Nice democratic republic you’ve got. It would be a shame if you let a few podcasters tear it apart. The rips and rends in the fabric of our politics were already visible before Charlie Kirk‘s death. An uproar of blame and counterblame began with undignified haste and will be argued over the poor man’s coffin. It emits more heat than light, but the light it casts resembles the one Douglas Murray detected after the Palestinian assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023: “Sometimes a flare goes up, and you see exactly where everyone is.”
Americans are a high-consensus house divided. Consensus won over division in the 2024 elections. The majority want the “Great Woke Wars” to end. They want the government to go back to what it is supposed to do: hold the ring so that we can get on with real life. They want a reset from the state-mandated madness of racial conflict, radical cosplay, and gender psychosis that the Democrats installed at every level of American life. They want justice. But too many Republicans want revenge, and the “Make America Great Again” fringe wants blood. If the Republicans carry on like this, they will lose the public’s trust. Faced with the madness of MAGA, the voters will “Make America Democratic Again.”
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“Revenge is a form of wild justice,” said Francis Bacon, the crooked lawyer who rose to attorney general in the creepy court of James I. This brings us to Attorney General Pam Bondi of the crazy court of “King Donald.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” Bondi said on Sept. 15. There really isn’t. There’s free speech under the First Amendment, and there are necessary limits on incitement. The Supreme Court affirmed in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 that to be “incitement,” speech must be directed at and likely to lead to “imminent lawless action.”
Bondi knows this (probably), but she also wants revenge. So does Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. On Sept. 17, Carr invoked the FCC’s public interest obligation to pressure ABC’s affiliates to drop comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show. The “MAGA gang,” Kimmel said in his monologue on Sept. 15, is “trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Carr called Kimmel’s words “the sickest conduct possible.” Kimmel clearly spoke the truth — or at least his half of it. In the days after Kirk’s death, both the Right and the Left tried to score political points by pinning his suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, to the other side. The speculations of the Left were, I’m afraid to say, less demented and incisive than those of the Right.
The Left argued on the basis of emerging and fragmentary evidence that Robinson is a “Groyper,” an irony-poisoned Generation Z racist. Nick Fuentes, the camp and creepy self-proclaimed leader, repeatedly accused Kirk of betraying MAGA because he was suborned by “the Jews.” Robert Bowers, the white supremacist who shot up Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, said much the same about President Donald Trump.
You don’t have to be a Left partisan to suspect that Robinson is a “Groyper.” It was my initial suspicion, too. But you have to be insane, dumb, or racist to believe what the MAGA gang is saying. Tucker Carlson implied, and Candace Owens said outright, that Kirk, a vocal supporter of Israel for all of his short and public life, was killed because he was on the verge of switching to the anti-Israel camp of the MAGA isolationists.
This really is “the sickest conduct possible.” Kirk is not yet in his grave, but the people who slandered him as a turncoat are now lying about what he believed, advancing racist conspiracy theories in his name and trying to cash in on Turning Point USA’s mailing list and Kirk’s access to Trump.
Carlson accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “appropriating” Kirk’s legacy on a tribute edition of The Charlie Kirk Show while Vice President JD Vance sat opposite him and pretended not to notice. Owens has claimed to have detected “a federal conspiracy” and named the investor Bill Ackman as one of the cabal of pro-Israel Jews that she said were pressuring Kirk. Megyn Kelly, the pick-me girl of MAGA podcasts, praised Owens as “brilliant.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Weimar Republic) said “a foreign country, foreign agents, and another religion” were misleading Americans about Kirk and trying to “take over Christian Patriotic Turning Point USA.”
“My friend is dead and you want to cut that shit out,” Vance said on Sept. 17, blaming “left-wing extremism” for Kirk’s death. “Look yourself in the mirror,” he said. Vance looked almost presidential while carrying Kirk’s coffin onto Air Force Two. If he wants to actually be presidential, he’ll need to repeat that message to the extremists of the Right. The MAGA gang is directing incitement against Jews, blacks, the Chinese, and even Indian IT guys. Lawless actions will result and tar the Republicans as everything the Left has always said they are. Call me a crazy optimist, but I don’t believe that Americans will vote for a race war in the midterm elections or in 2028.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.