In less than two weeks, I was supposed to debate Charlie Kirk.
The event was scheduled for Sept. 25 at Dartmouth College, and it was meant to be a wide-ranging conversation about American politics, focused on the views of young voters.
But on Wednesday, tragedy intervened. The entire country now knows the story: Mr. Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at a university campus in Utah. Late Thursday night, an arrest was made in the case.
I found out that Mr. Kirk had been killed while I was livestreaming to my audience on Twitch, as I do nearly every day. While I am exposed daily to images of incredible horror, particularly those of atrocities taking place in Gaza, I was still shocked by the images from Utah.
What shocked me was not merely the graphic nature of what took place. It was the horror of seeing someone whom I know — not a friend or an ally, but a human being I know personally and have debated before — fall victim to what clearly seems to be a rising tide of political violence.
Even before knowing exactly why Mr. Kirk was killed, I think there are some disturbing and necessary insights that can be drawn from his horrible death, ideas that affect the way many of my viewers — and many of the people who followed Mr. Kirk — see the world.
The first of these insights is hardly new. The United States has both very loose gun laws and more violent gun deaths per capita than any other developed nation in the world. And while shootings occur most anywhere, campuses can be especially deadly. As news broke that Mr. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, there was a near-simultaneous tragedy at a high school in small-town Colorado, where a 16-year-old shot two fellow students. There have been 47 school shootings this year.
Though it may ultimately prove correct to classify Mr. Kirk’s death as a tectonic political murder, the shooting was not itself uncommon or extraordinary. The victim was.
The second idea is more general and is connected to perhaps why these kinds of killings happen in the first place. Violence almost never originates in a vacuum, and the killing of a high-profile political content creator — regardless of why it happened — speaks to a breakdown in our social order.
Mr. Kirk was fond of talking about the ways that urban life has decayed in America, particularly in places like his native Chicago area. In fact, his last words included answering a question about the frequency of mass shootings with a question of his own about whether “gang violence” counted in that discussion.
Any answer about civic decline in America also has to include a discussion about the failure of our political and economic establishment to reconcile with social challenges that have touched every place and aspect of American life. Too many examples of the deadly gun violence we see today are, it seems to me, indicative of this decline.
The social challenges include rising rents and homelessness, the destruction caused by climate change, titanic levels of inequality, and too many others to name here. Our capitalist way of life — always accumulating, never evening out — leaves more and more people to deal with these problems on their own.
This produces feelings of isolation and resentment as material conditions worsen. And considering that our society is swamped by and yet somehow stitched together by a 24/7 news cycle that too often feeds this resentment, it is little wonder that a country of stressed-out gun owners would have so many grim, needless gun deaths.
This connects to my final idea.
Americans inhabit a culture of violence to which we have become habitually desensitized. There’s a connection between our culture of violence and American foreign policy. Over time, our culture of violence has targeted people around the world — anywhere from Cuba to Iraq — people who serve as literal targets for American weapons and bombs, absorbing what I think of as Americans’ excess capacity for violence.
For years now, American politics has taken on an increasingly punitive flavor. During the George W. Bush era, Arabs and Muslims were (and remain) singled out for suspicion. Their civil rights were routinely violated as we embarked on fresh wars against Arab and Muslim countries, and we regarded lives in those countries as less precious than our own.
The Barack Obama years were not so much a correction as continuity, with drone strikes, night raids and forever war. What followed in President Trump’s first term and in Joe Biden’s administration was still more of the same: extreme rhetoric about designated American enemies combined with aggressive sanctions and secret operations aimed at destabilizing entire countries.
A foreign policy organized around punishing and killing our supposedly sworn enemies, diplomacy be damned, conveys the terrible message that we can only kill and maim our way to achieving the world we want to live in.
I fear that this is most evident in America’s ironclad support for Israel. The genocide in Gaza has claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives. Meanwhile, Israel has carried out brazen assassinations and attempted assassinations in Iran, Qatar, Lebanon and Yemen. Backed up by Mr. Trump and, previously, by Mr. Biden, our government’s virtually unyielding support for Israel tells a scary story about the country we live in.
It suggests that, merely because we designate them as such, American enemies can be marked for death. Whether such rivals pose a legitimate threat, the “fire and fury” of our military and our allies have clearly become the default answer for how we deal with a world whose interests don’t align with our own. Pulling a gun or launching a missile has become part of our national character, a sad reduction of morality to the time it takes for fingers to pull triggers.
I would have liked to ask Mr. Kirk about all these things. He and I identified some of the same problems, but our views clashed about their causes and their potential solutions.
Americans, especially younger Americans, feel a sense of growing hopelessness as so many of those in power refuse to listen to their struggles, economic and otherwise. One side, Democrats, offers mostly platitudes, while the other, epitomized by Mr. Trump, frequently takes advantage of people’s resentments and redirects them toward vulnerable communities. Mr. Kirk, an ally of Mr. Trump, was an expert at the latter.
I wanted to debate Mr. Kirk. But because of a violent act, now I can’t.
Hasan Piker hosts a streaming show on the Twitch platform covering politics and pop culture.
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