County Should Not Name a Road After a Politically Divisive Figure

I am an eight-year resident of Manatee County and a lifelong independent. When it came to my attention that the Manatee County Commission is considering naming a road after the late Charlie Kirk, I wrote them the following to express my views on the matter:

First, without equivocation, I absolutely, totally condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk. No one in this country should be harmed for expressing his or her political views, no matter how reprehensible! But make no mistake: Many of Kirk's views were reprehensible, as well as ignorant, bigoted, and extreme – and conservatives and progressives alike should deplore the idea of honoring such a man in any way.

Here is just a small sample of Kirk's abhorrent views:

On the subject of race, Kirk said: Black women, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the late Congresswoman Shirley Jackson Lee, and former first lady and lawyer Michelle Obama, “lack the brain processing power to be taken seriously.”...The Civil Rights Act, which prohibited segre gation and outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, was “a mistake.”...Blacks were “better off” in the 1940s....

On other subjects: Although Charlie Kirk supported Israel, he also asserted the false, antisemitic trope that American Jewish donors were promoting anti-white sentiment....Among several falsehoods and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that he embraced, Kirk stated that hydroxychloroquine was “100% effective” in treating the virus...He was an anti-vaxer, and he described social distancing and restrictions on church gatherings during the pandemic as a Democratic plot against Christianity....He stated that abortion is never medically necessary and should never be allowed, even in cases of rape....He claimed that young women who voted for progressive candidates were seeking “careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” (Never mind that his widow, Erika, did not marry Kirk and have kids until her mid-30s, and instead pursued college and career opportunities blazed by the feminist movement that both Kirks decried.)...Charlie Kirk also promoted the conspiracy theory called the “great replacement,” which falsely claims that there is an orchestrated effort to replace white Americans with immigrants. (There isn't such an effort; the simple reality is that America's recent population growth is almost entirely due to immigrants because, for many years and counting, white U.S. women have been having kids at less than the replacement birth rate.)

Are these the kind of views that you seek to honor by naming a road after Kirk? Or do you seek to honor him as a statement against political violence because he was murdered? If the latter, where is the road named for Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker emerita of the Minnesota House who, along with her husband, was murdered by a MAGA wacko last summer? President Trump did not order flags to fly at half-staff for her; he did not call her family to offer condolences; he did not show up and speak at her wake. Although the White House did put out a statement decrying political violence, it did not even mention her name. (What the Administration did do recently was remove from the Department of Justice's website a detailed press release confirming the inconvenient truth that political violence in the U.S. is far more likely to emanate from the extreme right than from the extreme left.)

In 2021, Charlie Kirk called George Floyd, whose murder by a Minnesota policeman sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, a “scumbag” who was “unworthy of the attention” he received. That same unworthiness can and should be said now of Charlie Kirk. It is a sad commentary on the state of politics in this country that Kirk, with his extreme views, had any significant following whatsoever. It is even worse that he had friends in high places, especially at the White House.

And finally, if you or anyone else might think it is wrong of me to write harshly about a deceased man, I urge you to keep the following in mind: If you don't want people to speak ill of you when you are dead, then you shouldn't speak ill of people when you are alive. Kirk spoke ill of many people; his bigoted views were racist, sexist, and extreme; his misinformation might well have cost lives; and Manatee County should not in any way endorse the man or what he stood for by honoring him.

M.S. Wilson
Manatee County