I don’t think he deserves memorialisation ahead of the child victims of school shootings- one which occurred the same day, but is normalised to the point where it was scarcely reported- and the assassination of an elected official in Minnesota in June, which received very little press and the death threats and harassment that volunteers in the electoral system received as a result of the lies, that they knew were lies, about a stolen election.
I’d never heard of this guy before the other day, but I did hear today that Trump had canceled the visas of the grandchildren of a minister in the Brazilian government and placed tariffs of 50% on Brazil because they found Bolsonaro guilty of an attempted coup. Trump’s government is punishing another country’s democratically elected government for not giving in to an armed insurrection. This is not normal behavior.
Trump himself talked to a mob that stormed the capital about hanging opposition leaders and even his own vice president for his following a largely ceremonial role in the handover of power.
And when the former speaker’s husband was attacked with a hammer there was talk about crisis actors and all kinds of hatred.
I’m all for denouncing political violence and extending empathy to its victims, but not selectively.
And I have to be honest that I’ve avoided this and the fantastical US politics in general. But we’ve seen Trump’s Republicans try and break their country’s system with voting registration restrictions known to exclude voters and have little other effect, gerrymandering districts openly, abusing powers to get independent bodies to doctor statistics and results, and they’ve attacked the rule of law through judiciary appointments and resulting judgements, including the idea the the president is in effect above the law.
And we’re seeing some of these actions, in terms of changing voting registration rules for no reason, creeping in, in New Zealand.
So I didn’t know much about Charlie Kirk, and I also don’t know the name of any school shooting victims from this year.
I do know the trouble Ireland had removing violence from their politics and I’m grateful that the countries that I and my family live in have not had a normalising of violence, and particularly gun violence to such a degree.
But don’t be fooled. Australia famously slowed gun violence, but guns and the political rhetoric of the NRA are returning there. We get to choose to try to keep this stuff out or to follow their examples.
