My topic today is what a horrible target that leftist weirdo picked to murder in Utah last week. Not that killing anybody because you disagree with him isn’t everywhere and always a horrible thing to do.
But ironically, Charlie Kirk was the best of all of us on the right, in terms of his kindness, generosity, and lack of hate, bigotry, and all other bad qualities that the hateful, bigoted left pretends to dislike.
Again, NONE of us deserves to be killed over political agreements (duh!), but think of all of the most famous or influential conservative media figures. I used to like Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens, but they’ve gone off the rails recently. Alex Jones is three-quarter loon. Rush was great, but he had his share of tasteless comments and actions. (And by the way, when he lost his hearing, the entire left media and blogosphere celebrated wildly. Many of them did the same when he died. One might almost think that celebrating serious health setbacks and death of their political rivals is in the Left’s DNA…)
Ben Shapiro is a genius but gives no quarter on many political issues, as does Michael Knowles. Matt Walsh is fearless, and has gone hammer-and-tongs after leftists, especially on transgenderism and anti-white racism. Stephen Crowder is hilarious and insightful, but he throws rhetorical haymakers with the best of them.
Don’t get me wrong: I really like all of those people. (Except for Jones, Owens and – sadly – Tucker, nowadays.) And I give anybody who has done thousands of hours of speaking a lot of grace, re: cherry-picking their worst handful of moments.
Because in my own small way, I know how tough it is to not repeatedly make an arse of yourself if you speak or write enough. In my 700+ columns here over the last 9 years, you could make a “Worst of Martin” compilation that would shame my parents.
And that’s AFTER I’ve edited out numerous f-bombs, dozens of gross references to Que Mala-on-Willie Brown encounters, juvenile insults about the physical appearances of thousands of leftist hatemongers, and – after the latest vile comment from the likes of Joys Reid and Behar, Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, Grandma Squanto et. al. – offensive rhetorical questions on the general theme of, “Do you service your clients with that mouth?”
So, yeah. Anybody who does a lot of talking or writing about politics has said some stupid and offensive things from time to time, even your roguishly winning curmudgeon of a Roving Correspondent. (And don’t protest that I’m a prince among men and a hilarious genius, and that to know me is to love me. I tell myself that in the mirror every morning, and I can only partially buy it.) (But thank you anyway.)
Again, Charlie was the best of us. He did more public speaking and writing than almost anyone, while making fewer mean-spirited or genuinely offensive comments than anyone. Which is what makes it especially infuriating to witness the tidal wave of specious leftist attacks on him in the days before and since his murder.
So, because as CO himself has pointed out, everything is better when put into a list, I have classified the leftist complaints about Charlie into 4 categories:
1. Generalized, unsupported smears. These are the usual, meaningless epithets: fascist, Nazi, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, gynophobe, arachnophobe, blah blah blah. But there were milder ones too. A CNN goblin, minutes after the shooting, said, “He’s a divisive figure. Polarizing, a lightning rod, whatever you want to call it.”
Pro tip: if you want to insult someone, you might not want to use a term so anodyne that it could equally accurately be used to describe Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha or Martin Luther King. Because anybody who’s made any kind of difference in this world is thought of by someone, somewhere, as “divisive” or “polarizing.” You moron.
One of the most basic concepts that I used to teach to inexperienced students in my persuasive writing and debate classes was that all claims must be supported by evidence.
This first type of smear is never accompanied by examples/evidence. An example from one leftist pol among hundreds comes from CA state senator Scott Wiener: “Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. Also Charlie Kirk was a vile bigot who did immeasurable harm to so many people by normalizing dehumanization.”
He seems nice, doesn’t he? He got the “bigot” shot in, and the nebulous “normalizing dehumanization” too. And he didn’t cite an example of either. Because of course he didn’t. Because there were none. Just a hateful claim, and no evidence.
Like Anthony Weiner and Charles Blow, this little man richly deserves his last name.
2. Specific, unsupported smears. Otherwise known as bald-faced lies, these would seem to be rarer, since they are easier to disprove. And yet there were plenty of them, with leftist trolls just making up Charlie quotes out of thin air.
The most infamous came from Stephen King, who claimed that Charlie “advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”
In King’s defense, he’s come up with mesmerizing stories about demon-possessed cars and alien/spider/clowns that live in sewers and prey on children (spoiler alert), and both of those are only slightly more believable than that Charlie Kirk would advocate stoning gays.
Of course King ran from that quote like the fat kid on the train tracks in Stand By Me when somebody mentioned that the Kirk estate could sue him for such a blatant lie, and slide some of that sweet Stephen King cash over to Erika Kirk and the kids.
3. Out-of-context smears (general): These are at least loosely tied to a specific issue, even if still left vague and evidence-less. One of the best examples of this crime against decency comes from Ilhan Omar, the Jew-hating Squad member (but I repeat myself) who did an interview with another anti-Semitic creep, Mehdi Hassan. (Who happens to have one of the highest SFPIs [Simpson Face Punchability Indices] ever recorded, at 98.)
Here’s what she said about Charlie: “What I do know for sure is that Charlie is someone who once said, umm, guns save lives, after a school shooting. He was someone who was willing to downplay the death of George Floyd. (Here Hassan said, “Called him a scumbag.”) [And] downplayed slavery…by saying Juneteenth should never exist.”
I don’t even have to look these examples up to guess what Charlie actually said about them, because I know his belief system (because it’s mine too) and how it would apply to each of these examples.
He and I would say that guns save lives, because that’s provably, statistically true. See John Lott’s work for the details, but in addition to all of the criminals shot each year, guns prevent something like 100K crimes each year, mostly without firing a shot, since cowardly criminals often run away when their would-be prey displays a gun. And he probably mentioned school shootings because almost all of those end only when a good guy either shoots the scumbag, or the scumbag shoots himself or surrenders when armed good guys show up.
I’m sure he only “downplayed slavery” in the sense that he objected to the Left’s racist and anti-American focus on slavery as the only important aspect of our history. To them, anything less than condemning America and whites completely and all the time – despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of whites died to free the slaves and that America was only the second nation in world history to free ourselves of slavery – counts as “downplaying slavery.” Which it isn’t.
Also, Juneteenth sounds goofy, and it’s become one more politicized excuse to pick racial scabs on a wound that should have started healing 160 years ago! Juneteenth isn’t as bad as Kwanzaa, but it’s not great. And it doesn’t make anyone a racist to think so.
And as far as calling George Floyd a “scumbag,” that’s probably one of Charlie’s harshest comments in 10,000 hours of public speech. And it’s still not as offensive as 72% of the things that come out of your ungrateful mouths all the time, Ilhan and Mehdi!
Also, while I taught “Writing in the Law” I learned that “truth is an absolute defense” against defamation, including accusations of scumbaggery. And while George Floyd was created in God’s image, he spent a lifetime making terrible, evil decisions. He was a degenerate junkie and career criminal right up until the day he died, and he once pointed an armed pistol at the belly of a pregnant woman during an armed robbery.
That’s first ballot “Scumbag Hall of Fame” material right there.
Evil Ilhan ended her rant by saying, “There is nothing more F-ed up than to completely pretend that his words and actions have not been recorded. These people are full of sh*t, and I think it’s important to call them out, and—”
Hang on a second. I forgot that I was wearing my conical purple wizard hat, and I’m suddenly getting a message from Sam Kinison’s ghost for Ilhan.
[Begin Kinison filter] Hey there, Ilhan, it’s funny you mentioned things that are F-ed up, because I’ve been watching from here in heaven, and I’ve noticed one thing that’s more F-ed up than anything Charlie Kirk ever did. And that’s…MARRYING YOUR OWN BROTHER! OH! YOU MARRIED YOUR OWN BROTHER, YOU B*TCH!! OHH!! You were either helping him to commit immigration fraud against the nation that was generous enough to save you from that sh*thole desert you lived in… (IT’S A DESERT! FOOD DOESN’T GROW THERE! OH!) …Or else you were doing it to BANG YOUR OWN BROTHER, YOU SICKO! OH! OHHHHH!!! [end Kinison filter]
4. Finally we have the more specific, out-of-context smears. A good example among many would be one spread by Karen Attiah, a black opinion editor at the Washington Post, and coincidentally, a racist whitey-hater of the first order. Unexpectedly!
Karen (HA!) posted the following quote from Charlie: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” She presented this quote as if Charlie was making a blanket statement about black females.
Unfortunately for Abysmal Attiah, actual quotes are pretty easy to check. So many people did. And they found that in addition to ripping it out of context, Attiah actually changed one word that completely changed the meaning of the quote. Unexpectedly!
Here’s the context: It was July of 2023, a few weeks after SCOTUS ended affirmative action in college admissions. The left was very displeased about this, and they got their collective non-binary onesies up over their collective heads, and raged about it.
In a misguided attempt to show how great affirmative action discrimination was, Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown-Jackson all acknowledged that they had gotten affirmative action.
And Charlie said, “Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power….”
You see the change there? Because Charlie said “YOU” at the beginning, he clearly wasn’t talking about black women in general, but about these four particular black women. And he wasn’t making the charge himself, he was pointing out that they had admitted this about themselves.
Remember what I said before, about the truth being an absolute defense?
Michelle Obama – secret service code name “Scowling Wookie” – disguised her lack of intelligence better than the others, hidden as it was beneath her smoldering anger, and her prison-ripped outside-linebacker physique.
But anyone who listened to Joy Reid or Sheila Jackson Lee for more than 3 minutes knew that they were three consonants short of a full Bingo card. And I’ve read several of Ketanji’s writings – mostly dissents in cases where even Kagan and Sotomayor were giving her half-baked ramblings the stink-eye – and… Yikes!
If the Supreme Court were a kangaroo court – and I mean one made up of literal kangaroos – I’m pretty confident that Ketanji would still be in the bottom third of the justices in terms of IQ.
So yeah, “not much brain power” is a little harsh, especially for sweet Charlie. But…
Fact Check: True.
Let me end on a happy note: even the far-left WAPO had had enough, and they fired Karen Attiah last Friday.
So fill your cardboard box with all your race hatred and grudges and hit the bricks, Princess! Maybe the Wakanda Times is hiring.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to finish the week strong with one more column. So if you see me plodding by shakily, hand me a water bottle and tell me I’m looking as ripped as Michelle Obama.
Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!
Martin Simpson 