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Well, when you thought the week was boring...
Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.
I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.
I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.
I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.
I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.
We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.
I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.
I have been trying to put my finger on why this one feels different, and a Facebook post from Nick Freitas has I think cleared it up for me.
Charlie wasn't an elected official. He was a young man who was willing to speak up for his beliefs. His arguments were often not all that sophisticated; he did a better job as an avatar of free, heterodox expression in academic settings, than as an advocate for any particular position.
This was not an untargeted massacre, as sometimes happens. It was also not the assassination of a government figure or candidate for office, quite. When was the last time someone like Kirk was assassinated? Someone who stood for a political view (or, arguably, a tribe) but who was strictly involved at the level of discourse, rather than politics or government operation (e.g. the Israeli staffers)? What would that even look like, with tribal positions reversed? Would it even occur to a violent right-wing nutjob to go after someone like Kirk? Who even is the "Charlie Kirk of the Left?" What other figures in history occupied this peculiar niche? Maybe Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or (less effectively) the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, though that was an Islam thing rather than a red tribe/blue tribe thing.
Whatever the case, this one bothers me a lot more than any of the other recent violence. It feels like a truly, purely ideological hatred--not activism or civil disobedience, not "mostly peaceful protest" or even "unapologetically violent protest," more of an absolutely unhinged, Excessively Online commitment to "fuck the outgroup." Kirk was harmless in a way Donald Trump obviously isn't, even in a way state legislators and law enforcement aren't; he was not in any position to oppress the way even the lowliest of government officers and officials sometimes might. Kirk had no power but that of his voice.
Kirk was just talking.
And he got murdered for it.
Ding ding ding.
There is virtually no way to paint him as a 'valid target'. Oh he said things you disagree with? He came into your ideological havens and confronted you directly? Boo fucking hoo get better ideas I guess.
He didn't invite nor go looking for violence, wasn't responsible for any decisions that might have caused any harm on a political level.
And what the lefties celebrating his death don't seem to get.
A) Charlie was WAY more popular among normies, especially young ones, than most thought.
B) A lot of those normies can tell that Charlie got killed for espousing opinions that they, themselves hold. He wasn't some out-and-out radical and he didn't run in radical circles.
Killing a basically normal guy, in his early 30's, with a lovely wife and two young kids. Christian. Didn't even curse. Debated civilly, but (and this was his true sin) was VERY EFFECTIVE at spreading righty ideas and demonstrating that lefty ideas were not universally accepted, even in colleges.
It breaks, I daresay, every single social norm that undergirds a 'liberal' (in the classic sense) society.
If merely "said things most people believe but that lefties don't like to hear" is enough to mark him for death, well, who precisely ISN'T fair game to the other side?
At least one (now former) MSNBC political activist sure tried:
Edit: Dowd also speculated that Kirk might have been accidentally shot by "a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration" (because that's totally something conservatives do on college campuses, right?).
Had me fooled for a second. I would have thought Ezra Klein wrote this shit.
That weird softvoice "and so i think" type of offensively gentle call to action is quite characteristic of ezra klein, but klein wont even have the balls to explicate the implicit castigation of kirk that dowd exhibited. klein is, if anything, a catastrophist who sees the progressive order of his vox days breaking down internally and instead of progressivism drifting towards his chosen island of centrist stability he is finding that the new island he calls home is itself fracturing. there was a email leak at one point that showed klein did have balls to say mean words, so maybe in the background klien and proximates like shor are screaming "dont you all see how fucking bad this is for us"
Actual Ezra Klein posts on X, for the record, include:
and
I agree that Klein didn't condone the killing, as I stated in my parent post. I meant to largely point out that Klein scthick is mainly trying to eke out a defensible progressivism and the new ground he staked as abundance ish deliverism is where hes finding out is shaky.
But jesus those tweets don't help. The replies there are basically "im actually celebrating have have to pretend i'm not".
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