Millions of Americans just witnessed a killing.
On Wednesday, scattered amid social media’s banal ephemera — tired memes, partisan agit-prop, and celebrity gossip — appeared a video of a young man speaking into a microphone, then recoiling from a gunshot to the neck.
For hours, this snuff film was impossible to escape, the atrocity autoplaying over and over, as clout chasers capitalized on the human mind’s helpless fascination with violence. It was a horrifying spectacle, made all the more so by the identity of the deceased — the conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk.
Kirk evangelized for causes that I despise. But through years of long-form commentary, he had endeared himself to millions of conservatives. Our brains did not evolve to distinguish parasocial relationships from actual ones: For almost all of our species’ history, to hear a person speak on a near-daily basis was to know them intimately. Countless Republicans, therefore, experienced Kirk’s death as though it were the loss of a friend.
For liberals, meanwhile, Kirk’s killing constituted an appalling assault on political liberty. The commentator came to prominence as a defender of conservative speech on campus. Now, while speaking at a university, he had been silenced by a bullet. Such violence did not just steal Kirk’s voice, but discouraged others from articulating provocative views in public, whatever their ideological content.
Kirk’s assassination was thus an assault on the democratic project — on our capacity to collectively govern ourselves through the exercise of reason. It was also alarming, obscene, and ironic in the grimmest possible sense.
The right’s response proved to be much the same.
The right’s shamelessly distorted narrative about political violence in America
Within hours of Kirk’s shooting, the most powerful Republicans in the country — from the president to Fox News hosts to megabillionaires — were agitating for authoritarian repression, and justifying it with incendiary lies. (Meanwhile, Democratic officials, to a person, condemned Kirk’s assassination.)
To appreciate the Orwellian nature of the right’s reaction, consider a few of its aspects:
All this dishonesty and unreason was as menacing as the promises of vengeance it rationalized. The openness of the right’s lies signaled that truth would be no obstacle to the sating of its bloodlust, nor to its exploitation of tragedy for partisan gain.
The left’s online culture is flawed — but so is the right’s
The right’s mendacity contains a sliver of truth: There are some sick currents in the culture of the extremely online left. Social media algorithms reward provocation. And they foster status games in which ideologues seek to demonstrate their superlative commitment to the cause. This can encourage apologetics for violence: Expressing glee at the killing of a health insurance executive, for instance, can both 1) gain you attention and 2) signal that you’re more outraged by America’s unjust medical system than your squeamish peers.
These dynamics are perverse and harmful. Yet there is nothing wrong with the left’s political culture that isn’t also wrong with the right’s. And right-wing extremism has claimed far more lives in recent years than the left-wing variety.
A conservative movement committed to Charlie Kirk’s ostensible ideals — to free speech and open discourse — would respond to his assassination by decrying political violence in all its forms and rejecting the pernicious notion that the government must suppress certain ideas to keep the public safe. But such a movement does not exist.
Today’s conservatism is animated by resentment, fear, and a consequent will to dominate its opponents. Kirk’s assassination has reinforced these authoritarian impulses and provided a pretense for indulging them. In doing so, it has thrown our already imperiled democracy into even greater jeopardy.
The post The right’s vicious, ironic response to Charlie Kirk’s death appeared first on Vox.
