They have their Horst Wessel

Horst Wessel, of cursed memory, was a member of the Nazi Party's paramilitary wing who was murdered in 1930 by two members of the German Communist Party. Alive, he was simply another mindless cog in the Nazi machine; dead, he became a martyr over whom songs were sung, like the "Horst Wessel-Lied".

Our own Nazis are turning Charlie Kirk of cursed memory into the American Horst Wessel. People are being fired or reprimanded for expressing Kirk's beliefs accurately. What were his beliefs? Well:

Now, these statements are public record. Kirk never shied away from them during his execrable life. But now, in death, they are to be memory-holed, forgotten, erased. He is to be honored with moments of silence before sporting events. Flags are to fly at half-staff in mourning. In death he is everything right and good about America.

One would expect the rabid right to go down this path. It's who they are. But they have, without much trouble, pulled the country's elites behind them, from government to the press.

Indeed, the media sane-washing of Kirk has been one of the most amazing things I've witnessed in my fifty-six years on this rock. And that's saying a lot; after all, I was born just a few months before the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. You have people like Sally Jenkins of The Atlantic posting on social media that Kirk was always polite and civil. I guess eliminationist rhetoric is fine as long as you use the correct fork for your salad. And then you have white politicians like Gavin Newsom, who was at least cordial with Charlie Kirk, urging us to "continue his work". Really? What work would that be, Governor Newsom? Because that "work" would at the very least see my citizenship stripped and allowed to continue to live in this country on sufferance. But, you know, at least I'll be able to bask in civility and discourse as the overseer makes sure I pick my consignment of strawberries.

If a left-wing podcaster—say, Hal Sparks—had been murdered instead, it would have been, at most, a two-day story. The media wouldn't have gone wall-to-wall with coverage. Flags would have remained flying proudly. Few save for us who know his work would have cared. And that's for a reason: the murder of a leftist, to the media, is at best regrettable, at worst deserved. The murder of an actual fascist is a stab against everything which is good and decent of this, God's own country. This is the week that the lie of the "liberal media" has finally been put to rest, dead of its own inherent contradictions. The media have failed us miserably in this episode, and has carried out its own purge against any employee daring to merely say, for the record, what Kirk's beliefs were.

It's a truism that one refrains from saying anything ill of the recently dead. It's a silly tradition. In this instance it is positively pernicious. A saintly Charlie Kirk is being created out of whole cloth, a figure who never existed in real life. His supporters are pouring every goodly attribute into him, and carrying out jihads against anyone who pushes back against the narrative.

It doesn't matter that the murderer is a white man just like him, and, according to all reports, MAGA. Black HBCU's were still targeted with bomb threats. Black politicians received death threats. We should be glad that the murderer was not Black; Rosewood-like pogroms would be burning this country.

The only word I can think to describe this entire episode is "disgusting". The rewriting of reality would have made Stalin proud, or Big Brother. At a time when a functioning media would be laying out facts, we instead have to turn to foreign outlets like The Guardian. Our media is too busy genuflecting to the powers that be. And no, it's not out of fear. It's not even out of cowardice. It's out of fellow-feeling. There is no other explanation for it. 

Democracy dies in darkness. And the lights are being put out by the people we trust to keep them on. So that means that we have to be those torches in the darkness. For we can no longer depend on the gatekeepers. They've left the gates wide open, and the barbarians are in the city. What the past decade has shown is that we're going to have to go house to house fighting. I'm up for it; but it won't be quick. And the battlefield isn't just the US, but the entire West, as it has a paroxysm of forgetting.

Postscript

Well. It seems that even for our spectacle-addicted media, things are becoming too much. From CNN:

A hearty golf-clap. Now lay out Kirk's philosophy out in full, with no fear or favor. Because, you know, as the other side likes to say: He was no angel.