Millions of Americans just witnessed a killing.
On Wednesday, scattered amid social media’s banal ephemera — tired memes, partisan agit-prop, and celebrity gossip — appeared a video of a young man speaking into a microphone, then recoiling from a gunshot to the neck.
For hours, this snuff film was impossible to escape, the atrocity autoplaying over and over, as clout chasers capitalized on the human mind’s helpless fascination with violence. It was a horrifying spectacle, made all the more so by the identity of the deceased — the conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk.
Kirk evangelized for causes that I despise. But through years of long-form commentary, he had endeared himself to millions of conservatives. Our brains did not evolve to distinguish parasocial relationships from actual ones: For almost all of our species’ history, to hear a person speak on a near-daily basis was to know them intimately. Countless Republicans, therefore, experienced Kirk’s death as though it were the loss of a friend.
For liberals, meanwhile, Kirk’s killing constituted an appalling assault on political liberty. The commentator came to prominence as a defender of conservative speech on campus. Now, while speaking at a university, he had been silenced by a bullet. Such violence did not just steal Kirk’s voice, but discouraged others from articulating provocative views in public, whatever their ideological content.
Kirk’s assassination was thus an assault on the democratic project — on our capacity to collectively govern ourselves through the exercise of reason. It was also alarming, obscene, and ironic in the grimmest possible sense.
The right’s response proved to be much the same.
The right’s shamelessly distorted narrative about political violence in America
Within hours of Kirk’s shooting, the most powerful Republicans in the country — from the president to Fox News hosts to megabillionaires — were agitating for authoritarian repression, and justifying it with incendiary lies. (Meanwhile, Democratic officials, to a person, condemned Kirk’s assassination.)
To appreciate the Orwellian nature of the right’s reaction, consider a few of its aspects:
- A president who fomented an insurrection four years ago — and ordered military honors for one of its perpetrators just last month — declared his commitment to hunting down all who “contributed” to “political violence.”
- He attributed all political violence to the radical left’s habit of “demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible” — as though he had not likened his political opponents to “vermin,” declared that Democrats are “an evil group of people,” or baselessly accused the party of conspiring to rig elections by helping undocumented immigrants engage in mass voter fraud.
- President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fox News’s Jesse Watters, and countless other Republican influencers suggested that the left was the sole wellspring of political violence in the US — just three months after a conservative assassinated a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota. Their elision was blatant and intentional. In Trump’s speech, he rattled off a list of recent acts of political violence, one that omitted the myriad attacks on Democratic officials.
- Trump attributed the attempt on his own life to the “radical left,” despite the dearth of evidence that the man who tried to assassinate him, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was motivated by progressive ideology.
- Trump and other conservatives hailed Kirk as a champion of “free speech” and “open debate” while calling for government crackdowns on progressive organizations, whose advocacy could have theoretically inspired his killer. Ironically, this last argument is structurally identical to those of the illiberal leftists whom Kirk lived to denounce: that some ideas are so likely to cause harm that we must suppress them, even if they do not explicitly encourage specific acts of violence.
All this dishonesty and unreason was as menacing as the promises of vengeance it rationalized. The openness of the right’s lies signaled that truth would be no obstacle to the sating of its bloodlust, nor to its exploitation of tragedy for partisan gain.
The left’s online culture is flawed — but so is the right’s
The right’s mendacity contains a sliver of truth: There are some sick currents in the culture of the extremely online left. Social media algorithms reward provocation. And they foster status games in which ideologues seek to demonstrate their superlative commitment to the cause. This can encourage apologetics for violence: Expressing glee at the killing of a health insurance executive, for instance, can both 1) gain you attention and 2) signal that you’re more outraged by America’s unjust medical system than your squeamish peers.
These dynamics are perverse and harmful. Yet there is nothing wrong with the left’s political culture that isn’t also wrong with the right’s. And right-wing extremism has claimed far more lives in recent years than the left-wing variety.
A conservative movement committed to Charlie Kirk’s ostensible ideals — to free speech and open discourse — would respond to his assassination by decrying political violence in all its forms and rejecting the pernicious notion that the government must suppress certain ideas to keep the public safe. But such a movement does not exist.
Today’s conservatism is animated by resentment, fear, and a consequent will to dominate its opponents. Kirk’s assassination has reinforced these authoritarian impulses and provided a pretense for indulging them. In doing so, it has thrown our already imperiled democracy into even greater jeopardy.
