On September 21 at State Farm Stadium in Arizona, around 60,000 people will be expected at the funeral of Charlie Kirk, a renowned right-wing speaker, photogenic author, on-air personality, promoter of gun rights and a vehement opponent of abortion and transgender rights. He was murdered just days ago while speaking at a university in Utah.
He had hundreds of thousands of followers spellbound by his passion, good looks and vitriol during his Prove Me Wrong debates across the United States. His book jackets looked terrific.
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In the past two years, Kirk went slightly off-message (or perhaps not off-message…). The subject at hand was not exclusively abortion or guns. Instead, Kirk was telling listeners that certain black women, among them former First Lady Michelle Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, and the US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson were being criticized — correctly — by those Americans once opposed to his cause who now sang a different tune:
“….Now they’re saying it for us…’You do not have (the) brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously…’”
Nor was that the end of it. There was more on Kirk’s mind:
“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?”
Kirk had obviously been thinking about race and reliability a lot because just weeks later he had more to say on the subject of color and credentials:
“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
Or:
“…if you’re a pot-smoking Black lesbian do you get treated better than a United States Marine?”
And:
“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”
Does any of the above sound familiar?
It did to me.
As a follower of the history of Germany (my parents who fled the country for good reason seemed to know a lot about it in their time), I am of course familiar with the life and death of the country’s onetime hero, Horst Wessel, who — after his violent death — had a really awful song named after him. In fact myth has it that he actually wrote that song. (Most likely, he didn’t write it: check it out online).
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It wasn’t a great tune. Lots of trombones and spooky lyrics (“Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope…Comrades shot by the Red Front will march in spirit within our ranks”).
Of course back then it ultimately became the country’s national anthem along with Deutschland Uber Alles; Adolf Hitler called it “a battle hymn for millions.”
So no, it wasn’t simply your basic heroic toe-tapper: it was kind of sly, intended to provoke young German Communists into street fights with young German Nazis of whom Wessel himself was one.
As it happens, there was an element of prophecy in the song. On January 14, 1930, at age 22, Wessel was shot by a member of the Red Front; he later died of his wounds, and his spirit certainly did march on to those verses for at least 15 years. To his credit, he doesn’t appear to have made plans for the afterlife or some ecclesiastical or ceremonial festivity, although plenty of contemporaries thought otherwise. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, threw Herr Wessel a huge Berlin funeral with a reported 30,000 fans in attendance, paraded his coffin throughout the city, and in his newspaper gave the dead man a startling eulogy:
“A divine element works in him, making him the man he is…One man must set an example and offer himself up as a sacrifice…”
Last week the Washington Post, the newspaper that once had the estimable and back then very rare courage to flout a brutish presidential administration and unveil the Watergate Scandals, fired its impassioned editor Karen Attiah. She had quoted one of Kirk’s racial remarks scathingly on an online site.
The reason for her expulsion after 11 years on the job? The Washington Post won’t say. But Attiah claims the newspaper told her, among other things, that she was guilty of “gross misconduct” and “endangering the safety of colleagues.”
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That danger to fellow journalists certainly is a possibility, as anyone who has lived through and reported on the famous Nixon scandals, the constant threats and rampant bullying, the secret wiretapping and lies and fears, knows only too well. Back then individual safety or extreme name-calling didn’t use to be the most compelling argument against publication. Reporting on the use of slurs by a well-known individual wasn’t a sign of “gross misconduct.”
Of course in the ‘70’s and even later, fears of powerful intimidation and menace were considered, especially by the Washington Post, a newspaper for which I worked. They were pored over, examined, analyzed — and then they were discarded. The presses rolled.
That’s what journalism is about. Moving forward, reporting, analyzing, commenting. Despite everything.
But racial broadsides? Declaring gun possession a “God-given right” and denouncing civil rights leader Martin Luther King as “an awful person”? A proponent of “the replacement theory” which posits that Jews are attempting to replace White Americans with non-white immigrants? Encouraging students to report professors who they believe touted what the Right calls “gender ideology.”
That was what Horst Wessel and Nazi Germany were about.
That’s not the United States, really it’s not.
Or at least once upon a time, it wasn’t.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com — In the Cover Photo: Charlie Kirk speaking at the 2021 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 21, 2021. Cover Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0
