Six-Fingered Man

So we have to figure out how to feel about Charlie Kirk's assassination.  

I'm not going to go into the reasons why this is such a conflicted situation.  Charlie Kirk was an extreme right wing "influencer," well-known, and someone who advocated - and publicly professed - very extreme views.  You could look him up.  Hint:  He suggested mass incarceration as a fix for the housing crisis, and advocated for public, televised executions even for children to watch.  So we're not talking about one more conservative pundit, and there's certainly no room for both-sider-ism.

As I consider his brutal assassination, I will certainly rise to the level of civilization that is expected of me, as Johnathan Last has done:

So the assassination of Charlie Kirk is not just a human tragedy for his family. It is not just an affront to society. It is an attack on our civic compact. It should be confronted as such, with no qualifications or equivocations.*

But I'm also a flawed human being, and a politically active one at that, and a big part of me wants to say something like "good riddance to bad rubbish."  How can we celebrate a murder?  I guess the same way I celebrated the murder of Count Rugen.  You remember Count Rugen.  The last thing he heard before he died was Inigo Montoya saying "Hello.  My name Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die."**  No regrets.  

So how is this different?  I understand that Charlie Kirk was a real human being and Rugen was a fictional character, but that distinction doesn't carry a lot of weight.  Both were evil people, both were killed by determined people who (we would assume in re: Kirk's killer) were injured by them.

I've got no answer to this question - I'll feel the way I feel, and so will everyone else.  However, two things Kirk has said are relevant as we consider his brutal assassination:   

"It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights". (4/23)

"I think empathy is a made up New Age term that has done a lot of damage" (10/22)

The irony is, I suppose, that we honor Kirk's humanity by expressing - in word and action - our strong opposition to what he has said. 

* - From today's Bulwark Triad e-mail newsletter; no link available

** - [Update]  I just remembered that the last thing Rugen heard before being skewered was "I want my father back, you son of a bitch!"  But you get the point.