These are the weeks I made this newsletter to lament. Once again, I find myself “yearning to write patient explanations of why everyone else is being a dick.”
Before I do that, I must perform the increasingly important ritual of condemning this killing. I am not being the slightest bit sarcastic. There was once a temptation to roll our eyes at this step, as if “murder is bad” were too obvious a truth to require clarification. In 2015 or so, I might have been impatient with such rote incantations myself.
But unfortunately, something has changed since then (that’s kind of the whole problem here) that makes this truth obvious to fewer and fewer people. Something that’s pushing our country into deepening civil unrest. So whether or not you personally need to hear this, I think you should join me in affirming that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was evil, unjustifiable murder, categorically worse than anything Kirk himself ever did.
What’s more, this is the main story, more important than all that follows. Plenty of thoughtful writers are covering it, and nobody serious disputes it.
What liberals do seem to dispute is whether we’re also allowed to say anything else. I think that we are. Our opponents certainly are. I do not believe in fighting an assassin’s veto of one voice with a mourner’s veto of millions.1 With that heartfelt preface out of the way, I would very much like to proceed with explaining why everyone else is being a dick.
Lefties on social media are being dickish in a similar way they were after the Brian Thompson killing in December. Importantly, this is not the way that furious conservatives on social media suggest; I’ve seen very few literally condoning or celebrating Kirk’s murder. But a great many find it somehow relevant to point out Kirk’s views on utterly mainstream, center-right policy issues like gun control, abortion, trans rights, or affirmative action—which were, however pugnaciously expressed, essentially those common to Republicans in 2005. Those views may be ugly, but they are not fascism.
Many on the left are snidely insinuating some delicious irony in the fact that Kirk was killed by a gun. Because, get it? He supported the 2nd amendment! Haha. This is the mirror-image stupidity of Republicans imagining that a Democrat killed by an illegal immigrant somehow proves shit about immigration. Too many others are laughing at his fans’ pained reactions in ways that egg on the worst impulses of the illiberal right, just when the illiberal right is at the zenith of its political power.
It is fair, for reasons I will soon explain, for left-leaning people to have negative views of Charlie Kirk. It is even fair to mention some of those reasons at this moment; to resist his absurd martyrdom, the moments of silence, the flags at half mast, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom as insults to those honors’ deserving recipients. But the most vocal leftists are giving the wrong reasons! They’re confusing what beliefs and behaviors are truly beyond the pale.
As usual, the right’s political leadership is worse.2 Though all sides have countless individual idiots, there is an obvious asymmetry in how irresponsibly the most prominent voices in our politics—elected officials, thought leaders, people with name recognition—talk about political violence. Here's a roundup from conservative Andrew Sullivan:
“Laura Loomer — one of the activists closest to Trump, a woman who vets national security appointments — tweeted the following: “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” Clarifying, no? From a MAGA publisher with over 100,000 followers: “The admin has carte blanche. Don’t bother arguing. Just do what you’re going to do.” From Libs of TikTok: “THIS IS WAR.” And Milo: “Every network news operation, CNN, the Post, the Times. The Ford foundation. Bill and Melinda. Meta and Alphabet. Seize their assets. Shut them down. Do it today.”
From Elon Musk: “The Left is the party of murder.” And Nancy Mace: “Democrats own this, 100 percent.” And we can’t leave out Matt Walsh:
“We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell. They’re killing us in our churches. They tried to kill our president. They killed Charlie, one of our greatest advocates. … This is existential.”
This may be the first time Walsh has approved of a plural pronoun for a single person. But a he, unconfirmed at that point, instantly became a “they” for Walsh. This is Weimar-style polarization, super-charged by social media and videos everywhere, videos that stir the subconscious, from George Floyd’s neck to Charlie Kirk’s.”
(Collage borrowed from the great Bentham's Bulldog )
I documented the same asymmetry after the Butler shooting last year:
“…elected Democrats immediately, stridently, and universally condemned [the shooting]. When Republican Senator Steve Scalise was shot in 2017 by a Bernie Sanders supporter, elected Democrats immediately, stridently, and universally condemned it…
But when a large crowd of MAGA Republicans chanting “hang Mike Pence” attempted violence…based on a lie, Trump and his sycophants cheered them on, repeated the lie, spent the next four years portraying them as martyrs who should not be in prison, and promised to pardon them on Day 1 of his presidency.
When a Trump supporter tried to kill Nancy Pelosi and broke her husband’s skull with a hammer, Trump mocked them both to a cheering crowd. So did his son…
In 2023, Trump suggested that former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley deserves to be executed. On Veterans’ Day, he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Just last week, his ideological acolyte Jack Posobiec3 gave an utterly deranged speech threatening to arrest Biden’s cabinet members and staff and “chase the communists back into their urine-soaked faculty lounges,” because “we don’t negotiate with un-humans.” Studies show political violence and threats are three to five times higher on the right than the left, and also far more deadly and impactful.”
If MAGA applied half as much scrutiny to Trump’s comments after the Pelosi attack as they did to the Mayor of Charlotte after a random murder, they could not so easily invert the direction in which this problem is skewed.
Nor could they do so if they scrutinized Kirk himself. Because when that crazed intruder swung a hammer into Mr. Pelosi’s skull, Charlie Kirk called for “some amazing patriot” to bail out the attacker. He suggested that maybe the attacker didn’t break in after all, with a smirk and a nod to the baseless conspiracy that the attacker was actually Mr. Pelosi’s gay lover.4
Those comments hint at why it was inappropriate for my beloved Green Bay Packers to observe a moment of silence for Kirk on Thursday. A select handful of celebrities—think Tom Hanks or Michael Phelps—are so universally admired that such a moment would feel like a unifying gesture at a time of genuine national mourning. For Kirk, it played dumb to what half the audience rightfully thought of him 36 hours before.5 It went beyond the condemnation that everyone actually shared to imitate a devastation felt only by a rabid fringe.
To decry Kirk’s killing is sincere and necessary. To deescalate the aftermath is noble and prudent. But to feign grief at his loss strikes most Americans as insincere. And to exalt his memory—to recast his legacy as a fair-minded champion of productive political exchange—is revisionist bullshit. It is a testament to how far our discourse has fallen that we no longer distinguish between actual good-faith debate and the shock jockey clickbait to which Kirk devoted his life.
So what irritated me most this week was actually the center.6 Specifically, people like Ezra Klein—generally one of the better pundits out there—eulogizing Kirk as a man of courage and moral integrity:
“Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.”7
Sullivan chides the left that “it is never ‘hate’ to tell the truth.” Fair enough. Then let me tell the truth about who Charlie Kirk was, since everyone except Jamelle Bouie seems too timid to say it in full.
Charlie Kirk was a shameless liar and provocateur who pioneered the right’s performance of debate theater. That is my polite term for what South Park called “masterdebating” just three weeks ago: a showman’s style of verbal combat that feels good to the speaker and his sympathizers, but is actually an unproductive imitation of the real thing.8 Contrary to Klein’s hagiography, Kirk’s contributions to the discourse seldom intended to persuade. Rather, they were optimized to activate the amygdala, and to disable our society’s ability to reason together.
Back when it remained possible to imagine that social media was a force for good in the world, Kirk figured out how to hack the algorithm through ragebait, strawman, selective listening, selective editing, and above all, sensationalism. He’d say things like “Martin Luther King Jr. was awful” and “the Civil Rights Act was a huge mistake.” He said Joe Biden should be put in prison or given the death penalty for crimes against America. He said doctors providing gender-affirming care should be imprisoned after Nuremberg-style trials. This summer, he claimed that DEI increased the death toll of the floods in Texas that killed dozens of children at a summer camp.
Kirk was capable of civil exchange, and smart enough to debate in good faith when he wanted to. Had he wanted to, he could have pursued truth and compromise in earnest conversation with rival ideologues of comparable stature. He could have picked on people his own size. Instead, he chose to build wealth and influence by ensnaring 19-year-olds in word puzzles and rhetorical traps that intentionally sidestepped the values differences underlying their disagreements.
Charlie Kirk’s passion, day in and day out, was to say things he knew to be false, misleading, outrageous, or unrelated to the question at hand—but to say them abrasively enough that they fired up stupid people who otherwise wanted to believe him. I cannot emphasize enough how different this is from genuine debate, or how certainly he knew he was lying.
He knew he was lying when he said hydroxychloroquine was 100% effective in treating coronavirus. He knew he was lying when he made up death statistics from the swine flu, and said authorities in China were burning COVID patients. He knew he was lying about voter fraud after the 2020 election. He knew he was lying about George Floyd putting a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach, or dying of a drug overdose. He knew he was lying when he said the French yellow-vest protestors were chanting for Trump. Among 79 prominent political podcasters studied by Brookings in 2023, Kirk’s podcast was found to contain the second-highest proportion of false, misleading, and unsubstantiated statements.9
Together with Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder, Kirk laid the foundations of a broader right-wing “debate me bro!” ecosystem founded on flamboyant crowd work and speaking too quickly to fact check. Like a rap battle before a biased crowd, the exchanges reward overconfidence, verbal dunking, thinking on one’s feet, and amassing a herd of fanboys willing to hoot at your lines much more than critical thinking.10
With Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, Kirk seeded another ecosystem of conspiracists “just asking questions” to stoke false but inflammatory narratives “you won’t hear about on the mainstream media.” When it turned out that few educated people wanted to humor such garbage, their relative maturity was recast as cowardice: proof they were hiding something, or too brainwashed to entertain dissent. This was Kirk’s daily M.O.
To describe this behavior as “practicing politics the right way” because it did, I admit, involve the use of words is to set a bar so low it’s not worth mentioning. It is a depressing erasure of standards for how words ought to be used; an omission of inquiry into what makes words useful in the first place. If we abandon the expectation that political figures will use their words to converge on a shared reality and then reason together towards truth and good policy, then what the fuck are we even doing here? Why are we typing? Why not pick our policies by spinning a big wheel?
Today’s conservatives have a label for Kirk’s noxious soup of fabrication, obfuscation, inflammation, oversimplification, whataboutism, gaslighting, and strawman fallacy. Their preferred term is “free speech.” And they are technically right: this speech should not be illegal. Nor should it be censored on college campuses, despite the misguided views of a progressive minority.
But his speech’s legality is not its most noteworthy aspect, it’s just the nicest thing you can say about it. It does not render the speech virtuous, nor make Kirk a fighter for anything worthwhile. And like everyone else in his cesspool, Kirk’s feigned concern for free expression did not extend to his adversaries, much less to the hitlist of college professors he asked his followers to harangue. Bouie elaborates:
To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents. “‘Investigate first, define the crimes later’ should be the order of the day,” Kirk declared in an editorial demanding the legal intimidation of anyone associated with the political left…He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them.
So do not tell me that Charlie Kirk was a principled champion for either debate or free speech. His job—his raison d'etre—was to crowd out debate with lurid noise. He was a dancing monkey for wannabe autocrats, who made a mockery of the principles he’s now called a martyr for.
Andrew Sullivan thinks I’m being too harsh on the guy. Upon rewatching Kirk’s recent debates, he assures us that “I have found no personal animus, no individual cruelty, no rank bigotry.” And in the one video he linked, of the 20 minutes I had time to watch, I didn’t either. A bit of psychopathy, maybe. Some giddy edgelordism, devoid of empathy, charity, or integrity. But even here, I can admit nuance. Kirk was not as bad as others of the genre he helped found. Sullivan writes:
“I obviously oppose the kind of populist, authoritarian cult that Kirk was enabling, and the Christianism he backed. But he wasn’t Milo. He wasn’t Candace Owens. He wasn’t Alex Jones. He wasn’t even Tucker Carlson. And he did the hard work of democracy: talking to those who disagreed with him.”
I have two responses to this. First, if Charlie Kirk was not those people, you have to squint really hard to see the difference. Kirk’s own show mentioned him in the same breath as Milo in its response to the South Park satire. A co-host of that show was Jack Posobiec, who I quoted earlier as calling his opponents “un-humans.” And of course, these people all cavorted at all the same events, supported the same candidates, tweeted the same lies, and called each other allies. It is rich for Sullivan to draw this distinction in the same post as he criticizes the left for not reining in its fringes. It’s not that the distinction is necessarily wrong; it’s just imperceptible to people who followed Kirk through an algorithm that elevated his worst content.
My second and bigger frustration is with this well-meaning but simplistic dichotomy between words and violence, without any gradation of merit within the words category. I do not mean that words can be violence, in the way some progressives have claimed for the past 15 years. I mean that if we fail to distinguish between productive and unproductive speech, we’re missing a huge part of why the internet generations are losing faith in words to begin with.
In his call to grieve Kirk, Sullivan writes:
“Words connect with the rational part of our brains; images target the sub-rational. And in a sub-rational world, liberal democracy simply cannot exist.”
I agree passionately with the second sentence, and disagree with the first. Not all words target the rational part of our brains at all. Charlie Kirk’s words rarely did. It is emphatically not condoning his killing to point out that his commentary was lab-engineered to inflame the same the heated, threatened, monkey-brain tribalism that likely overcame his assassin. The social media shitshow that followed his murder, among his ardent followers most of all, is a perfect encapsulation of his legacy.
“The most important political divide in our country today is between people who think words and laws have failed so it’s time for bullets, and people trying desperately to pull us back from that ledge.”
In order to succeed, the people pulling back must be more candid and specific about the factors that got us here. Political violence is a symptom of a deeper rot in how we speak that has made the speech seem futile. It is because of people like Charlie Kirk that today’s young people are so tired and cynical of the merits of words.
A generation of kids has grown up knowing no form of debate other than what Kirk did—and what Kirk did is useless, for all but entertainment. It is for the crowd, for the exciting 360 slam, for the chance to go viral with a zinger soundbyte, or a video of your opponent not having a response for more than three seconds. It penalizes and humiliates genuine reflection, deterring participants from probing any deeper than thoughts they’ve already crystallized. And it is no substitute for the discussions I remember from my undergrad years, when people would actually try to reason with one another—not for the likes and subscribes, but in private DMs with nobody watching.
When words become useless, violence is the only thing left. Liberalism is on the side of meaningful, productive, good-faith exchange between people seeking compromise and coexistence in a pluralistic world. Charlie Kirk was not.
And in this case, an autocrat’s veto.
It is important to be specific about this. It is not everyone, and not even most people on the right who are worse! The average conservative-leaning person in this country behaves decently most of the time. The difference between the two sides of our spectrum is at the top.
Posobiec, by the way, was the co-host of Charlie Kirk’s podcast.
Three pages in, I’ve meandered to my actual point.
Or actually, much less than half. Probably at least half had never heard his name before Wednesday, because they have healthier relationships online politics than we do. This makes the solemn commemoration of his passing even more farcical.
I understand why men like Klein and Yascha Mounk feel anxious about saying anything a hostile reader could willfully misconstrue as justifying the attack. I feel the same anxiety. But I fear that in our understandable desire to pull society back from the brink, we are both suppressing an honest accounting of how we got there and robbing liberalism of it’s comparative appeal. If Kirk is what we’re for, then what we’re for has lost it’s lustre. A paralyzing fear of saying anything taboo is part of why voters have deemed our side so uninspiringly conformist in recent years. A majority of Americans would prefer we speak freely.
Likewise, Politico Playbook pretending that “Kirk’s approach was to persuade, to use charm and charisma and provocation and the power of argument to convince people of the righteousness of his cause.”
Kirk literally carried on these tactics until his last breath. On his show’s the last episode, Kirk lied to his audience that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.” And the last words he spoke before he was shot were to sidestep the lie he was peddling that transgender Americans are more likely to commit mass shootings:
“Question: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?
Kirk: Too many.
Question: Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?
Kirk: Counting or not counting gang violence ... ?”
The great tragedy of all spoken debate is that [ability to think fast and speak forcefully] and [ability to think carefully and embrace nuance] have only a very weak association.
You know that old (apocryphal?) quote, "I despise what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it"? Since last Wednesday, there has for a certain sort of liberal been such an overemphasis on the second half of that quote, that there's a danger we forget the first half. Thank you for your corrective.
This is just comprehensively everything I wish I could have mustered the words to say.