Ezra Klein has always gone out of his way to be kind to racists, even refusing to refer to Andrew Sullivan, supporter of gutter racist Charles Murray and shameless promoter of Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, a racist.
And now he's playing both-sides over the murder of Charlie Kirk, who was very much a racist.
In his NYTimes opinion piece, Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way, Klein warns the left and the right against using Kirk's death for political gain.
He's worried that the left will point out that Kirk was vocally in favor of a few sacrifices on the altar of NRA-level gun "freedom."
But if you mention that unpleasant fact about Kirk, Klein will consider you to be the equivalent of the right using Kirk's murder as a "Reichstag fire for our time."
Reichstag fire refers to a fire at the Reichstag which the Nazis used as an excuse to suspend civil liberties in Germany.
And this is how the right-leaning establishment at the New York Times attempts, again and again, to equate left-wing commentary with right-wing horror.
I am opposed to murder, even of wicked men like Charlie Kirk.
But it is a fact that he was a professional hate-monger. To say he was doing politics "the right way" is to excuse hate-mongering.
There is an excellent piece in Word in Black - 'Black America's Digital Daily' that says it all:
Charlie Kirk was no martyr for freedom. He was a provocateur whose rhetoric leaned heavily on racist falsehoods. He dismissed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as “anti-white.” He claimed white privilege was a “myth.” He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a “huge mistake.” He even reversed his praise of Martin Luther King Jr., later calling him “awful” and a “mythological anti-racist creation.”
Kirk also promoted the so-called “Great Replacement” theory — the white nationalist idea that demographic change in America is an intentional plot to reduce White influence. “The ‘Great Replacement’ is not a theory, it’s a reality,” he declared. Those words emboldened prejudice, spread division, and threatened the dignity of millions of Americans.
Kirk’s ideology was dangerous and rooted in racism. His assassination does not erase that truth. Violence doesn’t end hate; it deepens it, handing extremists a martyr.
Author Mark Harris also had an excellent response to Klein.
Harris forgot to mention anti-Semitism. Kirk was a big fan of the "Great Replacement" lie.
What we know about this Tyler Robinson: good student from a good Mormon family who scored high on the ACT, then dropped out of college after a semester.More: Tyler Robinson appears, from online postings, to have been a Groyper, a White Nationalist movement led by another far-right provocateur, Nick Fuentes, who regularly picked public fights with Kirk, urging his followers to out Kirk as a “fake conservative,” raising issue, most recently, with Kirk’s insistence that the Trump administration should release the Epstein files.Fuentes, of course, is now distancing himself from having been engaged in a MAGA civil war with Kirk, as is another far-right nutjob, Laura Loomer, who has been busy deleting recent tweets in which she had criticized Kirk as a “charlatan” and “political opportunist” who engaged in “mental gymnastics” and “stabs Trump in the back,” and wrote that she didn’t “ever want to hear Charlie Kirk claim he is pro-Trump ever again.”More on Tyler Robinson: the messages etched into the bullets were not, in fact, pro-trans, as the media and political ecosystem on the far right initially asserted, but rather, from a video game known for its satirical use of fascist imagery, which terminally online Groypers are known to have co-opted to be able to, in essence, hide in plain view.Still more: the parents are registered Republicans, and the father, Matt Robinson, seen in an online photo wearing a T-shirt repping the far-right Three Percenter movement, “is a Republican for Trump,” according to the grandmother, Debbie Robinson.
There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote “diversity,” they actually enforce a uniformity of thought, denying tenure to dissenters.
Charlie Kirk was given a platform by the Utah Valley University. But Weiss and her ghouls are going to use his murder at a college campus - a murder that looks to be part of a right-wing civil war - to advocate for attacking universities and cracking down on student rights.
Because the Free Press, and the money backing it, are monstrously evil.
UPDATE: Ta-Nehisi Coates responded to Klein in Vanity Fair:
Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.” The only hope was Donald Trump, who had to prevail, lest Haitians “become your masters.”
