The Rough Beast Slouches Closer
A murder that brings out our best... and our absolute worst.
I’m sitting at my desk this morning with a mixture of anger, grief, fear, frustration, and, if I’m honest, disgust.
I’ve met Charlie Kirk, followed him for years, sharply criticized him, and disagreed with almost everything he says. And yesterday, I was sickened and horrified by his murder. Because despite our differences, he was a human being. A husband. A father.
But on this anniversary of 9/11, we are clearly beyond the point where tragedy or disaster will — even for a short time — bring us together and remind us of our common bonds and purpose.
Instead, political assassinations have become a sort of twisted moral/ideological Rorschach test. Yesterday’s murder of Charlie Kirk revealed America in all of its compassionate decency — but also its coruscating tribal ghoulishness.
Across the political spectrum, there was an outpouring of sympathy and grace, even from some of Kirk’s sharpest critics. From the opposite ideological pole, Mehdi Hasan wrote: “Charlie Kirk called me a ‘lunatic’ and a ‘prostitute’ and demanded I be deported. Nothing, nothing, justifies killing him, or robbing his kids of their dad. We don’t know the identity or motive of the shooter but murder can never be the response to political disagreements.”
But the ugliness was impossible not to notice, giving us a glimpse of the dangerous fissures that have already formed, especially among those who have become numbed to the critical distinction between speech and actual violence. Yesterday I posted…
I wasn’t talking about the damage to their political cause. The folks smirking about Kirk’s murder were damaging our moral culture, our sense of shared decency, and the fundamental bedrock of our democracy. If you applauded Kirk’s death because of karma or because you despise his politics, you have already embraced a post-democratic world where violence replaces debate and persuasion.
The belief that we should not murder someone in cold blood is a limiting principle.
Liberal democracy has a limiting principle. Terrorism does not.3
As Ezra Klein posted yesterday:
Political violence is contagious. It is spreading. It is not confined to one side or belief system. It should terrify us all.
The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence. Political violence is always an attack against us all. You have to be so blind not to see that.
But the ugly reactions spanned the political spectrum from “tolerant” leftists who smirked, to the demagogues of the right who screamed “revenge.”
Elon Musk declared, “The Left is the party of murder.” Trump’s bigoted BFF, Laura Loomer demanded: “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization… We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.” Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie, waved the bloody shirt:
While Libs of TikTok posted: “THIS IS WAR,” Sean Davis, the founder of the uber-MAGA Federalist, barked that the Democratic Party “is a domestic terrorist organization.”
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And, of course, Trump himself shrugged off the presidential role of Comforter in Chief and chose instead to be the Maximalist Inflamer/Divider. Again.
In an Oval Office address, Trump lashed out at the “radical left” who, he said, “have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.”
This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
He followed with an ominous threat:
My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.
He went on to list several acts of political violence, including the attempts on his own life, the shooting of GOP Representative Steve Scalise, and the murder of a health care executive in New York.
But Trump did not mention— or so much as allude to — the murder and attempted murder of two Democratic Minnesota legislators, the shooting attack on the Centers for Disease Control, the arson attack on PA Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, or the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Nor did he mention the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6; or the plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer.1
Exit take: Of course he’s going to weaponize the tragedy. And, of course, the hypocrisy burns.2
Political violence is our new reality
Charlie Kirk’s murder was not a tipping point, because we have already tipped. Violence and the threat of bloodshed have been the background noise of our politics for some time now.
Two years ago, Reuters reported: “Political violence in polarized U.S. at its worst since 1970s.” It was also increasingly deadly:
Some deaths followed one-on-one disputes, such as a fatal brawl last year between two Florida men arguing over Trump’s business acumen. Others happened in public settings, such as the shooting of five social justice protesters in Portland last year by a man immersed in far-right political rhetoric. Politically motivated mass killings claimed 24 of the lives, including the May 2022 shooting of 10 Black shoppers in Buffalo by a white supremacist who called for a race war.
Meanwhile, tolerance for violence has risen and spread.
One in 5 U.S. adults believe Americans may have to resort to violence to get their own country back on track, according to the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, an attitude that experts say puts the nation in “an incredibly dangerous place” in the months before the 2024 presidential election.
Earlier this year, Noah Rothman warned, “We’ve been lucky that no single act has set off a truly cataclysmic chain reaction, but the potential for a spiraling cascade of vengeance and reprisals is ever present.”
Every day seems to bring us closer to that nightmare.
Which brings me back to the jeremiad I wrote late December after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: ”Who Do We Kill Next?
Spend any time at all on social media, and you’ve seen it: The real-time process and effects of online radicalization; the embrace of terrorist morality by a claque of neo-Jacobins (many of whom were posting paeans to decency, tolerance, democracy, and kindness just five minutes ago.)
Once upon a time, this sort of sick shit was confined to extremist 4-chan message boards after a school shooting, or a massacre at a mosque.
Now, though, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed on social media sites like Threads, X, Bluesky, and even here. There is a raucous celebration of a murder because the system is so unfair and “CEOs aren’t human.” And there is an endless stream of rationalizations; the “buts” that provide winking justification for cold-blooded assassination. Noah Smith notes that a new poll finds that almost a third of Americans under the age of 45 have a positive opinion of Luigi Mangione, the probable murderer.
The murderers (of Thompson and Kirk) may turn out to have severe mental health issues, or not.
But what about all the people penning justifications of his actions? The keyboard warriors who support the murder as a matter of principle, making judgments they regard as rational, reasonable, and high-minded, and unashamed to suggest that not only did the victim have it coming, but that others have it coming as well.
So, who else should be killed?
Or to put it somewhat differently, what other murders would be cheered or rationalized? What is the governing principle here? Is it limited to the cis white male CEOs of health insurance companies?
Who else? How about CFOs, and executive vice presidents? How about the “risk managers”? Or the lawyers? Or investors? Or shareholders, all of whom are surely also complicit?
If murder is justified by anger, disappointment, “or the unfairness” of the system, then why should vengeance be limited to executives of just one industry?
The list seems almost endless: Politicians who vote to cut programs? Members of the military? Police officers? Judges and juries who hand down unpopular or outrageous rulings? The Medicare officials who also delay and deny? How about Jews who support “genocide” by Israel?
Or MAGA activists like Charlie Kirk?
A wreckage of trust
None of this happened overnight.
Years of norm-breaking has left us surrounded by the wreckage of trust in principles and standards of every sort. So what we are seeing is a loss of faith — not just in capitalism, but in virtually every other institution — a loss of belief in the democratic process itself.
The right celebrates vigilante killings (lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse) and defends a violent attack on the Capitol. A nation that elects a convicted felon and serial liar to its highest office mocks the very idea that the powerful are — or ever will be — held accountable.
To many Americans right now, appeals to decency or the Rule of Law itself are seen as weakness or delusion — a naïve throwback to a world that no longer exists: A world where we knew and trusted the rules of civilization and liberal democracy.
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Exit take: Yes, it’s time for that Yeats poem again.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Thursday frogs
Honestly, this was the high point of my day yesterday. With the world gong to sh*t, I looked out into our basement window well and saw some friends. They say hi.
Nota Bene:
Political violence has become a laughing matter for Trump and his allies. After a crazed attacker fueled by online conspiracy theories beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer, Trump mocked it. “Nancy Pelosi has a big wall wrapped around her house. Of course, it didn’t help too much with the problem she had, did it?” Trump said in 2024.
GOP figures piled on. That included Kirk, who, in 2022, called for “some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail [the attacker] out.”
Joyce Vance gets it exactly right:
I have not lost my absolute disdain for Republicans who refused to condemn attacks like those on Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, the Minnesota legislators and others, merely because they were Democrats. If there is a floor for democracy, it is condemning political violence, and these people unambiguously flunk that test. They make their hypocrisy bare when they condemn attacks on Trump and tonight’s violent murder of Charlie Kirk, but not on people who they don’t consider part of their tribe. But here’s the thing: This is not about them, it’s about us.
Charlie, I'm not going to go as far as saying Charlie Kirk had it coming. Even my dark, cynical heart won't go that far. But it is *also* true that he helped create an environment on behalf of Donald Trump which normalized -- even celebrated -- political violence. Same can be said of Sean Davis and the rest of them. And now they're outraged that their successful efforts to do so have boomeranged and claimed one of their own.
To put it another way, there is an increasing, non-zero chance that I may be killed as a result of political violence. But when I go to my maker, one of the sins that I have to answer for will not include inciting or celebrating violence against my enemies. And that's more that can be said of the MAGAe.
The rhetoric out of the White House is terrifying, and I suspect the intention is to foment violence so that Trump can ignore Posse Comitatus and send the Army into every city. He could even deputize groups such as the Proud Boys to be his enforcers. The Supreme Court has already abandoned the Constitution; Kavanaugh's absurd reasoning regarding racial profiling is even worse than Alito's nonsense in Dobbs. Protest marches will be met with violence, and none of us is equipped to defend against a military conquest. The Russians and the Chinese are celebrating!