This is the Left’s ultimate cancellation - Charlie Kirk is dead
Like many Americans, he questioned the narrative around transgender activism. Worse, also like many Americans, he particularly was opposed to abortion. Now he himself is murdered, gunned down during a public debate at a university in Utah. Of course, like most public intellectuals of the right, Kirk was used to attempts to cancel him.
This is the ultimate cancellation. The question here is not whether you agreed or disagreed with Kirk. He had an enormous range of views across very different subjects, from pure politics to the very tender subjects of sexuality. But the fundamental issue is whether you can silence a person because he disagrees with you, even when disagreement is over something you regard as a fundamental subject.
The standard response from the huffy left already is that no one thinks killing their ideological opponents is right. But the answer is that – obviously – someone does.
The real question is whether the rabid push for cancellation of conservative views on every issue from life to death and anything in between creates a climate in which verbal assault can escalate to deadly violence. We constantly are told views to the right on issues such as climate change amount to incitement to humanicide. We are lectured that any attempt by Israel to defend itself against terrorism is genocide. What could be more natural than that a short back-and-sides, evangelical Christian ally of Donald Trump should undergo personal homicide?
Do not take my word for it. Go to the web. The crazier radicals of the nutso left are already overtly celebrating the slaughter of Kirk. Much more concerning is that significant parts of what would term itself the mainstream of progressive thought in the US is already framing the assassination in terms of amoral, neutral logical outcomes.
Of course, it’s dreadful he was shot. No one should be killed for their beliefs. But then comes the venomous sting. We have to remember he was a right-wing monster. He collaborated with the criminal, treasonous Trump junta. He made sexual and racial minorities feel unsafe.
All of which tends to one conclusion. People should not be shot. But we are not particularly sorry that this one was. This spells out the doctrinaire moral bankruptcy of much mainstream progressive thought. Most progressives presumably are opposed to assassination, though an alarming number giggled when Trump narrowly escaped a bullet.
But lesser forms of elimination are routinely deployed. College professors are forced out for uncongenial views on race and historiography. Public figures are vilified for political deviations. Artists have careers destroyed at the least departure from political correctitude.
The fundamental issue was whether Charlie Kirk should have been allowed to speak at all. He certainly was right-wing. He undeniably was a Trump enthusiast. But he was not a lunatic. He did not attend Nazi rallies or propose compulsory reversal of transgender surgery. This speaks to one of the intractable problems of today’s political and cultural debate. You do not have to do much to be characterised as a dispensable madman of the far right. Tony Abbott, for example, was merely a pretty intense figure of standard conservatism. Yet he was characterised as the “Mad Monk”, a bigoted trope calumny, marking him as an extremist Catholic who would bring the Inquisition to cringing Australian homes.
On the left, however, anything goes. In the US, Bernie Sanders can propose economic suicide and be praised as a prophet. Here, Penny Wong can reprimand a besieged Israel and be applauded as a diplomat.
Charlie Kirk made two mistakes: one was to be a man of the right; the other was to get shot. The lead bullet and the ideological bullet inextricably linked.
Greg Craven is the former vice-chancellor of the ACU.
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The stereotype of political persecution in the Western world is the elimination of some progressive hero of the left. Think a pro-abortion race theorist from New York gunned down for her progressive views on the reproduction rights of minorities. The shooting of Charlie Kirk runs against this self-serving narrative. Kirk was a confessedly evangelical Christian conservative of the right. He was an associate of Donald Trump. He was aligned with evil accomplices to MAGA.