On Charlie Kirk's Assassination

Hi,

“Purity that demands exclusion isn’t real purity. Maybe paradise is a lie.” (a quote from my favorite sitcom)

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What Rising Political Violence Reflects

In the reactions following Charlie Kirk's assassination, there is one glaring aspect of it I thoroughly detest.

Whether it is our country's near bi-weekly school shooting, the recent killings of democratic legislators in Minnesota just months ago, or this past week's murder of Kirk, each side of the political spectrum does this thing where they immediately go to work to dig, spin, and capture the narrative that the perpetrator belonged to "the other side."

This is now happening with Tyler Robinson, the 22-year old arrested after his father and roommate tipped off the FBI.

In this latest act of political violence, the Left calls attention to Tyler's MAGA-oriented family and religious upbringing to score points against that set of beliefs and lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the Right points to Tyler's online activity in left-wing forums and his allegedly transgender roommate as signs of this being leftist extremism run amok.

Personally, I think this guy was clearly radicalized online in far-left spaces, and any attempt to spin otherwise is just a dumb, and even senseless, exercise of the above in practice. And it obscures the most important, central part of this story: killing people over their political ideology is really bad for all of us.

It bothers me deeply that we are so intent on being on the "correct" side of each political tragedy that we ignore what those collective tragedies actually reflect about where we are at. It's like people are keeping some invisible tally. As long as our side's shit tally is lower than their side's shit tally, we can sleep at night. Yet, we're all living within the borders of the same country, participating in the same political structure, and circling the same toilet bowl.

Violence in all forms is horrible to witness, but there is something unique to political violence that feels especially jarring. And that is because it reflects a deep destabilization of the norms of the society we live in.