“Those To Whom Violence Is Done…”

 Somebody’s gonna have to explain it to me:

“This murder is not about Charlie Kirk,” Hall said, speaking on CNN with anchor Victor Blackwell.

“This is what happens when divisiveness and hate is left unchecked, and so what we in law enforcement [are] working to do in communities – especially in communities of color where we see that Kirk really spoke against on a number of occasions – is that we're trying to speak to our communities.”

Kirk was killed Wednesday at Utah Valley University, with the killing drawing international media coverage and bi-partisan condemnation. However, discussions around Kirk’s killing have also included mentions of the right-wing influencer’s past controversial statements, some of which were played by Blackwell amid their discussions.

“If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like 'boy, I hope he's qualified,’” Kirk said in a clip played on CNN.

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people – that's a fact!” Kirk said in another clip. “It's happening more and more!”

In the context of discussing Kirk’s past controversial remarks, Hall said that “tough conversations” needed to be held in communities about “hate-fueled violence,” while at the same time, warned that there existed “consequences for hate speech.”

“We also need to understand that there are consequences to hate speech, there's consequences for individuals to continue to push a narrative that promotes violence in this country,” she said.

Blackwell pushed Hall to clarify her comments, asking that she be specific in what she meant when referring to “consequences for hate speech.”

“People are going to hear you say that 'there are consequences to hate speech,' [so] I want to give you an opportunity to separate those consequences from what happened to Charlie Kirk last week,” Blackwell said. “You're not drawing a connection between those two?”

Hall clarified that she wasn’t drawing a direct parallel between Kirk’s killing and her remarks on there being “consequences for hate speech,” but stressed that, regardless of her opinion on the matter, violence would continue so long as “hate-fueled speech” does as well.

“No one should lose their life because of this, but when we continue as a country to push this hate-fueled speech and this rhetoric, we're seeing the violence happen regardless of whether you're red [or] blue, and what are we going to do about it?” Hall said.

“In Black communities, we recognize that. Historically, church bombings, the assassination of our political leaders in Black communities, that should not be a blueprint, it should be a warning that we need to do something different in this country.”

To point out that Charlie Kirk was a white supremacist, misogynistic, xenophobe who made his living promoting those ideas, and was doing so when he was murdered, is not a backhanded way of excusing his murderer.

But let’s say it is, rather than have that hard conversation about violence and racism in America. Especially in response to the burgeoning excuse from Kirk apologists that speech is not violence, only acts. Try to slice that baloney so thinly it has only one side. Anything but have that hard conversation.

Ideas promote violence. Ideas are transmitted by speech. My sympathies are with Charlie Kirk’s wife and children. My sympathies are not with Charlie Kirk’s ideas, which are pernicious and vile. Speech, be it hate speech or not, certainly has consequences.

                                  My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                                But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Sometimes that’s all words do: echo in the mind. Can we connect purpose with consequence? For purposes of legal consequences, only carefully. But for purposes of public discussions, to calm and quell and root out some of the violence in our communities? Certainly.

Charlie Kirk’s words undoubtedly were meant to inspire agreement and action. He didn’t have Eliot’s judicious consideration of what purpose his words carried: Kirk clearly meant to create agreement and action, even if the action was only agreement. He was building an audience, and doing it on hate and vicious intolerance.  And for the sake of greater society, we have an obligation to counter that. 

Just not canonizing Kirk, and telling the wider world who’d never heard of him, who he actually was and what he actually said, is a sound beginning.