Engage! Engage! Engage!

I am sitting in a hotel lobby in Lisbon on the last day of a seven month trip with my wife.  We visited 20 countries on three continents, and I’ll have much more to say about the trip in future Grumblings.  As I sit here contemplating a return to a country I barely recognize, however, I have been reflecting on the events of the past couple of weeks.  A month ago I was already thinking that things could not get much worse in the United States, but I have been resoundingly proven wrong.

The shocking and horrible death of Charlie Kirk has led an already wounded and limping country into what seems (from my viewpoint abroad) like a certain death-spiral. In fairness, I had never heard of Charlie Kirk until his death. I have limited exposure to social media by choice.  Once I learned that TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc were being dominated by this new class of folks called “influencers” I was out. It was an absurd idea a couple of years ago, and I imagine things have only gotten worse.

But I digress.

As soon as I heard the news about Kirk and the response from the right, I had to find out what he was all about.  I watched several long videos of his encounters with college students and was shocked…I mean genuinely shocked…that this man was being celebrated as some sort of messiah.  He was brash, uneducated, a terrible debater, a free-wheeling Bible quoter, a racist of epic proportion, a misogynist, a homophobe, and a transphobe. Just about everything out of his mouth was offensive to anyone who tries to live by Jefferson’s immortal words that all humans are created equal. Yet the MAGA cult was comparing him to MLK (who Kirk despised), to JFK, to Abraham Lincoln and other relatively good guys. 

I took to Facebook to engage with Kirk supporters to try to understand why they thought he was anything but an awful human. That information is really hard to get. Just short of 100% of posts about him were attacking people who didn’t think that much of him.  We were accused of taking quotes out of context.  We were accused of cherry picking quotes that “sound bad, but aren’t.”  We were somehow the villains for not celebrating a man who was clearly responsible for helping bring our country to the brink of collapse.

Let’s be clear.  MAGA is a revolution. I guess more accurately it’s a counter-revolution. It aims to bring overwhelming change to American society through whatever means necessary.  What it lacks, of course, is a revolutionary ideology.  Instead it aims to turn back the clock to a time when Blacks and women knew their place, and when gays kept their disgusting habits behind closed doors.  

I am reminded of the Counter-Reformation in Europe during the 16th century.  The Reformation led by Martin Luther and others brought genuine revolution to Europe.  It sought to upend the Catholic Church’s hold on the hearts and minds of men and to open the study of the Bible to all people so that they could develop their own relationship with Jesus Christ.  It sought to end practices like indulgences under which the Church charged people money to get relatives out of purgatory.  The Counter-Reformation initiated at the Council of Trent sought to re-establish the supremacy of the Catholic Church in controlling the flow of information about biblical teachings.  Those who stood up to the Church faced banishment, torture, and death.  Eventually the Church learned that you may kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea, and Protestantism flourished across the continent.

Those who look at Charlie Kirk as a charlatan, as a grifter, as a racist, etc. are now being subjected to the same treatment the Church leveled at the leaders of the Reformation.  People are losing their jobs, losing their TV shows, being publicly chastised for the awful sin of having the common sense to point out that Kirk was not actually a very good person. 

My wife asked me the other day why I continue to engage on Facebook with the MAGA crowd.  She pointed out that I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, and that I was wasting my time. I was also taking a sufficient amount of vitriol from the MAGA crowd.  I was surprised to learn I was a Nazi Terrorist, a Libtard, a racist against white people, a racist against Black people and on and on and on.

My wife was right that this wouldn’t be happening if I just didn’t engage. Her solution, however, would never fly with me. I don’t often disagree with her, (what’s the profit in that?) but this time I just can’t get around to her point of view.

The MAGA counter-revolution grew in people’s minds.  No one was physically forced to follow trump into the bowels of fascism.  Somebody at some point said something that appealed to these people, and they abandoned a hundred years or more of progress in treating all humans like…well…like humans. Improvements in Women’s rights, civil rights, immigration reform, LGTBQ rights, have been slow and often painful processes that magnified MLK’s idea that the arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice.  We really were getting better as a nation!

When the MAGA counter-revolution fails…and it will fail…it will be because someone lights a new fire in the minds of men. You can try to intimidate folks into silencing themselves.  You can take their jobs and threaten their livelihood.  You can physically threaten and assault them.  But as long as those who oppose the MAGA counter-revolution continue to speak out and to engage, there’s a chance that fire might take hold.

My latest tactic is to simply ask my attackers to please explain to me how I took Kirk’s call to execute President Biden out of context.  I ask them to please provide that context.  I even promise to never post another disparaging comment about Kirk if they would please do that.  The response is always the same.  Crickets.  They NEVER respond again to me. 

Now you may say “So what?”  I choose to believe that it is at least possible given the opportunity to address one reasonable objection to their devotion to Kirk they simply can’t do it.  Their reaction perhaps is to stop long enough to consider there is no way to put most of Kirk’s awful ideas into any acceptable context that looks like the “love for all mankind” they claim Kirk had.   One by one I choose to believe my engagement is going to slow down the ”Kirk is Jesus” campaign. 

Prove me wrong.