Killed by Irony
Last month a man was killed by irony.
While using rhetorical trickery to deflect a question about gun violence towards demonizing first trans and then Black people, Charlie Kirk was taken out by gun violence.
When you TRY to make this shit up, people don’t buy it.
The Shift in Conversation
This shifted the national conversation away from a gruesome attack on a train.
A mentally disturbed Black man stabbed and killed a tiny innocent white woman, and they were shoving images of the slaying in my face everywhere. I don’t know if the rest of you saw this.
She was a Ukrainian refugee — as it turns out, you can make MAGA pretend to care about asylum-seeking immigrants if you give them a chance to be racist about it.
Selective Outrage
Never mind that just a week prior, a white man in my town of Palm Bay attacked a woman who walked up his driveway by mistake because, he said, he thought she was a prostitute and was protecting his wife from her.
Like, why this guy’s first thought when encountering a new woman is that she’s an attack whore, I don’t know.
And before that, a dude in Texas shot and killed a ten-year-old kid for ringing his doorbell and running. No national outcry. They call it “ding dong ditch,” right? I can’t repeat what we called it as kids.
Manufactured Fear
Each of those attacks was just as senseless and unhinged — and perhaps more preventable — but they chose to ignore them and focus on this one fluke attack.
How do we know it’s a fluke?
If it happened with any sort of regularity, we’d never hear the end of it. They wouldn’t talk about anything else.
It helps them hang the mask of the Boogeyman on the savage Black face. Then they tell you that there are more just like it living all around you, prowling — as Charlie Kirk would say.
The only obvious solution? Bring in the National Guard, right?
Clean up the streets. Literally.
Make every city as safe and crime-free as Moscow at the height of the USSR — when the only one you had to worry about was the government.
Charlie Kirk’s Death and Its Fallout
Charlie Kirk died doing what he loved: talking some racist bullshit.
Nobody talks about the three children killed in a school shooting that same day — that’s the cost of doing business. WORTH IT, as Charlie would say.
Not to mention the guy who, the same day, killed a security guard and shot up the CDC for “pushing the COVID-19 vaccine.”
The Cascade of Violence
Since the shooting, I’ve lost count — three, four more incidents of angry white men making their mediocrity everyone else’s problem in an act of senseless violence.
A Mormon church, possibly in revenge for Charlie (since his shooter was Mormon), was attacked.
A man drove his truck, rigged with firebombs, into the church, setting it ablaze. He went from person to person asking if they loved Jesus or Joseph Smith more before shooting them.
A Kirk fan murdered two women for not sufficiently mourning Charlie’s passing.
The Gaslight Machine
Meanwhile, right-wing pundits are gaslighting a nation — insisting that left-wing violence is the problem.
And we have a president who gets all of his information not from intelligence briefings, but from doomscrolling and Fox News.
He literally argued with the governor of Oregon about what was happening in Portland, saying that’s not what he saw on TV.
The Trump Effect
This guy — he’s like a nightmare homunculus of a president:
Evil as Nixon, dumb as W, and senile and charming as Ronald fucking Reagan.
The reality-warping field around this narcissist is Scarlet Witch–level powerful.
We’re caught in the Man In The High Castle season of Trump-a-vision.
And the thing is, people see him winning. They see him getting what he wants.
They just copy the playbook.
It’s narcissists all the way down — stoking the flames of division.
Surrounding him are every unscrupulous lackey and henchman in the swamp, working his Fisher-Price buttons to get their needs met before the all-consuming hunger of his ego swallows them whole and spits the bones into a jail cell — like he’s doing to James Comey.
The Local Reflection
A local city councilman here in Palm Bay even got in on the action.
He organized a march for Charlie Kirk, and against left-wing violence.
He encouraged citizens to write the names of victims of left-wing violence — including “soft on crime Democrat policies,” like the girl on the train — on signs to bring to the march.
Then they met and marched with their guns and MAGA hats from Walmart to City Hall, chanting:
“Gotta deport ‘em all.”
Local Fascism, Local Faces
This same guy — who, as you’d expect, has no chin and carries a gun everywhere he goes — was passing around flyers telling gun range owners not to let “suspected leftists” train at their facilities.
The symbols they used for evidence of this allegiance were, of course, “antifa,” but also the Black Information Project, a picture of somebody throwing a swastika in a trash can, and the phrase “Make Racists Afraid Again.”
He was doing this from his city council–affiliated account.
These people are supposed to make sure the trash gets picked up — not start picking the wrong side in the national stochastic terrorism discourse.
But I guess now that the National Guard is on street-sweeping duty, he’s got some extra time.
The Mask Slips
He overplayed his hand when he said no Indian loves America and that they should all be deported.
The city issued a statement saying they valued diversity — and he doubled down with a longer letter.
He complained that in Michigan they play the Muslim call to prayer five times a day, and opined that all he wanted was for his kids to grow up in an America he recognized.
Full of Americans.
America for Americans.
He’s been condemned by Rick Scott and our local state senator, and the city council and attorney have both appealed to Governor DeSatan to remove him from office.
Neighbors and Narratives
Many of my neighbors, however, agree with him.
They agree with Charlie Kirk — that because DEI programs exist, they have “concerns” when they see their plane is being flown by a Black pilot.
That maybe he isn’t qualified — that affirmative action put him there, like a turtle on a fencepost, risking all our lives.
These men in their 30s, still studying for their third attempt at the GED, have the audacity to accuse Ketanji Brown Jackson — Harvard Magna Cum Laude, Harvard Law Cum Laude, 20 years of experience — of being less qualified than Brett Kavanaugh, who only ever clerked and “only” graduated Cum Laude from Yale.
I know — “only.”
Just saying.
The Lynching of Logic
And for some reason, when Charlie died, historic Black churches and universities started getting threatening calls.
Across the dirty South, Black men have been found hanging from trees in public spaces and summarily dismissed as suicides.
I don’t want to get out of my lane or go out on too much of a limb here — no pun intended — but when Black men in America decide to kill themselves, they do not grab a rope and climb a tree in the park.
I don’t care how many redneck coroners swear otherwise.
Independent autopsies are in progress.
As a Black man on TikTok said:
“A white man shot a white man and y’all are mad at us? What do we have to do with any of this?”
Racism is the Answer
When something about this country doesn’t make sense, you can get the answer to “why?”
It’s racism.
Personal Fallout
I, myself, have gotten death threats.
My criminal record, divorce cases, child support issues from over a decade ago — all looked up by someone with law enforcement–level access and posted in a MAGA forum, alongside several of my addresses (including my parents’) and calls for my death.
It started before the Kirk shooting.
But I’ve taken a step back and revised my approach to antagonizing MAGA.
I told my Black friends about this and they said, “First time?”
I asked them to cut me some slack — I’m new to the death threats.
The New Myth
A kid said Kirk’s death was his generation’s 9/11, but I think it’s our Horst Wessel.
Closing Thoughts
I don’t have any answers or warm, fuzzy takeaways.
The violence is real — and it’s everywhere.
But if we can stick together, we stand a chance of riding out this wave and getting back on the road to progress.