Washed in the blood of the lamb

This country has gone completely insane.

Charlie Kirk is being given the equivalent of a state funeral for a national hero: the vice president is his pallbearer, carrying his casket onto Air Force 2, the president has ordered flags to be lowered to half mast, and Democratic governors are complying, Trump is awarding him the Medal of Freedom (technically the nation’s highest civilian honor) etc.

Charlie Kirk was a thoroughly deplorable right wing troll, who spent his entire adult life helping to create the conditions that made Donald Trump and everything he represents possible. His murder was a terrible thing, both because murder in general is a truly terrible thing, even when the murdered person is a terrible human being, and because the political effects of this murder are themselves obviously horrible as well. But mourning him, like mourning the death of any key enabler of Trumpism, should be an extremely optional activity, rather than a civic duty.

The reaction to Kirk’s death, much more so than the murder itself, is what’s significant here. After all, what were once newsworthy attempt to commit the public mass murder of children in America, via our sacred untouchable guns, are now so commonplace that they barely merit a brief mention below the fold of our national newspapers. Minutes after Kirk’s murder — one of the tens of thousands of gun deaths that have happened and will happen in America this year — a high school just down the road from me was shot up by a 16-year old boy with a revolver, who had apparently been “radicalized by anti-Semitic extremists” aka Nazis, online, critically wounding two of his classmates before killing himself. The only reason there wasn’t a newsworthy death toll is that the kid couldn’t get into the locked and hardened for security purposes school doors, so he shot up windows and lockers while the terrified students hid inside the building, completing the ritual that they have been trained to perform since early childhood.

The very next morning, yesterday here in Boulder, my wife got out of an event with a friend. The friend turned on her phone, and it was blown up with 25 texts about how Fairview High School, which her 15 year old attends, was on lockdown because a man with a gun and a tactical vest had been spotted just outside. She couldn’t get near the school because of the police of course, so she had to wait to get the news that her son — a very bright sensitive independent-minded boy who I can picture vividly doing just this — sprinted out of the school when he got the emergency message to hide from the killer, just as he had been taught since he was five years old (run, hide, fight), running running running for his life on a ethereally beautiful sunny early fall morning in Boulder, Colorado, all the way to a friend’s house a mile away, where he finally stopped to call his mother. (I was a third-hand participant in all this as I searched the internet trying to find information that my wife could convey to our friend about what the exact odds were that her son was going to be murdered yesterday morning.)

It turns out the putative mass murderer was a runner wearing a weighted vest, who was carrying his cellphone in his hand. So nothing to worry about kids! Go back to learning things tomorrow I guess.

Meanwhile:

Matthew Dowd opened a floodgate.

The MSNBC political analyst, who lost his job shortly after on-air comments about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, was the first of many figures to face consequences Thursday for public statements or actions about the shooting.

Indeed, raw feelings about the killing have ignited a campaign to shame — and more. Several conservative activists sought to identify social media users whose posts about Kirk they viewed as offensive or celebratory. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer said she would try to ruin the professional aspirations of anyone who celebrated Kirk’s death.

A Florida reporter was suspended for a question posed to a congressman. A comic book writer lost her job because of social media posts, as did educators in Mississippi and Tennessee. “CBS Mornings” host Nate Burleson was attacked for a question. An Arizona sports reporter and a Carolina Panthers public relations official both lost jobs.

An anonymously registered website pledged to “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” and asked people to offer tips about people who were “supporting political violence online.”

The site published a running list Thursday of targeted posts, along with the names, locations and employers of people who posted them. While some posts contained incendiary language, others didn’t appear to celebrate the shooting or glorify violence. There were several similar efforts, including one by activist Scott Presler, who asked his followers about teachers who supposedly celebrated Kirk’s assassination, and posted findings on X.

A staff member at the University of Mississippi was fired after sharing “insensitive comments” about Kirk’s death, according to the school’s chancellor, Glenn Boyce. The university did not identify the employee or immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press.

The president of Middle Tennessee State University said he’d fired a staffer who offered “callous and inappropriate comments on social media” about the assassination. President Sidney A. McPhee did not identify the staff member but said the person “worked in a position of trust with our students.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education commissioner warned the state’s teachers that making “disgusting” statements about Kirk’s assassination could draw sanctions, including the suspension or revocation of their teaching licenses. Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas said in a memo to school district superintendents that he’d been made aware of “despicable” comments on social media.

“I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior,” Kamoutsas said in the memo, which he also posted on X on Thursday. “Govern yourselves accordingly.”

The rush to police commentary appeared to have little precedent in other recent examples of political violence, such as the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or the shooting deaths earlier this year former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and her husband Mark.

DC Comics announced that it was ditching a new “Red Hood” series, a Batman spinoff, after one issue had been published and two more were in the works. The comics’ writer, Gretchen Felker-Martin, had published comments about Kirk’s shooting online that DC called offensive.

Everybody sing it loud and proud. for the people in the back.