A retired Tennessee law enforcement officer was held in jail for more than a month this fall after police arrested him over a Facebook post of a meme related to the September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Prosecutors eventually dropped the criminal charge brought against Larry Bushart, but his stint behind bars came to exemplify the country’s tense political and legal climate following the tragedy, when conservatives sought to stymie public discourse about the late controversial figure that it saw as objectionable.
Now, Bushart is suing over his incarceration.
Kirk hasn’t said anything racist in a while.
Now that the emotion has died down and I can look at Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a whole and what came of it, i can confidently say that the world feels slightly better without Charlie Kirk in it. I don’t mourn him.
I said it from the start and stand by it: however you feel about political assassination aside, Kirk was one of the only right-wing media figures who had a chance of keeping Trump’s political capital alive, as in, he was one of the few people with the charisma and messaging skill that he could charm MAGA’s into shifting tone to follow his lead.
Who else is going to hold onto a segment of America who are violently stupid, armed, patriotic, and have the attention spans of gnats and each think themselves to be some kind of comic book hero? Trump was able to capture them because he seemed genuine even though it was genuine hate and anger. Kirk could have kept the hate and anger alive under a skin of righteousness and Christian ideology that would have absolutely caught on in midwest America like fire through dry brush if the GOP decided to go whole-hog and fund him in the coming years.
We averted a massive problem with Kirk, and the way everyone around him is currently grasping for shreds of that political capital as it evaporates into the wind just further reinforces what I believe.
Looks like we found a cure for racism