Political Murderers Have No Party, and Speech Isn't Violence
A familiar blame game is springing up after the shocking killing of a conservative activist. It's a game nobody wins.
A few weeks ago, a young man opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
150 windows were broken, and there were over 100 gunshots left in the building complex. An Atlanta police officer was sadly murdered.
The man who committed the attack was not arrested because he turned his weapon on himself and committed suicide.
Details reported after the shooting suggested that he was angered by the COVID-19 vaccine, which he believed had made him ill. It was, to my knowledge, the first time an anti-vaxx individual had attacked the CDC.
It was a terrifying experience for everyone there. I know because I have a cousin who works there (I’m Pakistani, every other cousin I have is a doctor). He had to hide inside until midnight. This is the environment people who work every day to cure diseases that kill millions of people have to live in now.
Yet weeks later, I found myself taking the CDC attacker’s deranged actions and turning them material for my stand up comedy sets. In a country where it’s easier to get a powerful weapon than it is a quality therapist, these sorts of tragic events are happening so often that we seem to forget about last week’s mass shooting to focus on this week’s. Joking about it is one of the only ways to stay sane.
Which brings me to yesterday’s latest horror. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while giving an address at a college in Orem, Utah. As of this writing, police have interrogated several people but have been unable to apprehend a suspect. It’s unclear why Kirk was targeted, but it’s unlikely that the crime was based on personal reasons or was completely random.
He was a giant among conservative Americans, well-known among Fox News viewers and zoomer Republican activists alike for his work on right-wing youth mobilization. And many people outside the right knew Kirk because of his frequent debates he held on college campuses — which in many ways modeled the kind of dialogues we should be having rather than just yelling at each other on social media with one-liners.
In the hours after the shooting, there was rare unanimity among American politicians who can’t agree on anything. Normally, if Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says the sky is blue, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rushes out to check, just in case. But on this, they were united. Everyone said this act of violence was unacceptable, and everyone wanted to pray for Kirk and his family after hearing the news.
Then came President Donald Trump. In a bizarre message taped from the Oval Office, Trump wasted no time antagonizing half the country. Here’s an excerpt:
For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in this country today. And it must stop right now.
I remember the years when Tucker Carlson, the popular conservative television host, was blamed for far-right racially motivated massacres that took place in places like El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
The argument went like this:
Tucker Carlson objects to the levels of immigration in the United States.
Carlson has at times suggested that Democrats are supporting liberal immigration policies to try to import a new electorate and replace the current one.
Criminals used weapons to attack groups of minorities.
These criminals had some of the same beliefs as Carlson, or at least used some of the same language (especially “replacement”).
Therefore, Carlson is responsible for their attacks.
For many years, this kind of argument was the purview of the left. It has increasingly been aped by the right — in this case, Trump. If some people didn’t like Kirk or denounced him in harsh terms, this must have inspired someone to kill him. If everyone had simply agreed with Kirk or at least politely disagreed, nobody would try to shoot him.
The problem with this argument is that it is fundamentally authoritarian. Millions of Americans engage in caustic political debates every day. Yet the number of actual political murderers is tiny — you can count them on one hand in any given year. The millions of people hurling insults at eachother are not responsible for the minuscular number of people on their “side” who actually pick up arms and try to harm someone over a disagreement. If we were to believe that speech alone was triggering violence, it would require fundamentally disabling the First Amendment. And that’s just not reasonable in a free country.
In fact, it’s not clear that politics is a big factor in political murder to begin with.
What? Did Zaid just write that? How can politics not be a big factor in political violence?
Well, in almost all recent cases of political violence, we have lonely disturbed individuals gravitating towards a political cause that also leads to the end of their own life or freedom. That’s not the path a happy person chooses. What is the difference between someone who hates health insurance companies and a Luigi Mangione? They may both hold the same beliefs, but Mangione had personal circumstances that helped push him over the edge. Political beliefs and dialogue alone are rarely enough to trigger violence, there are typically larger psychological or social forces at work.
And the most ironic part here is the messenger. Just days ago, Trump posted an image of himself dropping napalm on the city of Chicago, seemingly threatening it with “WAR.” Is the idea now that Trump would be responsible for all acts of violence in Chicago going forward because of his incendiary language? I doubt he would extend this logic to himself. Heck, he’s probably the rudest president that has ever held the office, constantly demonizing people who hold different political positions than his. If he’s suddenly Mr. Politically Correct, it would have to be the strangest conversion in all of history.
But I expect in the days ahead we will see continued recriminations and relitigation of acts of political violence. Some people will blame left-wing rhetoric and say there have been all these left-wing attacks. Others will say right-wing rhetoric is just as awful and point to political assassinations like the one in Minnesota that came and went with little fanfare.
The reality is that next to nobody in America wants to commit violence over politics. Most of us are too busy watching football. The people who do pick up weapons and commit these horrific attacks are not like the rest of us, left or right. And demonizing millions of Americans for the acts of a few will just further polarize us and make talking about or taking part in politics even more miserable. Political murderers, we always have to remember, have no political party.
There is a risk now that Trump will respond to this tragedy by cracking down on civil liberties in some way. In his message of condolences for Kirk’s death, he implied he would be looking to go after organizations that could be responsible. It’s not clear what this means or if there are even organizations involved at all — these sorts of acts tend to be done by lone wolves.
But as we think about the role of free speech in society in the next few weeks, I think we should bear in the mind the important words of Kirk himself.
Following the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in May, Kirk resisted calls from some to collectively blame Palestine activists for the attack. He wrote in a social media missive:
All over X, I see claims that some people have “blood on their hands” simply because they’ve made tweets attacking Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli government, or the war in Gaza.
No.
I just came back from the UK. Every day there, 30 people are arrested for social media posts the government says are “dangerous” or offensive” bceause they oppose things like mass migration or Islam. In the UK, people are arrested for silently praying or holding signs outside abortion clinics.
There are people who want that same tyranny here. People who oppose freedom of speech will always claim we need to act to prevent “hate” or stop “violence.”
We must always oppose that. Just because an idea is provocative or even offensive dodes not make it violent.Speech is not violence. Only violence is.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
The problem with these "events" is the knee-jerk reaction and the abuses of power it leads to, which is why as a cynic, I'm going to wait to see who they find for a suspect. Charlie Kirk was probably one of the few on the right or at all that was trying to teach young people how to disagree constructively. That's not exactly "bringing people together," but it is teaching them how to get out of their own little bubble, which is a step to a society where people can coexist and at least work together.
There are plenty of grating voices on the right. Some have huge followings. Maybe Charlie Kirk was killed because he was the only one who spent time in the open. But the symbolism can't be missed that the one young person willing to try to converse civilly and find common ground is now gone and out of the way.
I agree with Zaid. Violence and murder cross political lines and should be denounced by all public figures on both sides of the aisle. However, the way public and political discourse has ratcheted up to accuse or define political opponents as Nazis, Hitlers, fascists, etc. leads some deranged people to believe that extreme responses are justified or needed. I don't know how that kind of discourse can be de-escalated, but it is certainly needed. Our politicians and commentators need to learn how to debate, discuss, and argue without going to extreme ad hominem attacks.