I Really Hope I’m Wrong About What’s Coming After Charlie Kirk’s Killing

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In a ghastly act of political violence, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday while speaking at a college in Utah. Kirk was 31, and leaves behind his wife, Erika, and two young children.

The murder of Kirk is a horror. It has left two young children fatherless. It has sowed fear in the public. It is a continuation of the political violence in America that has left so much destruction and distrust in its wake, and that tears away at our democracy and our sense of mutual kinship.

It has also enraged the MAGA right, and they are now demanding revenge—not just on Kirk’s killer, but on Democrats, liberal advocacy organizations, the news media, and progressives more broadly. We are still in the early hours after this appalling murder. But many conservatives are trying to make this into their Reichstag fire: the moment the movement has been waiting for to use as a pretext to suspend democratic rules, crush their opponents, and put themselves fully in charge.

Democrats cannot stop this alone. We need every decent American—and especially every decent conservative in power—to put principle and country before fear and tyranny. Political violence must end. And so must the demands to respond to that violence through totalitarianism and oppression.

Kirk’s killing is far from the first act of political violence in the last few years, and the ideologies fueling this violence have spanned the political spectrum. There was a right-wing plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. There was the Jan. 6^th insurrection. There was the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi in which former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was also a target. There was the murder of Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House, along with her husband, and the related shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. There was the arson set at the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. There was the shooting at the CDC. There was the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. Well before all of this, there was an enormous number of attacks on abortion clinics and abortion providers, including several murders, and the shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise.

The motivations of these various killers, terrorists, and criminals are multifold. Some seem to hold sincere if extreme political beliefs; most, though, seem to be psychologically unstable men with a penchant for violence and incoherent views. We don’t yet know who killed Kirk, let alone what their views and motivations might be. But that has not stopped the MAGA right from concluding that not only is Kirk’s killer a leftist, but the entire political left is responsible for his death—and must be collectively punished.

“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” tweeted Laura Loomer^[2], the far-right provocateur who notoriously has Trump’s ear. In a separate tweet she continued, “Every single Left wing group that funds violent protests needs to be shut down and prosecuted. No mercy. Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence.” Federalist cofounder Sean Davis tweeted^[3], “The Democrat Party Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization.”

“THIS IS WAR,” declared Libs of TikTok. On his Fox News show, host Jesse Waters warned, “They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?”

“If they won’t leave us in peace,” wrote Elon Musk^[4], “then our choice is fight or die.”

Some right-wing influencers straight-up said^[5] that this is their Reichstag Fire: “Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire,” wrote one. “It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They cased this.”

In Trump’s statement^[6] from the Oval Office, he blamed “those on the radical left” for Kirk’s murder, calling them “directly responsible” despite still not knowing who killed him or why. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country,” he said.

It’s hard to overstate just how dangerous this rhetoric is, and how hypocritical: In response to an awful act of political violence, many on the right are encouraging more political violence. Others are defaulting to dangerous authoritarianism.

And this administration is set up for it. Trump has already used ICE to amass what amounts to a personal paramilitary. He has already dispatched the National Guard to American cities. He has already declared that the broader left, including progressive organizations, are responsible for Kirk’s death. He has made no secret of the fact that he harbors authoritarian ambitions, that if it were up to him he would never have to chafe against the fetters of Congress or an opposition party or the courts. He has many, many people in his ear telling him that Democrats, progressive organizations, and the news media are responsible for this killing and must pay a price for it.

This is an old playbook. When the Reichstag was set ablaze by a member of the Communist party in 1933, the Nazi party was quick to capitalize on the tragedy, blaming not just the admitted arsonist but a broad swath of the left (who exactly set the fire and why remains subject to debate, but at the very least we do know what a partially blind communist-affiliated vagrant said he did it). “This is a God-given signal,” Adolph Hitler said^[7]. “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

In the following weeks, thousands of leftists, including communists but also trade unionists, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and others were arrested. Hitler used the fire to suspend basic civil liberties, including the rights of speech and assembly, and consolidated all power to himself. You know what happens next.

My argument here is not that Trump is Hitler, or that the coming weeks in America are going to play out just as they did in 1933 Germany. It is certainly not that America is going to turn into Nazi Germany, extermination camps and all. It is that there is a clear authoritarian playbook, and many on the far right are encouraging Trump to use it. They are pushing Trump to act as Hitler did—while also encouraging him to bring the full force of the law down on anyone who says Trump is acting as Hitler did.

All of this is exacerbated by social media, which elevates the most outrageous takes to stoke collective rage. We see this happening in real time with the Kirk killing: While elected Democrats and prominent liberals were nearly uniform in condemning the violence, there were of course a smattering of random X accounts, left-wing agitators, and likely more than a few bots run out of nations with an interest in destabilizing American society who took the opportunity to mock or even justify Kirk’s murder; those deplorable comments were then used as evidence that “the left” was celebrating his death. Off of social media, I would bet that normal Americans of all political stripes were appalled and saddened by this killing. But the algorithmically-encouraged cruelty gave each side the ability to expediently caricature its opponents and assign their views to worst people on the internet.

This is true of the left, too. The MAGA leaders and activists who want a suspension of civil liberties and the jailing of Democrats are not representative of the average Americans who vote Republican. One difference is that many of the MAGA activists calling for war or tyranny or both have significant sway within the current administration. But we should not lose sight of the fact that, as disgraceful as some of us might find the very act of voting for Trump, the worst of MAGA social media is also not representative of conservatives or Trump voters writ large.

This is important, because the worst of the MAGA movement is primed to argue that their views are representative, and that they are standing for a majority of real Americans against the dangers of liberals, who must be destroyed if America is to survive. Do not give strength to the argument that half the country would back an effort to jail political opponents, target liberal organizers, and crush the news media. Do not lend credence to the narrative that this is a war. Do not surrender: Expect that our elected officials, our law enforcement officers, our armed forces, and our judges follow the law and the constitution. Demand that they do.

Fear is a conservatizing force. When people are afraid, they are quick to compromise their principles, to put a desire for order and safety over the harder work of living in a pluralistic liberal democracy that offers strong protections for speech and affords due process to those accused of wrongdoing. I personally hope that I am wildly overreacting here, that my own fear of how this tragedy might be exploited is making me catastrophize. I hope I am wrong about how this could go. If I’m not, though, we have to hope that there are still some Republicans left who are brave or at least minimally patriotic, and who hold freedom in higher esteem than power.

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