The New York Times had the scoop, at least according to its own lights. Charlie Kirk’s body was not yet cold when the paper’s “On Politics” newsletter whooshed into my inbox with the news:
Good evening. Tonight, we’re covering the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing youth activist and close Trump ally, at an event on a college campus in Utah, which is the latest example of violence against a political figure in America.
Once upon a time, the horror of such a public murder would have led every news report, on the assumption that readers’ and watchers’ interests would naturally be focused on its most sensational particularities. But that’s not how The New York Times rolls. The only particularities that interest the Times are the victim’s political affiliations. Him being “a right-wing youth activist and close Trump ally” was enough to tell the paper’s readers what to think of Wednesday’s shocking murder at Utah Valley University: namely, that it was nothing more than “the latest example of violence against a political figure in America.”
Those readers presumably don’t want to be shocked by any gruesome particularities; they want to be anaesthetized by generalities slotted into a preexisting narrative about “political violence” in America. Don’t worry, folks; you’re not going to have to take on board anything surprising, let alone shocking, that might cause you to doubt any of your preconceived ideas or the media’s lovingly tended political narrative of the last ten years in America.
The next day’s email blast from the Times reported “Officials Recover Rifle and Seek Gunman ‘of College Age’ in Charlie Kirk Killing.” A “high-powered bolt-action rifle” was found in a wooded area near the Utah Valley University campus, an FBI special agent said. The shooter was at large and unidentified “amid speculation about his motive.”
Reflect, for a moment, on those final five words of a forty-eight-word bulletin. What purpose do they serve there? They are intended as a reminder, I think, that the Times is going to keep up the pretense that the motive is unknown in order to reinforce that same narrative—about “political violence” unmoored from the ideology that produces it. No news story would be complete without some such assurance to Times readers that they won’t be told anything that they don’t already know, anything in the way of real news in the paper’s coverage of the shooting.
Barack Obama likewise tweeted: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” It’s quite a mystery, isn’t it? Yet you didn’t have to look very far on social media—for those with strong stomachs, Mike Solana of PirateWires spent some time spelunking in that sewer on our behalf—to find an awful lot of people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder who knew exactly what the motive was: like the murderer, they disagreed with Charlie’s politics.
More importantly, their disagreement was couched in terms—“Nazi,” “fascist,” “racist,” “white supremacist,” etc.—which precluded anyone from the media’s echo chamber from challenging this framing, for fear of themselves being immediately branded with the same epithets. Accordingly, any attempt, like Charlie’s, to bring such absurd rhetoric back down to earth with reasoned discourse was, to them, just more fascism. That’s why those who speak or write in generalities about “political violence” are deceiving themselves and others about the nature of the problem.
“Charlie Kirk Assassination Raises Fear of Surging Political Violence,” headlined the Times on Thursday. The subheading was even more egregious: “Initial expressions of grief and shock were overtaken by open calls for reckoning and vengeance, as some proclaimed the country was on the brink of civil war.” Once again, our eyes are diverted from the actual violence that took place at Utah Valley University on Wednesday and directed instead to the potentially violent reaction to it, which would then, if it ever happened, amply fulfill the Times’s prophecy of a generalized “political violence.”
In fact, political violence is rarely, if ever, a generalized phenomenon but is almost always tied to political particularities. Violence like that which struck down Iryna Zarutska on a commuter train in Charlotte last month—violence committed by a madman—may have no political affiliation, but Charlie Kirk’s murder wasn’t like that. It quite clearly arose out of the Left’s feral rhetorical culture, which the media has encouraged for a decade by doing nothing to restrain left-wing incendiary rhetoric and instead talking airily about “political violence” as if it could happen randomly, to anyone.
All those people on social media saying that Charlie got what was coming to him for being a Nazi didn’t come up with that idea on their own. That’s how they could know in advance of the murderer’s apprehension that Charlie’s killer was one of their own. They belonged to the same political tribe as those who have made a hero out of Luigi Mangione for murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last December, and founded a movement that some are now calling “Luigism”—a radical simplification of the Manichaean politics of the Left that knows no more of political reality than identifying who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
But as the murder of Charlie Kirk shows, when you eliminate your political opponents, be they ever so bad, you also eliminate the reason and goodwill that Charlie embodied.
