After the fatal shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk last week, observers rushed to take part in what’s become one of America’s most gruesome past times: waiting to figure out the politics of the shooter, so blame could be assigned to one party or the other for the tragedy.
Conservative politicians hurried to identify the shooter as a far-left Democrat. After Tyler Robinson was arrested for the shooting, left-wing commenters circulated unfounded theories that Robinson might be a Groyper, a white supremacist who thought Kirk’s racism didn’t go far enough. The war over Robinson’s identity reached a crescendo with Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, after the late-night host seemed to imply Robinson was a MAGA supporter in a monologue Monday night. Meanwhile, the right, starting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, has sought to spin Kirk’s killing into a larger narrative about the left’s propensity for political violence, a claim that isn’t backed by evidence.
Indeed, as Arie Perliger, a professor of criminology at UMass Lowell who has studied hundreds of political assassinations from the past century, has found, political violence is a much more complicated phenomenon than the current discourse would have us believe. “Each side picks the details that fit their own narratives, right?” he told Vox in a video interview.
And a closer look at assassinations reveals that the reasons for them run the gamut. For every assassin guided by a clearly comprehensive ideology of hatred and bigotry, there’s one who thinks assassinating a US president will help him impress an actor (Ronald Reagan and Jodie Foster, respectively). Thomas Matthew Crook, who shot at Donald Trump during a campaign event last summer, was a registered Republican who also donated to Joe Biden’s campaign.
Perliger thinks that when we endlessly obsess over the individual politics of an assassin, we’re focusing on the wrong question. “I think that we can learn much more about the overall conditions that facilitate people like Tyler Robinson,” he said. Those conditions, per Perliger’s research, include political polarization and endemic dysfunction — two qualities the US government has in spades right now.
You can read highlights from my conversation with Perliger below. They’ve been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Give me a quick overview of some of the research you’ve done on assassins.
Ten years ago, when I was faculty at West Point, we compiled a data set of around 700 political assassinations — not just of elected officials, but also judges and some other political figures. We tried to really understand if we could identify some patterns, some similarities, and if you could produce some kind of insights about the factors that can facilitate political assassinations.
What we were able to find out is that political assassinations are a combination of two factors. First of all, there’s increasing political polarization and the overlap of different societal cleavages. The second thing is that in many cases, it is being utilized when groups, constituencies, individuals, movements are losing trust in the political system. In other words, they deem the political system as ineffective.
Ordinarily, when we want to promote political changes, it demands a lot of resources, time, money, mobilizing the masses, and so on. Political assassination is perceived as a very quick shock to the system that can really dramatically change the political landscape and as a result can help the assassin to promote their objectives, their agenda.
One of the things that is really striking is how frequently, for a lot of these very famous assassinations, the agenda at hand is hard to understand from the outside. How common is it for assassins to act for political reasons that the rest of us have a lot of trouble parsing?
Our expectation to see someone in his 20s having some kind of a coherent ideological framework — it’s a bit unrealistic, even if they do extreme acts of violence or any kind of extreme act.
It’s very difficult to understand how attitudes, emotions, and perceptions intersect to lead a young person to perpetrate [a crime]. This is why I tend to focus more on how the environment leads those individuals or confused individuals, which are very common in that age, to engage in those kinds of acts of violence. I’m not just talking about political assassination. I’m talking in general about why we see young people much more comfortable in engaging in different acts of violence or extreme activities, including on campuses. I think that’s the real question that I’m trying to answer and to look at in my research.
Do political assassins tend to be younger? Is age correlated with assassination in the data set?
Not necessarily, actually. Our data set goes back to World War II, and it’s important to acknowledge that most political action until the early 2000s, most groups that challenged the government or challenged the social order, were very organized. They were actual institutionalized organizations. They actually met with each other. They actually distributed physical texts.
What happened in the last 20 years is that a lot of those movements and a lot of those ideas now are virtual ones, where part of the ethos is direct action: “If you’re really a believer, you should not expect any kind of organizational support. You should act.”
We see that on the environmental side, for example. A lot of environmental groups encourage members to act independently to protest against environmental policy that they don’t like, and so on. We see that also in the extremities of the left and the right, the idea that, in this day and age, we need to engage in these kinds of little resistances. If you really believe in those goals, in those ideologies, if you are really committed to the cause, you should act based on your own resources, based on your own capabilities. That’s really the secret sauce that will enable the movement to be more effective and to move forward.
And this is why you see so many lone actors recently, including during assassinations, which is much different than what we’ve seen in the past.
One of the things that I’m interested in is that whenever a tragedy like this occurs, there’s a rush from observers and politicians and people in the media to try to figure out what side of the political aisle the perpetrator was on, so we can all decide who to blame for what they did. From your perspective, what do you think leads to that impulse? And is there any use to it?
It’s really funny to see all this cherry-picking. Each side picks the details that fit their own narratives, right? “He talked with his parents about how much he hates Kirk, so he’s on the left. His parents are Republicans, so he actually grew up in a conservative family.” It’s completely unproductive, and it doesn’t really tell us anything. In general, I’m very reluctant to focus on specific individuals. I think that we can learn much more about the overall conditions that facilitate people like Tyler Robinson.
One of the things that I really emphasize when I’m being asked about this is the fact that political polarization has created a dysfunctional political system. Politicians today have zero incentives to engage in bipartisan politics. Congress, for a long time, has not actually engaged in policy construction, and cannot really produce any kind of shared politics.
There’s this strong sense that the system is delegitimizing the democratic process, and it creates a vacuum where different groups can argue democracy doesn’t work. “It’s obvious democracy doesn’t work. We should engage in other means in order to promote our objectives, whether it’s engaging in mass disruption, whether it’s burning everything that we can burn or killing people.”
The second element is that the incentives to go to the extreme create an ongoing delegitimization and demonizations of political rivals. Every policy that the other side promotes is an existential threat, is a catastrophe coming.
When I was tracking far-right online spaces during the Biden administration, every day they were sure that their constitutional rights were being violated, that their civil liberties were under threat. They were sure that antifa was at the gates. Every policy that Biden promoted was perceived as, “Okay, that’s the end of America.” In many ways, we see that now.
Look, we can have policy debates, but not every policy is an existential threat to the republic. We need to be able to actually have a discussion that is more nuanced. No wonder that people think that we have to do something, because things are going really, really bad.
The combination of all those things that I’ve just mentioned has created an environment which normalizes the usage of political violence, normalizes a consistent challenging of the system and the status quo. It’s created a situation where everybody feels that we’re in a very dark place. That’s because the mechanism that’s supposed to overcome those dark places is not really functioning anymore.
Many of my colleagues don’t like me saying that. I got tons of emails of all the interviews I did in the last few days: How dare I blame both sides? I blame both sides because I think both sides are engaged in similar rhetorical practices, and both sides are involved in violence.
It seems like you’re arguing that the political system has become so dysfunctional that a response of nihilism is, in some ways, quite rational. Is that a fair summary?
Definitely. In a different environment, people like Tyler Robinson would find more constructive ways to express their concerns. However, considering all the things that I’ve just mentioned to you, all those factors that work together, it’s no wonder that some of those individuals resort to those kinds of actions. It’s a broader theme that we see about how the entire societal discourse is normalizing these kinds of things. Luigi Mangione became a folk hero in some circles.
It’s going back to the lack of even basic empathy as human beings, and the fact that ideology basically encompasses everything, that we stop seeing people. We’re seeing everyone through ideological lenses and ideological prisms. We’re losing the basic understanding that our discourse would be much better if you maintain some of those aspects of some of those sentiments.
I’m always being asked what’s the one thing that our leaders can do. I always tell them that they don’t need to talk. They actually need to engage in bipartisan behavior that will signal to their constituencies that the other side is not necessarily evil. Once you signal to your constituency that it is possible to work with the other side, that’s a strong enough message to understand that it’s actually possible to create things together, and not just each side engaging in performative politics that maybe give them some votes from their bases, but doesn’t really promote anything really constructive.
Is there anything we haven’t discussed about this assassination that you think is particularly of note?
There’s two things that I think are really interesting. First of all, the expansion of political assassinations outside the political system. Charlie Kirk was not an elected official. He was a public speaker, and you can argue he was probably more influential than many other elected officials. That created a different discourse among what we call the influencers on the right and the left. It’s not just that suddenly they are talking about their own sense of security, but it also shows that politics right now is probably much more combustible outside the institution. It created different dynamics of where politics is happening.
The second thing I think is it happened on a university campus. It’s another reflection of the fact that campuses are becoming spaces for very contentious acts and violent acts. Campuses are less and less becoming places where you can actually engage in intellectual debate and exchange of ideas. Most people on campus these days are reluctant to engage in any kind of political discourse or any kind of issues, because of the potential cost. So we are losing universities as spaces where there’s actual intellectual debate, and they are becoming more spaces where both sides are doing performative politics, just doing performance, rather than actually talking to each other.
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