School shootings have become such a consistent feature of our society that we react to them almost casually. Only the family and friends of those involved mourn the victims. Flags are not lowered to half-mast out of respect for innocent young lives taken while getting an education. Politicians do not address the tragedies with compelling ideas to fix the problem. Presidents do not address the nation from the Oval Office to offer their plan for getting guns out of schools and keeping our children safe.

Unlike some people, I do not think the constant drumbeat of death and violence at our nation’s schools is an acceptable price to pay for the freedom to own a private arsenal. I don’t think the Second Amendment should be interpreted as a murder-suicide pact.

Every life lost to gun violence is a preventable tragedy. Our country refuses to prevent it. These shootings are not inevitable. We have chosen to live this way, under the oppressive threat of gun violence. And our choice is terrible.

• Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered while giving a speech in Utah. His last words were “counting or not counting gang violence,” as he responded to a shouted question about the number of mass shootings. He is survived by a wife and two children. My condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones.
• Late Thursday night, Kirk’s alleged assailant was taken into custody. We do not yet know the shooter’s motives, but that has not stopped white-wing media from going into overdrive with calls to go to “war” with the left.
• President Donald Trump responded to the death of his political ally in the only way he knows how: with threats and promises of retribution against his political enemies.
• The purging of media voices unwilling to venerate Kirk’s hateful, racist career has already begun. MSNBC fired analyst Matthew Dowd, who said in response to the shooting, “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” Telling the truth on television is never a smart career move.
• Meanwhile, HBCUs in the state of Virginia were forced to cancel classes after they received a number of credible threats. To recap, a white man was murdered by another apparently white man for reasons we don’t yet know, but somehow that means Black people have to catch hell.

Klein writes, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” I want people to pay attention to Klein’s word choices here, because nearly every one of them is covered in white supremacist apologia shit. A close read:

• “Dislike”: You see, for a cis white man like Ezra, politics and political discourse are  matters of taste. Klein no doubt disliked that Kirk said gay people should be stoned to death, but to him that’s merely a matter of preference. For other people—say, for instance, the gay people who would have been stoned to death had Kirk been more effective in his political goals—Kirk was not merely a distasteful provocateur; his ideology was a threat to their very existence. Whether an entire class of people has a right to exist is not a game to some of us, as it is to Ezra.
• “The following statement is still true”: I feel that when a guy prefaces a statement with something to the effect of “what I’m about to say is true,” they’re about to lie.
• “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way”: First of all, “exactly the right way” is not a fact that can be shown to be “true.” It’s a value judgment. And value judgments can be questioned no matter how much the white man making them stomps around and claims his judgments are facts. When we look at what values Klein supports through the avatar of Kirk, we see that Kirk was practicing the most divisive form of politics possible. Kirk’s goals were to outrage, not enrich. He practiced the politics of bullying and threatening. He called empathy a “made-up word” and said that Black women lacked the “processing power” of their white counterparts. Did Kirk have a right to say these things? Absolutely. Should he have been killed for practicing politics in the way that he did? Absolutely not. But to say that practicing politics in his way was “exactly right” is, frankly, a disgusting statement from Mr. Klein. I don’t even think there is one “exactly right” way to practice politics, but if there is, I for sure don’t think the one true way is to racially denigrate Black people and threaten the existence of the LGBTQ community. I want people who practice politics to be better than Charlie Kirk. And Ezra Klein.

Moreover,  it is entirely possible to condemn political violence and mourn the victims of political violence without lauding the political influence of the perpetrator of the violence. Klein fails that should-be-basic test.

Charlie Kirk represented the very worst American political discourse had to offer, and I wish he were still alive so I could say that to him, to his face, over and over again. I wish he lived long enough to see everything that he worked to achieve crumble all around him.

You see what I did there, Ezra? It’s really not hard.

All I can do is try to weather the storm. Violent whites have their blood up, and that usually means incredibly bad things for people like me. I’ve got public appearances that I probably need to cancel. I hope to survive this by staying as far away from white folks as I possibly can until their fever breaks.

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