Too much murder

I condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Without caveat, without any "buts".

Like all of us, Kirk was a mixed bag. "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote. So it was for Charlie Kirk.

Kirk's politics were vile. But he was a remarkable talent. His approach to doing politics — not so much his too-online debate performances, but Turning Point USA's building of a belonging-first membership organization — is admirable. It is how politics should be done. I lament that more civilized political communities have failed where Kirk succeeded.

None of this matters to the question of Kirk's murder, though.

Murder is bad. It's the easiest call.

Iryna Zarutska's murder on a Charlotte light-rail train was horrible. I condemn it unreservedly.

I dislike the way a certain political community, broadly Charlie Kirk's political community, has transformed her murder into "evidence" for their theory of a woke conspiracy to suppress coverage of black-on-white crime. What's unusual about this tragedy is not the limited coverage of a random homicide in an American city. We have those every day, alas. What distinguishes Zarutska's murder is the existence of a strikingly brutal snuff film and a strikingly beautiful victim, which made it possible for the incident to be animated into a national obsession.

Zarutska's murderer is a violent schizophrenic who should not have been on the streets. How to manage people who require support and supervision, in a manner respectful of their rights but also others' safety, is a question to which we've collectively thrown up our hands. The murderer may have referred to his victim as "that white girl", but mostly he seemed confused about his action. "Make sure it was me that did it, not the material. And I'm telling you, the material did it… I never said not one word to the lady at all. That scary, ain't it? So, like, why would somebody stab somebody for no reason?" The smarter MAGA-ists understand that the racial dimension of the crime is weak, so they play up a racial dimension of a supposed cover-up.

Zarutska is innocent of all that. Probably she would not approve of it.

Perhaps Kirk was principled enough that he would not approve of the McCarthyite speech crackdown his murder has provoked from his own political allies.

Both of them are dead. They don't get a say in these things.

On the same day Kirk was killed, two students were wounded in a school shooting apparently motivated by the nihilistic white supremicist ideology that often motivates school shootings. The victims were not killed, thank goodness. Only the shooter died, by suicide. "Only."

All of this is tragedy.

Last week, responding to Zarutska's murder, Fox commentator Brian Kilmeade suggested for the difficult homeless "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them." He later, to his credit, retracted the remark and apologized.

Nevertheless, on Monday, two homeless encampments in Minneapolis were shot up. Is there a relationship between Kilmeade's remarks and these events? We don't know. Probably we never will. I don't suggest we charge Kilmeade with a crime, even if he had not recanted. As Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson remind us, free speech in the United States encompasses hate speech, and that's a better choice than allowing the state to invent shifting criteria for what speech is so hateful that it should be criminalized. I presume Brian Kilmeade is a person of conscience. I don't envy him the questions he must be asking himself after this week's events.

Also on Monday, on Donald Trump's orders, the US military blew up a boat in the Caribbean, ending the lives of three people. The allegation is they were drug runners. On September 2, eleven people were killed in a similar incident. Yesterday President Trump said we'd in fact "knocked off" three boats, though we know very little about the third.

Each of the people on these boats were as human as Charlie Kirk, as precious as Irina Zarutska. These people too were husbands, fathers, daughters, mothers. They had dreams, futures.

Perhaps you are willing to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt, that it had ironclad intelligence these were drug-runners and not (or not accompanied by) migrants fleeing the catastrophe that Venezuela has become. Whoever these people are, or were, Solzhenitsyn's remark applies just as strongly to them. "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts."

These were human beings, not even alleged to be military combatants or terrorists. They would not have been given the death penalty if convicted of the crimes of which they are accused.

They were not convicted. They have not been indicted. They were killed, not in any kind of self-defense. They had no opportunity to contest the charges against them or to surrender if the charges were accurate. They were extrajudicially executed on the President's say so. They were murdered.

President Trump remarked:

We're seeing that there are no ships in the ocean anymore ... no there are no boats. I wonder why? Meaning, no drugs are coming across. Probably stopping some fishermen too. To be honest, if I were a fisherman, I wouldn't want to go fishing either. "Maybe they think I have drugs downstairs."

If Mr. Trump is so certain our intelligence is ironclad, why would he fear? People fish for their livings. The President might have reassured them, you have nothing to worry about unless you are running drugs, we know who these people are. He did not. His Vice President echoed the remark, "Hell, I wouldn't go fishing right now in that area of the world."

Perhaps my sense of humor is underdeveloped.

But I think murder is bad.

Without caveat, without any "buts". It's the easiest call.