It would be hard to imagine a more contemptibly flippant approach to navigating this sensitive moment.
If the only point of Senator Chris Murphy’s most recent inflammatory tirade (there have been many) was only to generate positive attention inside the left’s intellectually cloistered and rapidly self-radicalizing salons, he accomplished his mission.
In a lengthy missive that would have benefited from an editor’s touch, the senator warned on Sunday that something “dark might be coming.”
The darkness he frets did not descend on the American political landscape after United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot in the back — an assassination that prompted only chin-stroking from Murphy. At the time, he said the slaughter should prompt us to “listen to what people are feeling” and match alleged killer Luigi Mangione’s rage with “anger over the thousands of people who die, often anonymous deaths every single day at this country at the hands of a health-care industry that mostly doesn’t give a sh** about people and only cares about profits.”
That seemed pretty dark, but that wasn’t the darkness he was talking about. In fact, he wasn’t talking about any of the violence we’ve actually witnessed. His warning had nothing to do with the macabre celebrations that followed the murder of real estate executive Wesley LePatner by a mentally deranged shooter. Murphy was not referring to the number of Democratic voters who are bombarding their representatives with calls warning them to be “prepared for violence” and urging them to take a bullet for the progressive cause.
He was not referring to the attacks on Immigration Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection officers and facilities we’ve witnessed this year — one of which was a tactically sophisticated assault conducted by what might be best described as a small-cell terrorist unit. He wasn’t talking about the riots in Los Angeles, the firebombing of Tesla charging stations and dealerships, or any of the other episodes of politically charged violence this year alone.
No, what really scares Senator Murphy is the potential that all this violence may beget a backlash.
“The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence,” he mourned. “Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.” We’re rapidly approaching the point at which “Trump could orchestrate a dizzying campaign to shut down political opposition groups and lock up or harass its leaders.”
Of course, Murphy’s selective reading of the threats that loom over the political landscape was little more than a fundraising pitch. The all but existential crisis Murphy envisions “means everyone who cares about democracy has to join the fight — right now,” he wrote. “Join a mobilization or protest group. Start showing up to actions more. Write a check to a progressive media operation.”
It would be hard to imagine a more contemptibly flippant approach to navigating this sensitive moment. It’s telling that he retailed it on Bluesky, which has seen such a disturbing uptick in violent revolutionary rhetoric since Charlie Kirk’s assassination that its moderators have had to crack down on posts “glorifying violence or harm.” That audience is blind to the violence committed in their names, and utterly deaf to the appeals of its victims’ survivors. Instead, Muphy chose to reinforce their dangerous delusions.