In the world of opinion journalism, you’ve got to be wary of arguments meant solely to churn out clicks, reactions, and responses by throwing a rhetorical cat into a crowd of rhetorical pigeons. Most of the time, it’s best to ignore these traps and get on with your life, but every now and again, something so astoundingly insane comes along that it must be combated, even if it means shining a light on insanity.
Enter Thomas Chatterton Williams, a humanities professor and staff writer at the Atlantic. His latest article, titled “The Other Martyr,” compares MAGA’s treatment of assassinated conservative speaker Charlie Kirk to the Left’s treatment of … George Floyd.
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Williams argues that while the Left used “Floyd’s asphyxiation” to turn a “flawed and desperate man into a Christ figure,” the Right has apparently responded to Kirk’s assassination with “its own religious ferment, animated by a new martyr.” Not only that, Williams adds, but the Right is now using Kirk as a cudgel to “advance illiberal aims and silence opponents,” just like Floyd’s death was used to “justify and hasten all manner of political ends.”
First, it was Iryna Zarutska, the young Ukrainian refugee who was brutally stabbed to death on a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in an unprovoked and racially motivated attack, allegedly by, as Williams put it, “a Black man,” who was earmarked for this role. But Kirk’s assassination sparked “a different canonization” used to purge conservative enemies from public life.
Now, of everything that is wrong with this self-satisfied nonsense, it’s important to state clearly and definitively that the only things Kirk and Floyd have in common are that they are American men who are now dead. Kirk built a peaceful campus activism movement that fostered an entire generation of conservatives, while Floyd was a career criminal. Kirk was assassinated for the crime of speech, while Floyd died due to heart disease, drug use, and a forceful police arrest. The Right responded to Kirk’s assassination with prayer, while the Left responded to Floyd’s death with months of deadly riots across the nation, causing over $1 billion in damage.
So, we must ask, why is this absurd comparison being made? Well, there are two fundamental reasons: to continue the Left’s addiction to rewriting its own recent history and to demean the conservative Right. These combined efforts allow people such as Williams to ignore the entire context of Floyd’s and Kirk’s lives and deaths, let alone the differences in the nationwide response to both deaths, and envision a world free of personal responsibility.
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Floyd and Kirk are the same, you see, if you ignore almost every detail about their lives and deaths. By ignoring context and lazily painting them both as “controversial” men who have become idols for political opportunists to make a dull accusation of hypocrisy, Williams runs roughshod over the notion that our choices and actions actually matter.
But the opposite is true: Our choices and actions are all that matter, and when we take that into account, perhaps Kirk earned his status of martyrdom, while Floyd did no such thing.
Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist. Follow him on X (@ighaworth) or Substack.
