🔒The Right's Hypocrisy is Not Their Weakness - It's Their Strength

Charlie Kirk is in the news again, yay! Not because he suddenly returned from vacation and was baffled that everyone was under the impression he was dead, but for a much more boring reason: Dave Chapelle was recently recorded on a potato phone at a live comedy event making a joke about Kirk’s death with the punchline clipped out.

So first of all, obviously there’s a lot more to this bit and whoever decided to just truncate out the entire joke part of whatever joke Chapelle was making here was acting with deliberate intent. And I’m not even arguing that the punchline was hilarious or even landed at all, because I don’t know what the punchline even was, and neither, apparently, does anybody. At least, none of the audience, as of me posting this, has given any further context.

 It doesn’t matter what the rest of the joke was, anyway, because the problem is the fact that a joke was made and the right are trying to rekindle the cancellation marathon they threw last year immediately after he was killed, when online vigilantes set up surveillance parties to scour social media for anyone displaying insufficient grief about his death. These mofos worked in shifts for like a month, aggressively doxing and mass-reporting to their employers anyone who was found to have made an uncharitable comment about Kirk online, whether it was an outright celebration or someone merely pointing out the irony of his death relative to his stated philosophical position on gun violence (specifically, that the current rate of unjustified gun deaths in America is an acceptable sacrifice for a robust interpretation of the Second Amendment.)

 That is a perfectly reasonable point to bring up! And, in an attempt to shield myself from any such retribution, I wish to God that murder hadn’t happened. But it did, and nobody can change what happened, and it’s therefore pretty damn open-for-discussion the question of whether Kirk, and those who agree with him on the subject of gun violence, are willing to extend the “worth it” umbrella to the murder of Kirk himself. Or, alternatively, are you “literally doing the meme” about the villain from Shrek? You know the one I mean.

It would be hypocritical to specifically exclude certain individuals from the “worth it” category who weren’t specified in the original statement, right? It’s completely valid to question whether Kirk and those who shared his beliefs on this topic were actually extending the definition of “worthwhile” gun violence to public figures, or whether they’re kind of just throwing acceptable economic and racial underclasses under the bus here. It’s a question made more pertinent by the fact that Kirk’s literal final words in the mortal realm were to dismiss most gun violence as a “gang” thing.

 The doxing campaign that followed Kirk’s murder took place at a time that kind of feels alien, now, even though it was just a year ago—in mid-to-late 2025, Trump’s MAGA coalition felt like it was still consolidating power to a terrifying degree and every institution was falling in lockstep with its ideological mission. In the days after Kirk was shot, a lot of people thought that Trump was going to do something drastic like declare martial law or some shit, and a lot of institutions were extremely eager to comply for their own survival. These people put so many heads on pikes. A huge number of people got fired from their jobs just for quoting Kirk’s own words in a way that made a point about his beliefs. 

I noticed at the time that a number of these doxing campaigns were using the online tipping service Buy Me a Coffee to finance themselves. This is the company that I, myself, use to solicit one-off donation payments for my newsletter. I found that some of the people running these campaigns were explicitly and openly targeting racial and sexual minorities, which is very much against BMAC’s terms of service, so I submitted a complaint with ample evidence. They nevertheless declined to intervene with these fundraisers even where the people running them were quoting Hitler.

 I don’t recount this to shame BMAC in particular, and hell, I’m still using their service. Find me any company that would have stood up against even Hitler-quoters at the height of their wrath in support of an assassination victim that the Vice President was claiming as one of his best friends. My point is that this was an event that made it explicitly obvious that corporations and institutions will never step up and save us from fascism should it arrive, and I know a lot of you will say “duh” to that, but you may not understand exactly why.

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