By James J. Devine
They did it again. With spines of overcooked spaghetti and principles of wet cardboard, a caucus of so-called Democrats—Vichy Democrats who would rather collaborate with the Republicans than fight for what’s right—signed their names to a grotesque perversion of truth.
They have posthumously anointed Charlie Kirk, a man who built an empire on hatred and paranoia, as a martyr for “civil discourse.” In doing so, they have not only betrayed their own values but have actively participated in the very Republican chicanery that is poisoning American democracy.
Let’s be unequivocally clear: Charlie Kirk was not a patriot. He was a partisan bomb-thrower, a hustler who made millions by peddling division.
He was a man who disparaged Martin Luther King Jr., promoted the racist Great Replacement theory, and built an organization, Turning Point USA, notorious for its campaigns of intimidation against professors and students who dared to lean left.
His rhetoric wasn’t “civil”; it was a masterclass in dehumanization, a constant drip-feed of venom designed to make his enemies seem less than human. To now recast this hateful, bigoted monster as a gentle apostle of respectful debate is a lie so profound it borders on obscenity.
And the ultimate, tragic irony—one these Vichy Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Mikie Sherrill haven’t the courage or intellect to confront—is that Kirk was a vocal proponent of the very logic that led to his demise. After countless mass shootings, where innocent Americans were gunned down in schools, churches, and supermarkets, Kirk’s position was cold and clear: these deaths were a “worth it” price to pay for an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Sherrill called Charlie Kirk a Christian nationalist hostile to the rights of women and black people—but she voted to honor him anyway.
So, we must ask AIPAC Shakur and Mikie Sherrill: Was Charlie Kirk’s own death “worth it”? Was his assassination the “price of freedom” he so casually assigned to others?
Or is it a terrible, predictable consequence of a society saturated with the violent rhetoric and unencumbered weaponry that he championed? The Republicans who penned this resolution don’t want you to ask that question. They want to mourn the symptom while ignoring the disease they helped spread. And our Vichy Democrats, in their stunning cowardice, are helping them do it. Only 58 Democrats voted no!
By voting for this twisted hagiography, our Vichy Democrats have walked right into a trap. They have allowed Republicans to craft a lie: the breathtakingly false narrative that political violence is a singularly left-wing problem. This is a monstrous lie. The facts, from Charlottesville to El Paso to Pittsburgh, show that the overwhelming majority of political terrorism in this country is committed by right-wing extremists, radicalized by the very ideas Kirk and his ilk mainstreamed.
But instead of confronting this hypocrisy, Democrats like Sherrill and Jeffries—terrified of a potential attack ad, desperate for donor cash from all sides—capitulate. They lack the courage of their convictions. They run from a fight. This is why Democrats are losing. Not because their ideas are unpopular, but because their leaders are unwilling to fight for them. They fear the GOP’s noise machine more than they value the truth. They would rather praise a monster than risk offending his followers.
Political leaders on both sides of the aisle quickly and unequivocally condemned the killing and denounced the violence, but many Republicans spewed nonsense by suggesting that liberals celebrated this terrible incident. Instead of telling Republicans to stop lying or demanding an apology from President Trump for exploiting the tragedy for partisan advantage, these spineless Vichy Democrats let the GOP get away with cashing in on murder.
Have Americans lost the ability to hold two thoughts at once? The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a terrible tragedy that might have been prevented with commonsense regulations of firearms. Charlie Kirk frequently engaged in disrespectful tactics, used sophistry in debate, and advocated a hateful and bigoted point of view that imposed on the freedom of millions of good and decent Americans.
Something very bad happened to a person who was not very nice most of the time.
The fact that Charlie Kirk was an asshole does not mean that he deserved to die. The First Amendment gives all Americans the right to be an asshole, without fear of being killed, beaten, or persecuted as so many of our citizens have been by virulent and unrelenting Republican barbarians.
Republicans cultivated this atmosphere of violence and division because they have lost sight of the differences between politics and war. Vichy Democrats once again capitulated because they don’t recognize the similarities.
I once landed five minutes on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show because I used incendiary language following a comparable tragic episode of gun violence. Tucker Carlson is an asshole who rudely dismissed my relevant arguments, pretended that I was not making any sense, and called me ‘unbalanced’ as he cut off the conversation. In the Green Room, I got to meet Alan Dershowitz, another asshole, although he was pleasant to me. Nobody got killed, in spite of any dislike or disagreements.
An employee once told me that I am an asshole, but a likeable one.
I got a fair number of death threats after appearing on Fox News, and most of those callers were assholes, too, but one elderly woman expressed genuine concern that I would do something dangerous or violent. I explained that I was making a point in response to decades of gallows humor (like ‘liberal hunting licenses’) and escalating rhetoric that dehumanized liberals, Democrats, and other people who live outside what was then just becoming the MAGA cult.
The attempted assassination of members of Congress was not an isolated event but a symptom of a deeper sickness within the American body politic. This sickness is fueled by two interconnected plagues: the pervasive glorification of political violence and the lethal ease with which firearms can be obtained. Many Second Amendment advocates believe firearms are the solution to tyrannical government, but those same right-wingers are celebrating a tyrant in the White House.
I have written volumes about important matters of public policy and managed campaigns for outstanding candidates who were simply ignored by the media, pollsters, and sometimes even by the public. I never got the kind of attention I did after responding to the shooting at a congressional softball game practice with the hashtag #HuntRepublicans.
You can catch the clip on YouTube, and I stand on my logic. https://youtu.be/w8_6pwldKu8
I was correct in asserting that Republicans began this, and I correctly predicted that things would get worse.
You might not have noticed, but things did get worse.
Extremists plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg was grazed by a bullet, and Nancy Pelosi’s husband was struck on the head with a hammer.
Three times, assailants fired gunshots at the Democratic Party office in Arizona, a lunatic firebombed Jewish Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence on Passover, plus the gunman who killed Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband also injured Sen. John Hoffman and his wife.
These were not the work of nutjob nincompoops who voted for Trump and then tried to kill him, nor Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver wannabes. They were acts of political violence directed at victims who were Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, and Democrat.
Instead of saying that one party wants to put a lid on this problem, or that most political violence mainly comes from the right wing, about half the Democrats in Congress voted to canonize a devil.
The only hope that the Democratic Party may avert the fate of the Whigs—that is to avoid collapsing into irrelevance and memory—is to stop nominating cowards who kowtow to contributors. The first chance you get would be a good time to start electing liberal lions. We need fighters who will name the bigotry for what it is, who will condemn political violence while simultaneously condemning the hateful rhetoric that inspires it. We need leaders who will stand up and say, “No, we will not sanctify a man who trafficked in poison, and we will not absolve the party that provided his platform.”
Charlie Kirk’s death is a tragedy. But allowing his legacy of hatred to be whitewashed by bipartisan consent is a national disgrace. The Vichy Democrats who supported this resolution didn’t honor anyone. They simply dishonored themselves, betrayed every principle real Americans claim to hold, and disappointed Democratic voters who are waiting for their leaders to stand up and lead.