Greetings from Glen Allen!
It’s been a heavy few weeks since my last dispatch, with the shooting at the children’s mass in Minnesota and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I’ll get back to my regularly scheduled programming next month, but today I have a plea for fellow writers to be more prudent with their words and what they share. I’m going to pick on Stephen King, but this applies to all of us.
Until next month.
Charlie Kirk, Stephen King, and Cruelty
In the week since Kirk’s assassination, I’ve seen so many writers say something like “assassination is bad but he was a terrible person.” There’s a difference between “I hate his ideology” and “He was a hateful person,” but many in my social feeds have blurred that line, which has led to a lot of misinformation.
For example, Stephen King casually posted that Kirk “advocated for stoning gays to death, just sayin’.” The context was a line from Kirk’s radio show where he took a woman to task for cherry-picking Bible verses. He used the line as an example of why you don’t want to do that.
King deleted his post and apologized, but the incident was cruel on two levels. First, whatever your view of Kirk, it’s wrong to allege a falsehood, particularly one as monstrous as “he advocated stoning gays to death.” The both-sides whataboutism of “the right does it, too” doesn’t make it OK.
A second, subtler level of cruelty is to the gay community itself. Imagine as a gay person you believed King’s post and then saw millions of people celebrating Kirk. What would you think? You might reasonably conclude you live in a country of bigots who literally want you dead. You might then conclude the only solution is to pick up a gun.
Those are the stakes of promoting a lie. People hallucinate a boogeyman and turn to violence to fight him.
The Dam vs. the River
If you’ll permit me a Cassandra moment, I have a good bead on both political extremes and can assure you that the vast majority of this country is in the broad “live and let live” center. Left and right have sharp policy differences, and yes bigotry still exists, but no one in the broad center wants actual violence.
However, many on the right have also pointed out that Trump is the dam, not the river — i.e., rather than leading the flow, he might be holding back a watershed. A growing number on the right seem to be ready for an authoritarian in the mold of Franco to counter the growing authoritarianism of the left.
We’re not there yet, but if you can’t stomach the open dialogue of a Charlie Kirk, you might manifest the real monster you’ve been afraid of. In his own words:
I go around universities and have challenging conversations because that is what is so important to our country, is to find our disagreements, respectfully, because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens.
The Edge of America?
In my second novel, I included an epigraph from the Book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
If you’re note familiar with Judges, it is one of the most depraved books in the Old Testament. After reaching the promised land, the Israelites failed to pass on the lessons of Moses to their children, which led to social fractures and bloodshed. What comes next is the Israelites eventually tire of the violence and ask for a king.
To paraphrase Uncle Ellis in No Country for Old Men, what we have isn’t new. But is social collapse inevitable? Otto von Bismarck allegedly said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
May it continue to be so.
Thank you Jon for the reasonable discussion on Charlie Kirk. I am very conflicted. I abhor many of the things he has said and professed to believe. I also have seen over the last weeks some clips of a reasonable young man who articulates his views very well. If only he didn’t feel the need to “perform” when his audience wanted the ugly speech. It seemed he was someone who spoke to his audience and thus it is difficult to discern what he truly believed. Violence is never the correct answer to political debate