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“Hate the sin, love the sinner” is a concept even devout Christians often find challenging. But what if the sin is hate, the sinner is a hater, and your whole redemption-free religion is based on the hatred of hate? What if we are all sinners in the hands of an angry podcaster?
This is the deep theological discourse that can be provoked only by the author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who made a joyless noise unto the Lord in the direction of the slain conservative political activist Charlie Kirk. “I think Charlie Kirk was a hatemonger,” Coates told New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “I take no joy in the killing of anyone no matter what they said. But if you ask me what the truth of his life was I would have to tell you it’s hate.”
Per the golden rule of punditry, what Coates did unto Kirk was done unto him. The columnist Karol Markowicz replied that Coates was a hatemonger himself. She is hardly the first person to make this claim, or something close to it. Coates himself wrote an essay exploring the subject of whether he hates white people for the Atlantic, where he was then employed.
I’ll leave to others to discern the truth of his life. Fortunately, no one has asked me, so I do not have to tell you. But it is embedded into progressive morality, such as it is, that hating those who hate is justified. (Not really as a form of self-defense, psychological or otherwise, though it surely serves that purpose too.) And thou shalt hate not just the hate, but also the hater. The hate cannot be separated from its lowly monger.
Among the hills I will die on is that NYPD Blue was a precursor to the great, movie-quality television shows of the 2000s, like The Wire, Breaking Bad, or The Sopranos. The first program contains a scene where Detective Andy Sipowicz admits to harboring prejudices, but says that he came by them honestly through life experience and would never wield them unjustly against the innocent.
Of course, it is a major theme of the show that Sipowicz learns that his prejudices often actually come from misunderstandings that are bad for other people and himself. His lieutenant takes him to a restaurant where he must confront his discomfort with black servers and patrons not appearing overly happy with his presence, even if they are ultimately letting him dine in peace and their racial animus is unconnected to the institutional power that comes with having a badge and a gun.
It’s a redemption arc liberals would approve of, back when they still believed in redemption. (We’ve come a long way from Norman Lear to White Fragility.) But there is a little bit of Andy Sipowicz in advanced progressives. They are simply not open to the idea that any of their own prejudices stem from misunderstanding. To whatever extent there is any hating going on, it is a righteous hatred of the oppressors’ and their allies’ hate, safely denuded of the institutional power that would qualify it as racism, sexism, antisemitism or anything like that.
As it happens, people who run elite newsrooms and universities or receive MacArthur fellowships do have a certain amount of institutional power. And you don’t need much institutional power to throw a brick through a window, assault someone on the street, or fire a bullet into Charlie Kirk’s neck.
None of this is to say that all people who espouse Coates’s views on this subject are advocating or in any way responsible for violence (although some do and are). You should be free to call out what you see as hatemongering without fear or favor. We no longer live in a country where such opinions will gain universal acceptance, if we ever truly did.
But there is enough polling to suggest that the belief some hatreds are more righteous than others is becoming more common at the sub-elite level in progressive political circles, and there are enough shocking and depressing headlines to suggest this might have consequences. Maybe a little more introspection is in order as to why the supposed hatemonger was assassinated in a climate of hatred.
Until then, we can only consider the words of the third pillar of Western civilization, alongside St. Augustine and Ta-Nehisi Coates: And the haters gonna hate.