At this point, there’s little doubt that the young man accused of shooting Charlie Kirk was angry with the right-wing activist’s political views. “I had enough of his hatred,” the 22-year-old suspect wrote in a text to his roommate, according to evidence released on Tuesday. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
But was the shooter a “leftist,” as Mr. Kirk’s allies and fans have so definitively insisted? His mother told investigators that his political views had recently moved to the left.
That doesn’t mean, though, that his act can be mapped cleanly onto the familiar left-right axis of 20th-century politics. He was not registered with any party. He did not bother voting in the 2024 election. He rarely seemed to surface from the deep end of the internet, where he learned a language that included antifascist slogans divorced from coherent ideology. Politics, it seems, existed alongside video games as a source for a strange swirl of signifiers.
He etched some of these allusions into his bullet casings. In the earliest days after the shooting, as people on the left and the right tried to pin the blame on their enemies, his messages were written in a way that taunted those who would try to break the code for their own ends, political or investigative. In another text, he explained those engravings “were mostly a big meme.”
In this confounding incoherence the suspect in the Kirk murder appears to have some company.
The 20-year-old man who nearly killed President Trump last summer in Butler, Pa., remains a cipher, with a profile more typical of a self-annihilating school shooter.
The 57-year-old accused of murdering Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota, and her husband, Mark, was a job-hopping father of five and apparently a committed conservative, though he offered no explanation for his acts.
The 26-year-old man accused of gunning down Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare executive, in Midtown Manhattan had experienced deep physical and psychological pain in the months preceding his act. The messages that he etched on his bullets pointed to his fury at insurance companies. But his disillusionment seemed to run deeper than health care. On his Goodreads account, one of his favorite quotes came from a religious philosopher: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
The messages may be garbled, but it would be a mistake to regard these assassins as acting outside the realm of politics. Their targets are unquestionably political, and their actions have political consequences. Mr. Kirk’s murder, especially, seems poised to unleash a ferocious government crackdown on liberal institutions.
Despite its modern markings, the violence we are witnessing is the heir to a long history of bloody political conflict in this country. Violent eras in the past were often characterized by fierce contests around profound questions of national identity and values: Who is included in the project of achieving freedom and prosperity? Who is not? When peaceful ways to adjudicate these questions have failed, the gun begins to beckon.
“Understanding political violence is often about understanding an ideology of last resorts,” Kellie Carter Jackson, a historian and professor at Wellesley College, writes in her book, “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence.” But if previous periods of violence could be understood as clashes of grand visions for the nation, today’s ideologies are just as likely to be nihilism and despair. Once there were movements and organizations. Today we have the lone individual, lost in a conversation with an online void.
A History of Violence
Historians typically define political violence as broader than assassinations of presidents and other major figures. As Professor Jackson puts it, these are “forceful or deadly acts that operate around a political agenda or motivation to produce change.” Under this definition, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was an act of political violence. So was the burning of cities across the country by ordinary people when they learned of his death. The United States, founded with the rallying cry of “Give me liberty or give me death,” has seen several eruptions of this kind of bloodshed.
Fevers of violence tend to occur during periods of political realignment, when the country’s two political parties are closely matched combatants and their constituencies are shifting, according to Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
We are witnessing that kind of movement now as the right gains support from the working class and the Democrats become the party of wealthy suburban voters. Neither side has been able to build a lasting majority coalition. The popular vote margin for the White House has been in the single digits for 10 straight cycles, longer than any other stretch in the country’s history.
The longest and bloodiest period of political violence was the roughly half century that encompassed the turn to the Civil War — in which nearly 700,000 died — and its terrible aftermath.
The 1850s, when the Republican Party first emerged, were particularly violent. The nation’s defining divide over slavery was becoming impossible to reconcile. Armed slave catchers routinely crossed borders into free states to kidnap runaway slaves. For decades white abolitionist leaders had preached nonviolent protest. But it was then that Black abolitionists concluded that the only language their opponents seemed to understand was violence.
“A lot of Black leaders felt that because slavery started with violence, because it was sustained by violence, it would only be overthrown by violence,” Professor Jackson said.
After the war, the Democratic Party successfully blocked Black voting rights in the South, first through terrorism and murder by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, then through Jim Crow laws. It was a revolt against a new power structure being imposed from Washington. This was also a period of extremely close elections and fairly regular presidential assassinations: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881 and then William McKinley in 1901.
A long period of Republican dominance followed, until a brief Democratic interlude under President Woodrow Wilson, who won the popular vote for a second term by only three points in 1916. Nativism rose in response to heightened immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and a sense that the country’s Protestant Christian identity was being lost. Race riots eviscerated Black neighborhoods.
During the 1960s, a long list of civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers were murdered as they tried to implement the promises of Black equality made a century before. The Democratic Party increasingly faced irreconcilable tensions between white Southerners and the rest of the party over race. By the end of the decade, the New Deal coalition that had given Democrats near-total dominion for years was fully coming apart.
The Vietnam War and the unfinished business of the civil rights movement led to disillusionment and rage against a government that seemed thoroughly corrupted. Far-left groups like the Weather Underground responded with almost nonstop explosives. For an 18-month period from 1971 to 1972, there were more than 2,500 bombings in the United States, or almost five a day, a vast majority of them nonfatal, according to the journalist Bryan Burrough in his book “Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the F.B.I., and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.”
If there is any solace to be derived from this very incomplete catalog of bloodshed, it’s that the country’s violent fevers eventually break. Political realignments consolidate into new blocs, and a new conception of the national project takes hold.
Leaders may address the underlying cause of the revolt. When the Vietnam War ended, protests petered out. Labor unrest cooled off after President Franklin Roosevelt instituted collective bargaining and the eight-hour work day.
Or one side may simply overpower the other when it wins over the wider public. The violent resistance in the South to Black equality diminished after the country adopted national laws enshrining civil rights.
But how can the flames be extinguished today if those wielding the gun are so often solitary ciphers? What is their revolt against?
A Politics of Hopelessness
The most dangerous element in our society may well be hopelessness. In an era of political realignment and contested ideas about the nation’s future, there are far too many Americans who can’t imagine any kind of future for themselves.
In a 2023 Harvard study, one in three young adults ages 18 to 25 reported feeling lonely. More than half said they lacked a sense of meaning or purpose. Other surveys show despair in a political system that many Americans feel has stopped responding to their most basic needs. In a poll this spring, only 19 percent of young Americans said they trusted the federal government “to do the right thing most or all the time.”
Measured in the bluntest ways, Americans early in their adulthood are not well. Until 2010, the mortality rates for adults ages 25 to 44 were declining, as one would expect in a country as wealthy as the United States. Since then, they have stalled, and then worsened after Covid-19. Other age groups spiked back sharply after the pandemic. Young people did not nearly as much. Their mortality rates are now far higher than in any other rich country, with the causes of death as varied as they are grim. Compared with before the pandemic, young adults are dying more from drug overdoses, car crashes, diabetes, alcohol, homicide, suicide.
Rather than comparing the recent run of violence with the 1850s or 1960s, it may help to see these events as closer kin to the mass shooting, a phenomenon that has now been with us for over a half century. A recent analysis of mass shooters revealed that social isolation was the biggest outside factor leading up to an attack, according to researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University. Often, the shooters have been suicidal. An estimated 30 percent of all mass shootings end in suicide by the attacker; another 10 percent are killed by law enforcement in “suicide by cop.” The man accused of shooting Mr. Kirk told his family that rather than turn himself in, he wanted to kill himself.
Today’s assassins have tenuous attachments to the kinds of formal networks that drove our divisions in past eras — political parties or radical groups, on either the left or the right. What they have instead are Discord channels and sites like Infowars, where they assemble a pastiche of ideas to try to make sense of the world. Those in their 20s have never known an existence free of the digital products ceaselessly pushed upon them by Silicon Valley, but even older generations are captive to their phones.
None of this is stopping the Trump administration from promising a vengeful crackdown on liberal institutions. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” said Stephen Miller, the White House’s policy adviser.
No doubt these will be expedient tools for the administration to go after its putative enemies. And so far the president has shown less interest in corralling violence from the right. The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was one of the most significant episodes of political violence in this country’s history. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump pardoned all involved.
So long as the focus remains solely on blaming either party, the despair that feeds this violence will only contaminate more of American life. When we try to find our politics neatly reflected back to us in each of these acts, we forget that the bullet itself is often the message. It’s a desperate act in a world where no words are left.
Jia Lynn Yang is a senior Times writer.
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