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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.
I turned to ChatGPT with a question slightly more general, and the last example it could find of a similar event in the US- political commentator or similar public intellectual non-politician being assassinated or at least attempted- was Alan Berg in 1984. Jewish radio host killed in his driveway by neo-Nazis. Movie came out about the group that killed him last year.
Before that it mentioned the Larry Flynt shooting.
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