Permission Structures For Violence: The New York Times And The Assassination Of Charlie Kirk.

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I have been discussing the idea that the Left has created permission structures for violence.

Their argument goes like this. If you make a point that they disagree with, that is a denial of their identity. It is an act of implicit violence. And that act of implicit violence is to be met with actual violence.

Thus, you will see Democrats using language like “fascist!” with regard to Republicans on a routine basis. You’ll see Democrats claiming day in and day out that there are brutal attacks on black people in the country, attacks that can only presumably be met with force, and then openly praising people who have used terrorism in the past.

It’s these sorts of arguments that create the permission structures for violence.

And those permission structures find their apex at The New York Times. As a newspaper, The New York is perhaps the chief purveyor of this permission structure. It has spent virtually every day since the assassination of Charlie Kirk — with the exception of Ezra Klein’s work — pushing that permission structure for violence.  

Right after Charlie died, they had not one, but two separate pieces concerning Hasan Piker, the Twitch streamer who is more than warm to terrorist violence. They had one piece that was an obit for Charlie by Hasan Piker, basically blaming capitalism for Charlie’s death. And then they had a profile of Piker, as though he were some sort of great exemplar of moral debate, anti-violence debate, which is insane. He has endorsed the use of violence over and over.

But over the weekend, they truly outdid themselves. The New York Times decided that there had been too much tolerance for opposing views in The New York Times. That had to stop.

And so they called forth the Halley’s Comet of stupidity. They appear upon the horizon once every few years. They emerge from their cozy sinecures, being overpaid to do virtually nothing by The New York Times and other elite publications.

So they trotted out Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is back from the intellectual dead. She hasn’t written anything for years, but she’s still on The New York Times’ payroll.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates chided the Times’ Ezra Klein for the great sin of being upset over Charlie’s death. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who just wrote a book calling Israel an apartheid state, likening Israel to the Jim Crow South, not mentioning Palestinian terrorism once; Ta-Nehisi Coates, the same person who has over and over and over again made light of terrorism, including 9/11, was the perfect person for The New York Times to bring in as a voice of morality.

What was he upset about? He was upset that Ezra Klein had written a couple of columns in which he treated Charlie Kirk as a good example of people trying to debate issues.

“I worry we are already in a cycle of political violence, of mimetic violence. I think about Pelosi. I think about Shapiro. I think about the near assassination of Trump,” Klein stated.

“After that happened, I thought about me. I thought about you. I thought about all kinds of people I know. So I do think there’s something about when violence takes hold, there’s something about it that begins to breach our lines. That’s part of my reaction too,” he said.

Coates replied, “I think all of that is understandable. But was silence not an option?”

But was silence not an option? You’re supposed to stay silent when a major political commentator on the other side of the aisle is shot to death while debating issues?

Yes, according to Coates, because Charlie thought the wrong things. 

Coates then turned to his usual routine about how America is a deeply evil and racist place. And then he mischaracterized Charlie’s positions over and over and over again, calling Charlie a racist, lying about what Charlie had to say, and suggesting that Charlie made the debate worse. 

Of course, Coates himself didn’t make the debate worse by suggesting over and over and over that America was deeply racist, unfixable, terrible, so terrible he had to run out of the country while simultaneously writing comic books for DC comics.

No, it was Charlie who was really the problem.

But that wasn’t all. On the same day that happened, The New York Times printed an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

She’s a person who, when she was criticized for her historical inaccuracies in her awful 1619 Project — which was a gigantic propaganda attempt by The New York Times to recast all of American history as the outgrowth of slavery — when she was criticized by actual historians, people who were not even from the Right, such as Gordon Wood or Sean Wilentz, she came out and basically said, “Well, they’re all white, aren’t they?”

People said that the riots that happened in 2020 could be called the 1619 riots. And she cheered that; she thought it was good.

Her essay about Charlie was egregiously terrible. She wrote:

The day Charlie Kirk was killed, Dominic Durant’s 11-year-old daughter came home from her middle school in Tulsa, Okla., and told her father that her friends had been very upset about his death, and that they felt she should be upset, too. “I’m sad,” she said, tears in her eyes.

Durant struggled with how to respond. He, too, had been appalled by the act of violence. But his young daughter did not know much about Kirk, and he worried she would look him up on YouTube and come across the many ugly assertions the right-wing activist had made about Black Americans like them. For instance, Kirk had claimed that four prominent and successful Black women, who all went to Ivy League universities — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the former first lady Michelle Obama, the TV host Joy-Ann Reid and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas — did not “have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously” and had to “go steal a white person’s slot.” He’d argued that “Black America is poorer, more murderous, more dangerous” than when Black people were living under Jim Crow.

Durant did not want his daughter thinking that because her friends were grieving him that the things Kirk had claimed were acceptable or right.

It was a difficult and heart-rending conversation, grappling with how his daughter’s classmates could admire a man who’d said such hurtful things. “I said it’s natural to be sad and I don’t want to change your opinion about being sad,” Durant recounted to me. “But I am explaining to you that the gentleman who just got shot was under the impression that you, as a young Black woman, don’t have the brain processing power. So I am explaining it to you to let you know what he said was wrong and not true.”

Charlie never said that. What Charlie said is that if you are an affirmative action admittee, the tacit admission there is that you couldn’t make it without affirmative action points. And then he pointed out that Ketanji Brown Jackson was put in place because of affirmative action, and has not exactly performed well on the Supreme Court.

But he never said anything such as “all black women don’t have brain processing.” That’s ridiculous. Charlie would never say that.

The entire piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones is a complete mischaracterization of Charlie’s positions in order to minimize the tragedy of his death.

As a Christian, Durant also felt he had to address Kirk’s version of Christianity, which condemned and disparaged people who are gay and transgender. Kirk once posted, “The pride and trans movements have always been about grooming kids.” 

If you read the entire tweet, here is what the actual tweet says.

“Trans actor Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen explains that queer stuff is no longer niche because 30% of young people are now LGBTQ. The pride and trans movement have always been about grooming kids. They call it normalizing. They cannot procreate, so they recruit and now they’re bragging about it.” 

What Charlie meant was that there is a social contagion with regard to things like trans. That is statistically true.

This intolerance was not reflective of Durant’s own understanding of Jesus or the Gospel, nor the faith his family practiced. “I reminded her not to be a hypocritical Christian,” he said. ”I told her, You know, the Good Book, the Bible, says you judge a man as he lived, not as he died.”

Put aside the fact that the anti-Biblical explanation of sexuality that is put forth by the Left truly does not accord with the words of either the Old Testament or the New Testament. This entire piece is designed to mischaracterize Charlie’s beliefs in order to suggest that the laments for Charlie are undeserved. That is the entire idea.

She essentially tries to call Charlie a white supremacist. She quotes another left-wing activist who stated that Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric of “Christian white nationalism, anti-transgender, quote anti-woke culture-war framing, this isn’t on the edge anymore. It has moved into what many consider the center of Republican identity.”

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This is what The New York Times is pushing: that Charlie and all conservatives are a threat, an open and evil threat, and so laments for their deaths are misguided.

“Can’t you just remain silent?” in the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates. And according to Nikole Hannah-Jones, do they really deserve the kind of sadness that people are pouring out upon them?

The New York Times, as always, remains a repository of crap.