Charlie Kirk was shot and killed today while speaking at Utah Valley University. In times like this, it’s customary to speak of one’s personal experience with the deceased. I was on Kirk’s podcast one time to talk about my last book, he was very nice, and that was the extent of our relationship. People who knew him personally say he was a good guy to know. I grieve for him and his family.
Beyond that, I don’t think individual political assassinations have anything to tell us about our politics. These are stochastic events. This is a country of 350 million people, and widely available firearms. Some of our fellow citizens are insane, like in any country, and if you’re a public figure, one of the risks you face is that an unstable individual might come after you.
But that’s not how right-wing Twitter is reacting. Charlie Kirk was apparently not killed by an individual gunman, but something called “the left.”
Some examples below.
Of course it was only a few months ago that a Democratic Minnesota State Representative, along with her husband, was killed, and a Democratic State Senator was shot and survived. This was obviously not the responsibility of “the right,” but one deranged individual. It is overwhelmingly likely that when the facts come out about the Kirk assassination, it will also turn out that there was no wider conspiracy behind what happened.
The argument that “the left” is somehow responsible goes along the lines that Democrats and liberals say bad things about Donald Trump and conservatives. Once in a while, then, it’s unsurprising that some unstable person comes along and takes these rantings seriously.
This argument makes sense on its own terms. The problem is that it is made by people who have chosen Donald Trump as the leader of their movement.
If you were going to place every national politician on a scale from 1 to 10 regarding how hyperbolic, mean-spirited, and cruel they are towards their enemies, you would have to put everyone else somewhere between 1-5 just to create enough room to put Trump at 10. There is simply no comparison between him and any other major politician. And his movement has taken after him. This is an administration that regularly refers to judges who rule in ways they don’t like as “Marxists.” We’ve become immune to this stuff. Imagine Biden or Obama calling a judge a “fascist” for overturning one of their policies. Name calling, lies, and ad hominem attacks that would have been unthinkable for every other administration in American history are daily occurrences in life under the Trump administration.
I would track down examples of things Trump has said himself, but it seems beyond silly to do so. Just look at the man! Listen to him! Do your ears stop working when you hear him speak? Does your brain shut off when you read his critics? The rest of the movement isn’t much better. The people speaking in apocalyptic terms about what “the left” has done were in many cases those who didn’t bother to hide their glee over Paul Pelosi getting attacked with a hammer.
When a movement has chosen Donald Trump as its leader, there are many arguments it can make. Perhaps the left is so powerful and such a malevolent force that its opponents need a man who is completely fearless, and unwilling to be pushed around. Or maybe the effects of demographic change are so threatening that the right cannot be too harsh towards a president on its own side as long as he is doing something to reverse it. But one thing a movement can never do after choosing Trump as its leader is argue that civility and decency towards one’s opponents are important qualities for politicians to have. You’ve forever lost the moral high ground in this area.
What many Trump supporters would like to do is use this as an excuse to shut down political opponents. If not legally, then by creating a social stigma around speaking out about Trump’s authoritarian policies and methods of control. Nobody should be encouraging assassinations, but if a president is behaving in an authoritarian way, those who see what is happening cannot remain silent because someone out there might hear what they are saying and commit a violent act.
Trump claims the right to ship people off to prisons in foreign countries without any due process rights, personally bullies corporations to do his bidding, and accepts practically no restraints on his power as the head of the executive branch. All of this remains true, regardless of whether or not we live in a country with a lot of crazy people with access to guns. It is impossible to predict how political arguments will sound when they reach the ears of schizophrenics, and our politics cannot be shaped around being careful to not set them off. If you truly want something close to complete safety, what you should be advocating for is strict gun laws like they have in the rest of the developed world, where gun violence of all kinds is much lower. But the Second Amendment crowd has made its choice about the risks it is willing to take to maintain what they consider a free society.
What a shitty, psuedo-intellectual take on a horrible event.
A man who extended grace to you in person and helped you personally to promote your book was shot in the jugular while he was engaging in open discussion of ideas on a university campus—and you decide to take the opportunity to write about how orange man is bad? Classy. Real classy Richard.
Have you heard of “whataboutism”, per chance?