De-escalation is that much harder, yet even more necessary, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s brutal assassination.
What would you do if you believed that the United States has a growing and volatile problem with political violence?
That question, as we relearned to our horror with Wednesday’s assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, is no longer rhetorical or academic. There have been too many snipers at rallies, too many home invasions of public officials, too many ambushes at government institutions, and too many intentional escalations at public demonstrations, to wave this trend off as statistical noise, coming as it has against a backdrop of plummeting societal trust and sustained Manichean hyperbole about the existential threat of the political Other.
So, what would you do about it? How would you act? As in most things, there is no one, true answer to the prompt; it depends on your vantage point, predilections, and station in life.
President Donald Trump, I think, was on the right track Wednesday night, if foreshadowingly tilting toward primary causality, when he posited, “It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year.”
Some on the political left have spent the better part of a decade demonizing Trump and his fellow travelers (Kirk was a supporter and friend) as possibly fascist authoritarians who either seek or turn a willfully blind eye to the deaths of their political opponents and other citizens. The cover of The New Republic on newsstands the day Trump was nicked by an assassin’s bullet was an image of him with a Hitler mustache over the words “American fascism.” Joe Biden during the COVID-19 pandemic accused “Republican governors in states like Texas and Florida” of “playing politics with the lives of their citizens, especially children.” Trans activist Samuel Theodore Cain, a.k.a. Roxie Wolfe, was arrested four months ago and charged with threatening the life of a public official after posting on X, “I’m going to assassinate Representative Nancy Mace with a gun and I’m being 100% dead ass”, in the wake of Mace’s repeated criticisms of “the radical trans movement.
