply familiar to those of us who live at the intersections of fate, race, gender and justice.
The rush to sanitize Kirk’s legacy is not an isolated phenomenon. America has a long history of smoothing over the sharp edges of those whose influence was harmful. Confederate generals who fought to preserve slavery were reimagined in textbooks as honorable men defending “states’ rights.” Richard Nixon, forced to resign in disgrace, was later eulogized by political elites as a statesman whose “legacy will endure,” with Watergate reduced to a footnote. Even George Wallace, who once pledged “segregation forever,” was later softened in memory as a “complex” figure rather than a lifelong architect of racial terror.
:: Setting aside Mr. Kirk (and honestly, I plan to never speak of him again, as I assume his memory will fade until no one will think of him any more than anyone really thinks about Rush Limbaugh these days), but the news is still depressing: How the Current Administration is dismantling American cancer research. In the long run, the most damaging thing about the current administration may well be Robert F .Kennedy Jr. and his ongoing jihad against vaccines and health in general.
:: Finally, because this is getting long, a tip of the hat to a voice I’m sorry to see retiring: Olivia Jaimes, the pseudonymous creator of the comic strip Nancy over the last seven years, is stepping down.
Since 2018, “Nancy” has been penned by an enigmatic cartoonist who uses the pseudonym Olivia Jaimes. The reclusive creator modernized the strip, which has been in print since 1922, and its characters: the always sassy, sometimes grouchy Nancy Ritz, her aunt Fritzi, and best friend Sluggo.
But last week, we noticed black-and-white reruns on GoComics running in place of Jaimes’ bright, spare colored panels. These were “Nancy” strips from the Ernie Bushmiller days, who wrote and drew the comic from 1925 until his death in 1982. Wait. Where’s Olivia?
True to her mysterious ways, Jaimes quietly exited the strip and officially announced her retirement.
This makes me sad, though I’m happy to note that Jaimes leaves behind a seven-year-long body of work that is compelling and artistically interesting in the best Nancy way, as well as being often downright funny, which is the whole point, isn’t it? During Jaimes’s run, Nancy introduced a new cast of schoolmates for Nancy, as well as modernized her interests (Nancy was a member of her school’s robotics team!) without ever leaving behind Nancy’s trademark self-centered, but still somehow kind-hearted, nature. (Esther, Nancy’s new-ish best friend, had better make the transition to the new artist!) I also noticed that Jaimes played with the comic strip’s relationship with time: in a daily strip, obviously time passes (you can’t have Blondie and Dagwood just living in the 1940s forever), but you can’t have the characters aging while time passes. Jaimes observed this with great facility, allowing her characters to subtlely change and even mature over time (witness Nancy’s relationship with Mildred, her counterpart at the local magnet school) while no, nobody ever aged in the strip.
Olivia Jaimes’s true identity has thus far not been revealed, and while I am not clamoring for that to happen (unless Jaimes wants it to be so!), I am clamoring for Olivia Jaimes to have many successful future projects that are at least somehow clearly indicated as being Jaimes’s, if they choose to do any. I’d like to follow their work. (I also want a collection of all of Jaimes’s Nancy strips!)
That’s all for now…and my tabs are STILL overflowing, fancy that….
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