The footage of the death of Charlie Kirk is unimaginably horrible. The young man — a husband and a father of two — is taking questions on a university campus underneath a banner that reads “Prove Me Wrong”. Then a shot rings out and Kirk jolts backwards — his life stolen from him by somebody who was arrogant enough to feel entitled to win an argument with bullets and not with words.
As I write, the shooter is not in custody. Their motives remain unproven. Still, it is reasonable to suspect that it was someone who disliked one or all of Mr Kirk’s pro-Trump, pro-Israel, traditionalist opinions.
I’m sure that the vast majority of Critic readers agree with me that killing someone over their opinions is monstrous. Indeed, the American establishment has been united in condemnation. Still, some voices on the left have been sneering about how Mr Kirk had it coming.
Political violence has killed and menaced people on both sides of the American political aisle. Trump, of course, was targeted for assassination while the Democrat Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed by a deranged evangelical fantasist.
It is on the margins of the left, though, that “assassination culture” has developed — especially following the photogenic Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of the healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The likes of ex-Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorentz have described Mangione as if he was a combination of Jesus and James Dean.
Now, Gretchen Felker-Martin of DC Comics can joke “hope the bullet’s okay”. (Felker-Martin’s horrendous novel Manhunt features the painful death of J.K. Rowling.) “Maybe Charlie Kirk shouldn’t have spent years being a hateful demagogic fascist and this wouldn’t have happened,” sneered one X user, who would have been worth mentioning except for the fact that her post attracted more than 150,000 “likes”.
This is sick stuff. But if you’ll be patient with me, I want to understand the radical left-wing perspective. Here is a guy, for them, who was using an enormous platform to promote eliminationist war, the subordination of women, the banning of treatment options for victims of gender dysphoria and so on. He wasn’t just a man with different opinions, he was a man — and, again, I’m trying to get into their heads here — who was doing material harm by influencing American politics.
It is remarkable that most of us accept those differences. But accept them we must
Well, polarisation has two sides. People on the right tend to believe in some or all of the propositions that left-wingers are using enormous platforms to promote the wholesale transformation of their nation’s demographic character, the freeing of dangerous criminals, medical experimentation on children and so on. While “polarisation” has something to do with rhetorical excess, it also describes real and dramatic moral and political differences. It is remarkable that most of us accept those differences. But accept them we must.
If someone kills a political opponent of yours, they don’t disappear and take their message with them. Their fans get angry — and some of them might want to kill you too. If you think people are being radicalised by nasty words on social media, imagine how much people could be radicalised by watching their favourite political commentators get shot in the neck.
In his book Days of Rage, the journalist Bryan Burroughs describes how in the 1970s, left-wingers thought political violence would bring about revolution. In a long and fascinating review, the writer David Hines reflected on how this dynamic could reoccur in modern America. “If we get political violence between civilians,” he wrote, “It’s mostly going to be low-level until it abruptly isn’t.” Again, if you think it’s hard to live alongside people whose political opinions — as you understand them — entail harm for you and your society, imagine how much worse it could be to die opposite them.
Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk. Whatever you thought of him — and I was not a fan, which I say to emphasise how much I mean what comes next — it took a lot of courage to surround himself with potential political opponents in a climate as febrile as that of the USA. He exposed himself to danger in the name of debate. Whatever cynical points we might raise about the conceptual limits of the “marketplace of ideas”, it’s disturbing to imagine what could follow the debate.
