Kirk, Bolsonaro and the boomerang of hate

With the identity of the alleged killer now public, we must consider the attack that claimed the life of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday in Utah as a result of the hate speech he himself promoted. The shooter, Tyler Robinson, was someone mentally intoxicated by this kind of messaging, and the fact that he wrote "leftist" messages on his bullets means nothing, because confusion and tapping are part of the ways of doing and saying things of the juvenile far right (also in our country). Barricaded as he often does at the Oval Office desk, Trump tweeted: "For years, the radical left has compared wonderful Americans like Charlie Kirk to Nazis." And he blamed these evil leftists for the death of the wonderful Kirk.

Banalization of Nazism and the word NaziVictimhood, the formulation of vague or fabricated accusations that are then used to point the finger at adversaries or construct slander, etc. Trump's Spanish disciples immediately went out to expel their toxic gases. "What would happen in Spain if a far-right activist shot and killed a left-wing activist?" asked the inevitable Tellado, whose mouth almost watered just imagining it. In Spain's recent history, this isn't a hypothesis that requires a great effort of imagination. From Carlos Hipólito to Guillem Agulló, from the Atocha lawyers to Lucrecia Pérez, the list of leftists murdered by the far right is long. The executioners, moreover, have often gone unpunished, or almost. (To the murders, we must add a long list of violence perpetrated by the far right, from beatings to gang rapes, which are always very difficult, curiously, to prosecute and punish.) A special round of applause for Feijóo, who expressed his best wishes to Kirk upon learning he had been attacked; his death was confirmed shortly after. Kirk's death is reminiscent of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch far-right leader murdered in the street by a follower in 2002. Or what happened to Trump during the election campaign in Pennsylvania at the hands of a 20-year-old man, Thomas Crooks, about whom nothing has been heard since, but who had been close to the Republican Party.

More interesting, and there will be an opportunity to discuss this in more detail, is the 27-year prison sentence against Jair Bolsonaro for attempted coup d'état. Lula da Silva and the Brazilian left are blazing a trail of empowerment, which consists of clarifying terms (for example, what a coup d'état is, a word so abused by the ultra-nationalist right everywhere) and daring to have, as the poet said, judges who work to apply the law to the parasites of democracy and the instigators of social division and hate speech. Speeches that sooner or later tend to backfire on their promoters, like a spit thrown into the sky, which usually falls on the one who spits it out.