If we honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy of good-faith engagement, we will reflexively step back from the precipice.
I f you spent time this weekend interacting with your physical environment, that experience likely did not leave you dismayed by the rapid deterioration of the American social fabric.
Maybe you saw one of the dozens, if not hundreds, of well-attended vigils for Charlie Kirk. You might have caught at least one of the NASCAR races, football and baseball games, concerts, or UFC fights honoring his legacy. It’s likely that you spoke about last week’s events at church, with friends, neighbors, and family. And if the polling is to be believed, there was consensus around the horror of it and the growing problem of domestic political violence it represents. The unspoken point of that conversation was to steel your mutual resolve to confront it.
If, however, you spent a lot of time online this weekend, you were probably bombarded with evidence that a terrifyingly large number of your neighbors want you dead.
That’s certainly what those on the right encountered. They witnessed the delusions that contributed to Kirk’s murder by an assassin who, by all accounts, was of sound mind when he committed his heinous act; a figure whose radicalization took place over a disturbingly short period of time. They saw a furious effort by a scary number of people who should be America’s stakeholders — law enforcement, teachers, journalists, and so on — either welcoming the bloodshed or desperately grasping at any rationalization they could that might justify their own ambivalence toward it.
They latched onto fake Kirk quotes that were supposedly indicative of the political organizer’s alleged racism or sexism, as though it would render the assassin’s motives comprehensible even if the quotes were accurate. The right saw that and concluded that Kirk’s fate could be theirs, too.
Americans on that side of the political spectrum watched horrified amid a delusional effort to make Kirk’s assassin out to be a scion of the political right — an effort that disregarded Governor Spencer Cox’s assertion that the killer was beholden to “leftist ideology,” an impression backed up by the shooter’s acquaintances, substituting a fiction in place of our shared reality.
The right watched the far left remember Kirk as the modern equivalent of Joseph Goebbels — “the head of Trump’s Hitler Youth,” as one outrage cultivator wrote. What else could that be but an effort to erect an elaborate permission structure for the would-be assassins out there?
If you’re on the left, however, you probably encountered the mirror-image version of this noxious phenomenon.
They saw right-wing commentators declaring that the marketplace of ideas is henceforth closed and aggrieved declarations that “we cannot share a country” with our political opponents anymore. They witnessed members of Congress joining the hunt for not just those who have lost their humanity to the online world’s self-destructive incentives but those who succumbed even to momentary lapses in judgment with the aim of meting out life-altering consequences. They probably saw one of the databases to which tipsters can contribute to that effort — websites that go by names like “Charlie’s Murderers,” as in plural.
That’s the sort of thing that gives center-left Americans pause when they hear the president promise to go after the “the organizations that fund” and “support” violent extremism — a mission that, while necessary, could put a lot of otherwise law-abiding liberal advocacy groups in the crosshairs if it is accompanied by a moral panic.
“I believe that social media has played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt that we have seen over the last five, six years,” Governor Spencer Cox said over the weekend. In his estimation, “‘cancer’ probably isn’t a strong enough word” to describe the role user-generated content has played in fomenting the radicalism with which we’re dealing today. “What we have done, especially to our kids, it took us decades to realize how evil these algorithms are.”
Indeed, the “conflict entrepreneurs” who populate your feed with stimuli designed to trigger your fight or flight instinct are, to one degree or another, engaged in a hostile action on behalf of foreign enemies. “What we are seeing is our adversaries want violence,” he told reporters on Friday. “We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instill disinformation and encourage violence.”
Our faith in the fundamental goodness of our neighbors is shaken when we see that revulsion toward Kirk’s murder is not universal. There can be no mistake that we are confronted today with a level of quasi-revolutionary violence from the left that should be unacceptable to all. It is real, organic, and homegrown — but not all of it. And certainly, the extent to which it seems like there is a mass movement in favor of bloodshed in service to radical political causes is a fabrication of the digital climate. Understanding that and compartmentalizing what we’re seeing online is an intellectual exercise. But our capacity for rationality, not rationalizations, is what separates us from the beasts.
And if you look around, you will not see a nation on fire. It would be nice if we had a more responsible political culture, but Americans are not looking to the president for cues about the behavior they should model if we are to avoid collectively sinking into the abyss. If we only honor Kirk’s legacy of good-faith engagement, we will reflexively step back from the precipice.
What happened to Charlie Kirk was not a tragedy. A hurricane is a tragedy. This was an atrocity. What would be tragic is if, in grief and fear, the inheritors of Kirk’s bequest cast it aside to indulge their worst selves.