Toot Sweet
THE SLOP MERCHANTS
If the question is, What are they trying to do? the answer appears to be, They’re trying to make life impossible. You have to deploy so many coping mechanisms, you can’t hear yourself think. But amid all this toil and strife, there’s no small satisfaction in watching them blow an easy lead.
Whatever you think about Charlie Kirk’s murder, the spectacle of Kash Patel cosplaying the role of FBI director is one sad-ass performance. The long shadow of the Hoover years teaches us the one, overarching essential, that control of the information environment is everything. If you lose the narrative, you’ve surrendered the ground game. Patel couldn’t keep his story straight. Rookie mistake.
Why does everybody feel compelled to say something? I remember something former DCI and SecDef Robert Gates [no relation] once said, “Never miss a good opportunity to shut up.” One of Trump’s verbal pathologies is that he thinks he has something profound to say about everything, or he thinks he’s expected to have something to say, or he simply can’t help shooting off his mouth. Maybe it’s a function of the Twitter or TikTok mentality, that we don’t hesitate, or look before we leap.
I don’t think the body was even cold, before the MAGA-verse began generating outrage content. “Most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets.” (My bad, I had to do it, all those sibilants.) The fact that it was ill-informed, or complete fiction, or inflammatory, is beside the point – it was the point. They were already monetizing, or weaponizing, Charlie Kirk’s death. All the crocodile tears at Mar-a-Lago can’t camouflage that. Horst Wessel comes to mind, and that comparison is only going to send the rabid Right into paroxysms of apoplexy. (Couldn’t resist those rhythmic X’s, either.)
For those of you who might not recognize the historical reference, Horst Wessel was a Nazi agitator, a Brownshirt executed by Communist muscle-heads, in early 1930. He was a pimp in his spare time, and his murder was as much a business dispute as political. Which uncomfortable circumstance was papered over by Goebbels, who turned the dead thug into a martyr. “A man who calls out through his deeds, ‘Come to me, I shall redeem you!’” The imagery is only too calculated. Later on, the Horst-Wessel-Lied, a song with lyrics written by the ‘blood witness’ himself – Hitler’s description of the sainted lad - took on a life of its own, as a Nazi power ballad and nationalist signifier.
These days, the equivalent would be an Internet meme, an endlessly circulated gif, that memorializes Kirk’s death as sacrifice, in service to higher principles of - Oh, wait.
Charlie Kirk’s murder isn’t coherently political, as one observer remarked. It’s a lone-wolf killing, and whatever statement is being made isn’t being delivered out, into the real world, but directed inward, at the on-line community, a substitute, self-reinforcing authority. And community isn’t quite the right word, because the virtual presence is in many ways opposed to socialization. This guy doesn’t belong to any political categories, either, one way or the other, because he’s disengaged from the active political conversation, at least in a conventional way. He manifests our collective unconscious, catalyzed by the algorithm.
The uses to which Kirk’s death are being put are entirely functional. The outpouring of grief is laughable. We can only wonder what his shelf life would be, without the generative manipulation of the echo chamber. We’ve learned to discount most of the drippy smarm we hear from Trump himself, but in this case, the pile-on from the Karens is deafening. The sycophancy index is pegging the needle. I’m not sure why this has gone into such high gear, or why it’s achieved such resonance, but maybe they were just ready for it, waiting for the animating event, a spark to the tinder. It doesn’t matter who got shot, or why. It’s happy accident. The opportunity presents itself. You take the moment when it serves.
Charlie Kirk was a racist, misogynist, Fascist-adjacent oinker who leveraged his platform with a message of retributive violence and tribal hatreds, and took up too much air in the room. He is, in fact, a Horst Wessel for our time. An empty windbag the MAGA faithful can fill with the milk of vitriol. It says everything that they clutch him tearfully to their breasts. The brand is venom. It’s toxic slush, and Charlie Kirk is a clickbait whore, dead by his own hand.