Charlie’s Dead!

When I was a kid back in the 1960s, the phrase “Charlie’s dead” was something you said to a woman when her petticoat was showing. Do women still wear petticoats? Whether or not it referred originally to the execution of Charles I, it is fairly ancient. After what happened last week, it will forever have a contemporary, sinister meaning.

I never met Charlie Kirk, the closest I ever came to his organisation was when I found a sticker in Sydenham for Turning Point UK. I e-mailed them and received a polite invitation to join, but replied that I was too old.

Old is a word that will never be associated with Charlie, because he would have been just 32 on the fourteenth of next month. If you haven’t seen it, there is video of his assassination on YouTube; I won’t link it here, because it is harrowing. There is more than one clip, he was addressing a large crowd. People realised immediately what had happened and probably fearing a mass shooting, they began to run away from the scene. Women screamed, but there was no real panic.

To add to the horror, Kirk’s wife was present with their two young ones. Their son is still a baby, but their daughter is old enough to realise or to be told that she will never see her father again.

Vigils were held for Charlie Kirk on three continents including one in London last Friday evening, which I attended. There was a heavy turnout, and not all those present were white, although anyone reading the sick obituary published by the Socialist Worker website the day of his assassination might not think so. This is the way the extreme left glorify violence, the way they have always glorified it.

When the executive Brian Thompson was assassinated in broadly similar circumstances last December, the headline of the same website was UnitedHealthcare CEO got a dose of his own medicine; they have since alluded to his alleged assassin as a folk hero. Like Kirk, Brian Thompson was a married man and father of two.

The pondlife of the Socialist Workers Party are far from the only leftists to gloat over the murder of Charlie Kirk, but many of them are not laughing quite so loud now. Supporters in Michigan went to an Office Depot print shop to order a poster for their vigil. They were refused service by a woman who called it propaganda. They released a video of her refusal, and the company says she has now been fired.

Many others have been fired or disciplined for making outrageous social media posts, including teachers, airline pilots and infamously, at least one TV pundit.

This is cancel culture coming back to bite the people who have endorsed it for years. It isn’t always inappropriate to make jokes about the dead; it wasn’t long after the 9/11 attacks that people - including New Yorkers - were laughing at the fall of the Twin Towers. Sometimes, gallows humour can be a fitting or even a healing response. The mocking of Charlie Kirk isn’t that though, most of these people are glad he is dead, and not a few of them would gladly see you dead if you share any of his political views, even tangentially, and even if you aren’t white.