Cancel Culture Redux; Jewish Conspiracy As Vanity Project
Human, all too human.– When everything you and your friends once decried as a communist plot to overthrow your country, you and your friends now espouse and embrace with brio to achieve your own ends. And when you manage to convince yourselves — or rather accept without a moment’s doubt or hesitation — that this hypocritical adoption of the very totalitarian methods you formerly feared will somehow lead to the revitalization of your country.
Charlie Kirk was not a statesmen of any kind, let alone an important one. He was neither a religious leader nor a war hero. He was not a long-established doyen of the arts, the sciences, spectator sports, or the academy. He was, in the final analysis, a minor celebrity of the right-wing half of the internet’s tribal politics scene, and, as far as I can tell, a relatively doctrinaire denizen of the populist rabble-rousing political faction that still intermittently attempts to pass itself off as conservative today. He was also a very young man, still in his formative years intellectually (assuming that any significant development of his intellect was within his potential), and therefore not to be taken too seriously for his ideas, inasmuch as we can all remember how derivative and pliable our own thinking was before age thirty, and how much we still had to learn and evolve after that age.
It follows from nothing about his life or death, anymore than it has from the lives and deaths of so many men far greater than he, that modern civilization ought to be fundamentally altered, and long-cherished natural rights abandoned or abrogated, in the name of imposing and enforcing universal respect and reverence for the memory of this unfortunate young man. America, long since having learned to tolerate the near-universal violation of the Second Commandment (not to mention most of the other nine), has apparently now decided that Charlie Kirk is the one holy name that must never be taken in vain, for the sanctity of which new commandment the U.S. Consititution’s First Amendment is to be burned at the vigil of state-enforced Rightspeak. Thus, we suddenly hear the Trump administration and its popular shills openly invoking the left’s phony category of “hate speech,” and promising to pursue and punish transgressors of these new verbal purity requirements, in a naked attempt to exploit Kirk’s death as the gateway drug into openly criminalizing any speech — that is, any ideas — opposed or unpalatable to Trumpism.
We are witnessing the Trump administration’s rapid descent into absolute lawlessness, or rather self-identification with and as The Law. That the remnants of America’s institutions of government, and of its traditions of natural rights and individual liberty, are still able to provide at least some friction to slow the devolution into unbridled demagoguery, is no argument or evidence against the facts confronting us. It is immediately apparent to anyone watching with clear eyes that there is nothing stopping this administration from imposing its whims without regard for legality or public opinion, except the actual limiting resistance of law and public dissent, obstacles which are proving to be much weaker and less trustworthy than one might have imagined even a few years ago. Americans inclined to view the government expansions and civil compliance training of the Covid years as a brazen test for future tyrannization would do well to remember who was president of the United States during the first year of those unconstitutional expansions, for it is certainly clear who is benefitting most from the executive power gains (and public inuring to such gains) that are the terrible legacy of that period.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, probably the first name in everyone’s mind when thinking of the phrase “character witness,” rejects all dismissals of the latest conspiracy theory about Charlie Kirk’s murder, namely that the Jews did it — okay, I admit that this “latest conspiracy theory” is getting a bit old — on the grounds that we ought to trust the people who were Kirk’s “personal friends” for a true insight into his view of Israel, specifically Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. As if there were any doubt that those two would be right on top of the Evil Jews Theory of Everything. And thank you to Congresswoman Greene for reminding us of the old saw that a man ought to be judged by his friends, though perhaps, in this case, it would be best not to associate the man with these friends quite so soon — it is the least we can do, given the horrible manner of his death, to let him rest in peace a little while longer.
The need to explain everything by way of conspiracy speculations may be one of the surest signs that one is dealing with dyed-in-the-wool progressives, whether of the right-wing or left-wing sort. For progressivism, at its core, is born of the need to believe that all history is part of a comprehensible system, ordered and self-propelling. One who adopts or imbibes this progressive presupposition — that is, one whose view of politics and civilization is inseparable from a drunken sense of inevitability and preordained logic — is unable to accept the role of chance or incommensurable anomaly as a factor in The Great Unfolding. Thus it is, for example, that Marxism reduces all of history’s complicated twists and turns to the inescapable and therefore (supposedly) predictable vectors of property ownership, while Nazism reduces them to the millennial struggle of the Aryan man to fulfill the Earth’s destiny by ridding the human race of its primordial impurities at last.
And hence today, our own tired sots hard at the stale dregs of late-stage progressivism are incapable of allowing that events and political trajectories may sometimes be altered by the more or less random acts of confused young men of no inherent worth, connection, or consequence. No no, they insist, that won’t do. There must be an ultimate meaning within the grand design, a world-historical source for any event they regard as important (whether it is actually so or not); therefore, lacking both imagination and minds logical enough to develop an idea in an interesting way, these shrunken progressives seek to make sense of Charlie Kirk’s murder by resorting to one of progressivism’s old standbys: the Zionist plot.
Left out of their picture is a convincing explanation of why killing Charlie Kirk of all people — a minor celebrity of the right-wing half of today’s internet tribalism — should be worth the trouble of such a plot. Of course, a simple consideration of the fact that the “friends” offering these speculations in public are themselves, like Kirk, mere minor celebrities of this trivial moment in political discourse, is all the explanation one needs. Vanity and delusions of grandeur are self-justifying. Wouldn’t Owens and Carlson need to believe their deaths would only make sense as world-historical events, after all? Hence the quest for an explanatorily grand “theory” of poor Charlie Kirk’s murder.
