In the same way that Osama Bin Laden deserved a fair trial instead of an extrajudicial execution, Charlie Kirk didn't deserve to die in lukewarm blood. Yes, Osama Bin Laden was a terrorist responsible for 9/11, a day that will forever live in infamy - but you can ask any LLM why he deserved a fair trial and you'll get at least three logical answers.

Similarly, Charlie Kirk was a stochastic terrorist who created lists of public enemies, stopping just short of asking his followers to harass and harm them, leaving just enough distance so that he could avoid legal liability while giving his followers clear directions. He has legally encouraged violence against gays, citing how "god's perfect law" states that gays "shall be stoned to death." "A patriot", Kirk has said, should bail out the man who violently assaulted the husband of Nancy Pelosi.

All of this is morally abhorrent behavior; All of this makes Ezra Klein's glowing tribute to Kirk even more courageous.

People who believe Osama Bin Laden deserved due process are not terrorist sympathizers - they're just committed to universal liberalism. On that same note, Ezra Klein, who praised this terrorist for "Practicing Politics the Right Way," is not a terrorist sympathizer: he's just a really good liberal. You need to ask yourself, "Does 'Ezra Klein is a terrorist sympathizer' even sound sane?" And you need to answer, dear reader, with "Of course, 'Ezra Klein' and 'terrorist sympathizer' are not synonymous." Except for these instances and their variants, 'Ezra Klein' and 'Terrorist Sympathizer' do not belong in the same sentence, and we should not give any attention to anyone who even attempts to argue that Ezra Klein is a terrorist sympathizer.

The Yellow Knight

One can argue that Klein needed to retain his bona fides as a terrorist non-sympathizer by adding a simple sentence to his op-ed to emphasize the sins of Kirk, perhaps something like "Charlie Kirk was a stochastic terrorist who didn't care if trans people died." But that would be falling into the very trap that Klein has already warned us about: the trap of "everything-bagel liberalism", which is the tendency for many liberals and progressives to demand that a project consider every single social issue before it is deployed.

A city that requires every new home to be built with ethically sourced nails, union labor, and lumber from a sustainable forest, following a lengthy and comprehensive environmental impact review, will ultimately result in no new homes and higher rents. The bagel had so many requirements that it became impossible to fulfill. An op-ed to discuss the significance of Kirk's assassination follows the same path: if you stray too far from the message of "political violence is bad", you end up with no op-ed at all.

If Klein were to *condemn* Kirk's lust for political violence, it would have been misconstrued as blaming Kirk for his own misfortune! This would have undermined the core message of nonviolence, which is why the only way out was to pretend that Charlie Kirk was a peace-loving man with good politics. Sometimes the truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. We the people may have deserved an everything bagel, but we got something far more pragmatic from Klein: a glazed donut — a Krispy Kreme Kirk.

He Didn't Start The Race War 

An ancient Vietnamese philosopher, commonly referred to as Uncle Wong, is often attributed with a quote, "Nhà dột từ nóc dột xuống," which roughly translates to "What is good for the master is good for the servant."

By giving Charlie Kirk the praise and eulogy that he did not deserve, Klein helps normalize and universalize the rule of law for everyone, even future Osamas bin Laden. Let's be honest here: Charlie Kirk and Osama Bin Laden are treated differently because of the color of their skin, and that's not Klein's fault. Yet it is admirable that Klein took it upon himself to think about the justice that both of them truly deserved when writing this op-ed.

You see, arguing for due process of terrorists is not as easy as it sounds: America is far too racist to be directly convinced that *brown* terrorists deserve a fair trial. As a result, the only way for Klein to sway the median American towards universal liberalism is to profusely appreciate the white terrorists enough and hope that some of that respect and empathy trickles down to the nonwhites. Klein was not being racist, he was simply being realist about race. Whether we care to admit it or not, the color of activism matters. That is why the NAACP did not choose to agitate over Claudette Colvin’s bus incident! Colvin was too black and therefore not white enough for the fledgling nation to empathize with, as opposed to the lighter-skinned Rosa Parks.

Blondi

Finally, we come to the most essential point of all: What makes liberalism so wonderful is that we can coexist despite having drastically different opinions. Even if Ezra Klein straightforwardly wrote the entire op-ed, he is entitled to do so. People are allowed to honor their friends publicly. Who would begrudge a Bill Cosby superfan the opportunity to write a glowing obituary about the good he has done for the world? Were Charles Manson's groupies expected to keep quiet about their love and adoration for him? Hitler had a dog!

To lesbian transgender people like me, to black people like my girlfriend's sister's boyfriend, it's easy just to see Charlie Kirk as just a stochastic terrorist - to see him as Osama Bin Laden, the monster. But to Ezra Klein, who is just as human as I and my girlfriend's sister's boyfriend, Charlie Kirk was more than Osama Bin Laden, the monster. 

To Ezra Klein, Charlie Kirk was Osama Bin Laden, the friend.

Cover photo © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons