Your Dislike of Charlie Kirk Is Not Interesting Right Now
Or: how liberal monomania about ideology gets in the way of context, discretion and broadly behaving like a normal person.
Dear readers,
In the aftermath of the shooting death of Charlie Kirk, I can’t stop thinking about a survey a few weeks ago from the new liberal publication The Argument. The survey included the question: “Do you think having opposing political views is ever an acceptable reason to cut off contact with a family member?” And 40% of 2024 Harris voters said yes, compared to just 11% of Trump voters and 18% of respondents who didn’t vote.
“I think liberals have got to understand that we, as a constituency, are very much unlike the rest of America,” wrote Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data and polls. “It’s not just that we’re different from Trump voters — it’s that we’re very different from people who don’t vote as well. The findings about who was more likely to cut off friends and family over politics really underscored this for me, because Harris voters were the only group that was even close to evenly split on that. That’s not a statement that we’re wrong, but it is a statement that the rest of Americans view and interact with the world very differently than we do.”
At least these days, liberals are much more fixated than conservatives on politics as a barometer of morality. To have the correct political views is an important part of what it is to be a good person, and if a person has the wrong opinions, that’s a moral offense, and a valid reason to cut them off.
Of course, politics is necessarily a moral project. It matters who wins elections and it matters what the government does, because public policies have important effects that can run with or against our values. Everyone should understand that this isn’t some game. But at the same time, we live in a pluralistic society, and we need to be able to share a sense of national identity with people whose values might differ from our own in important ways. So we need a public that takes politics seriously, but not too seriously.
I’ve been thinking about that poll question because of the bifurcated response I’ve seen among liberals to Kirk’s killing. Among liberals who “do” politics for a living, I’ve seen near-uniform expressions of horror and revulsion. I have seen a surprising amount of grief. In addition to being a logical human response to the fact that a husband and father of two children was murdered, I think this reflects an understanding that political violence is dangerous for everyone. In some cases, it’s an expression of professional empathy — as Ezra Klein writes, he and Kirk were in some sense in the same business, and that business is now more dangerous than it used to be. And I think it also reflects, at least implicitly, an understanding that responding to a conservative’s murder by fixating on how bad and gross his ideas were would be a political loser, just making liberals seem weird and callous and obsessive and off — especially given the likelihood that the murder was itself committed as an expression of objection to those ideas.
But among liberals who are mostly spectators to politics… hoo boy. They have seemed weird and callous and obsessive and off, unable to stop themselves from responding to Kirk’s very-likely-ideologically-motivated murder by harping on how bad his ideology was.
I make good choices about who I follow, and I don’t think I saw organically in any of my feeds a liberal celebrating Kirk’s death, though I did see conservatives surface quite a few examples of liberals doing this. I did see, across platforms, a handful of posters who apparently thought his death was funny. But what I saw a lot of was liberals who felt the really important thing to discuss about Kirk, right after he was killed, was how wrong he was. Either that he was wrong about gun control, and was now paying the price for this; or that he was hateful about various social issues (especially ones to do with race and gay rights) and that everyone needed to remember this right now.
The norm against speaking ill of the recently deceased exists to benefit the living: people are grieving, and it is both rude and cruel to compound their grief by telling them what was wrong with the person they just lost. When liberals respond to Kirk’s murder with jeers for him (and with outrage over institutional displays of mourning of his death — I have seen a lot of complaints about institutions in blue states that have lowered flags to half mast for his death1) they are saying that he and his supporters are undeserving of the usual consideration that we provide to each other in our society.
This is an extension of the view that having the right politics is very morally important: people who get politics wrong are worse people, and they deserve worse treatment. In many liberals’ view, Kirk already breached the social contract with his offensive views and comments, and his fans breached the social contract by agreeing with him. Why would these people deserve consideration when they haven’t extended it?
There are a few problems with this outlook, with one obvious one being that if nearly half the electorate is in breach of your social contract, it’s not much of a social contract. Another is that, as Jain notes above, it’s a worldview that creates a wedge between liberals and everybody else, which poses a problem for fostering enduring support for the liberal ideas whose moral importance is the supposed point of taking the morally rigid stance in the first place.
But there’s also a particular problem with that worldview right now, which is that the shooter appears to have been a liberal who took the moral importance of having the right ideas too seriously. I describe him like that advisedly, because what we’ve learned about his motivations looks different than what we often see in these sorts of cases.
Very often, when people commit spectacular acts of political violence, their accounts of why they did so are difficult to map onto a political project. They fail to fit neat ideological boxes, like Thomas Crooks, who appeared to also research opportunities to kill Joe Biden before finding an opportunity to shoot Donald Trump. They announce grandiose ideas, like would-be assassin Ryan Wesley Routh, who thinks he should fight Trump in a golf match to the death. Even Luigi Mangione’s “manifesto” amounted to something of a hand-wave, saying in regard to the ideological urges that led him to kill a health care executive that “obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.”
But the text messages between Tyler Robinson and his former roommate that investigators have released show a simple and clear explanation of why he shot Charlie Kirk.
“I had enough of his hatred,” he wrote. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
This observation about the killer’s motive is inconvenient enough that lots of liberals are in denial about it — they prematurely declared that the killer actually objected to Kirk from the right and then they looked away when presented with evidence that showed that wasn’t so. Jimmy Kimmel suggested that Robinson was part of the “MAGA gang” — an error2 that has led to a preposterously unconstitutional but apparently successful effort by Trump’s FCC to force Kimmel off the air. After the texts expressing a liberal motive came out, liberal influencers declared them to be fake.
This deliberate looking away from the most likely explanation of why Robinson shot Kirk reminds me of the preposterous claims (ones I still hear periodically from normie libs) that Donald Trump staged last July’s assassination attempt against himself. And we’ve of course seen conservatives do this, too: inventing the ideas that State Rep. Melissa Hortman was shot by a leftist, and that Paul Pelosi’s assailant was his gay lover. People do this because the shooter’s motive matters. If someone engages in violence on behalf of a political movement, that’s a demerit to the movement. It doesn’t mean that people have to give up their ideologies, or even that they have to give up speaking passionately on behalf of those ideologies, when political violence comes from one’s own “side.” But it is at least a reason to pause and reflect on how someone might have gotten so stirred up, and to give some space to the other side to grieve. Partisans seem to understand that political violence from their “side” would create a reason for such a pause, which is why they look for fake stories to avoid admitting when it happens.
What I am seeing from a lot of the liberal rank-and-file is a failure to observe that pause. If someone commits a murder, it’s always possible that person may have been right about some moral issue other than “is murder justifiable?”. But that’s not the right moral issue to focus on. If a pro-life activist murders an abortion doctor, that doesn’t require sincere opponents of abortion to change their views. But they also shouldn’t respond “well, the real problem is a million dead babies a year.” That response would be wrong because it’s tactless and callous, but it would also be wrong because it conveys the implication that the murder was, if not morally acceptable, at least less morally unacceptable than your typical murder.3
I agree with Peter Spiliakos that liberals who respond to Charlie Kirk’s murder with condemnations of Charlie Kirk aren’t saying they think his killing was morally acceptable. They still think it was wrong (or at least, almost all of them do). But what their reactions convey is that his bad political activities are an extenuating circumstance — a fact that makes his killing less morally wrong, though still wrong; and less deserving of condemnation, though still deserving of condemnation.
That view is wrong on the moral merits, unappealing as a political message, and especially ill-timed when he was just killed by someone who appeared to share liberal moral precepts but take them in an appalling direction. There will be plenty of time to debate every aspect of American politics — our political discourse will remain a boot stomping on a human face forever, I promise — but for now, there’s no reason to undermine the political-violence-is-bad message by fixating on the ways you think the shooter might have had a point. All this message does is remind the rest of America that you’re a monomaniac — too focused on how terrible it is that people disagree with you about politics to see which other matters might be important.
Very seriously,
Josh
Obviously, not everyone gets flags at half mast when he or she dies, and decisions about when to lower the flags reflect a discretionary decision by whoever controls the flags. I’d just remind my liberal friends here that a key message from lowering the flags in this context is that political assassinations are an attack on the fabric of our democracy that harms us all. To respond by fixating on how you objected to Kirk’s particular politics is to miss the point.
I have honestly been a little baffled by people who argue this is a misinterpretation of Kimmel’s comments. Kimmel said on Monday: “We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” Of course, observing that conservatives are insisting the shooter wasn’t one of them does not itself imply that he was one of them. But if Kimmel doesn’t think they’re mistaken, why would their insistences be “desperate” “characterizations”? Why would they constitute “new lows”? And his comments came in the context of other liberals having convinced themselves of the idea that the shooter was right-wing — the day before Kimmel gave his monologue, Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter that Robinson “appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.” Richardson, a leading voice for normie liberals with nearly 3 million Substack readers, still hasn’t corrected that statement. My guess is Kimmel read her newsletter — he’s very much the target demo — and believed it. None of that justifies the FCC’s unconstitutional effort to force Kimmel off the air; I don’t even consider it to be good enough reason for affiliates to voluntarily take his show down. Part of a free and open discourse is that people will make mistakes, and until about five minutes ago, conservatives understood the hazards involved in putting the force of government behind the “fact checkers” who would seek to stamp out mistakes from the discourse. But some of The Wall Street Journal’s reporting — that Kimmel had intended to use his Wednesday monologue “to say that his words were being purposefully twisted by some members of the Make America Great Again movement,” an approach that Disney executives worried “could make the situation worse” — suggests to me that the company did Kimmel a solid by pulling him off the air promptly, before he went on the air and accused people of bad faith for reading his comments in what I think is the most straightforward way. That would have made it harder to put him back on the air after people’s tempers cool down a little bit.
Similarly, the told-you-soing about Kirk’s opposition to gun restrictions is also unproductive. Who is this supposed to convince of anything?
Well-written and argued, but you haven't quite convinced me about the flags-at-half-mast issue.
Mainstream cultural institutions have been celebrating the life of Charlie Kirk as if he was some great American hero, when in fact he was a partisan political commentator who was purposefully, consciously rude and offensive to people he disagreed with.
And, fair enough - there's no rule that says you have to be polite. Politics ain't beanbag, as they say. But expecting Americans who were often the targets of this media figure's scorn and disdain to stay quiet while our cultural institutions hold him up to be a figure we should all revere and celebrate is asking too much, in my view.
I think the situation would be fundamentally different if Kirk had been an elected official. But as a media figure (and an avowedly brash, rabidly partisan media figure at that), I don't think it makes a lot of sense.
What if Mehdi Hasan had been shot? Would they be flying flags at half-mast in Alabama? Almost certainly not. I think it would be weird for them to be flying flags at half-mast in NYC! Hasan is a partisan, argumentative, and often-rude political commentator. To state the obvious, this does not mean it would be ok to shoot him! In fact it would be quite bad! It would be an attack not only on him and his family but on the fabric of American democratic society! But is it cause for lowering flags to half-mast? I think we'd find that kind of weird, and I know that there would be a lot of pushback.
Your footnote argument that "political assassinations are an attack on the fabric of our democracy that harms us all" was somewhat persuasive, but I think the only way to show that is to make it very explicit. Absent that, it feels like a celebration of his life rather than mourning political violence in general.
I don’t disagree with anything you say here, but there is another side to this coin. Was there a similar poll while Biden was president? Were Republicans, both in office and not, respectful when Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer? Were the flags lowered when a D legislator and her husband were murdered for political/ideological reasons?
It’s easy to be magnanimous when you hold power. Your message above should be listened to, but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.