Before I get to the hopeful part, I should note that, like millions of others, I spent the last several days with a pit in my stomach.
Here are the sources of my nausea in order of importance:
I was sickened by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, whose talent as a young organizer and provocateur I had underestimated, and who was robbed of his right to raise a family and lead a full life.
I was sickened by the reaction of the vile man in the Oval Office, who has done more than anyone to incite political violence in this country.
I was sickened by J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller and company, who plan to use the power of the federal government to clamp down on the free expression that Kirk often (not always) championed.
And, I was sickened by a relatively small number of heartless shit-posting lefties (none with roles in the Democratic Party) who gave American fascists an opening to take us closer to civil war.
You may have noticed that I wrote “fascist,” which, thanks to the suspect apparently carving “Hey fascist! Catch!” on his bullets, has now been declared verboten (note the German) as a way of describing one’s political adversaries. Hmmm…. I feel as if I’ve heard that word recently, before the tragic shooting, and not in an Antifa post, if there are any these days.
Oh, yeah. A very long year ago, a candidate for president named Donald Trump said at least five times on the campaign trail that Kamala Harris is a “Radical left Marxist, communist, fascist.” Only an addled ignoramus like Trump could call someone a communist and a fascist in one sentence.
Scoring points on all of the MAGA hypocrisy, projection, and gaslighting of the last week (I mean, decade) is almost too easy. Witness Greg Gutfeld complaining about the left’s whataboutism, when for years this rhetorical technique has been a staple of his act. Right-wingers weaponizing Kirk’s death suddenly turn into snowflakes when anyone catalogues his outrageous comments, which of course he wouldn’t have hesitated to do had a left-winger been shot. Recall how Trump and Kirk lionized the Trumpster who broke Paul Pelosi’s skull? Don Jr. shared a meme that showed a Paul "costume" consisting of a pair of underwear and a hammer.
A few “musts” for this urgent time:
We must continue to insist that both sides have fueled our culture of political violence. Vance lied this week in saying that almost all of it is from the left. In fact, the conservative Cato Institute reports that since 1975 (excluding 9/11), 10 percent of politically-motivated murders have come from the left, 23 percent from Islamicists, and 63 percent from the right.
We must remind the public that Kirk’s critics should be afforded the same right to say offensive things that was granted to Kirk himself. Free speech is meaningless if it applies only to your team.
We must do what we can to stop the spasm of anti-trans violence that likely lies ahead, even though the suspect’s lover was horrified by his deed. You can bet that MAGA will keep trying to hold the trans community and the entire Democratic Party responsible for the act of one homicidal young man.
And we must confront the words of our adversaries mostly in the court of public opinion, not the courts themselves, which should throw out almost every attempt to shut critics up about powerful people, especially when they’re engaging in the sacred American tradition — central to our freedom — of harshly criticizing the president. That must continue, or we’ll be in even deeper trouble.
MAGA is so desperate for scapegoats that we are now seeing Trumped-up charges against 94-year-old George Soros, who — contrary to the frothing of the vice-president — does not fund the Nation magazine, which is doing good work that is no danger to the republic.
Of course, it’s just another form of projection for the extortion racket operating out of the White House to pledge that it will bring racketeering charges against Soros and others on the left.
Let’s hope grand juries continue to resist indicting people who are obviously innocent MAGA victims. With any luck, we may be moving past Judge Sol Wachtler’s maxim that prosecutors could “indict a ham sandwich.”
As you may have noticed, one of my strategies for self-care and hope in the last nine months has been to look for something positive (good is too strong) that might come out of our American horror story. My latest hopes rest on Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who has assumed a leadership role in the Kirk case.
Cox is the go-to guy for developments in Utah, which gives him the standing to check the demand for vengeance and summon some of our better angels.
In 2016, he surprised Utah by speaking at a vigil honoring those from the LGBTQ community who died in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. In a memorable moment, Cox apologized for making fun of gay classmates when he was young.
Last Friday, Cox stepped up again. As Trump launched a new terrifying era of repression that combines McCarthyism with J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO surveillance, both now much easier to execute with the help of the internet, Cox explained that he was processing his anger by going back to “Charlie’s words” about the need for civil debate. “Words aren’t violence,” Cox said, a rebuke to both woke campus rhetoric and Pam Bondi’s scary notion that “hate speech” is not covered by the First Amendment. “Violence is violence.”
Making Kirk a martyr for that fundamental idea could be a heavy lift for Cox, but I’m glad he’s trying.
And Cox had a more ambitious goal on the day after the shooting, which was to move people away from “the poison” of social media and urge them to “touch grass” in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder..
Two days later, Cox appeared on Meet the Press, where instead of piling on liberals, he turned the debate back to that urgent subject:
I believe that social media has played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt we've seen over the last five, six years. Cancer probably isn't a strong enough word. It has taken us a decade to understand how evil these algorithms really are. I can't emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us. Some of the most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage — which is the same type of dopamine, the same chemical you get from taking fentanyl — and get us to hate each other. I'm seeing it in real time in the tragic death of Charlie Kirk. I'm seeing it in every corner of our society. The conflict entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us, and we are losing our agency.
Cox’s phrases — “cancer on America,” “addicted to outrage,” “conflict entrepreneurs” — all have a fighting chance of breaking through and shaping the debate. Here are two other interviews where Cox resets the conversation over Kirk and lowers the temperature in the process.
Cox is against common-sense gun safety laws, and he doesn’t talk enough about increasing mental health services. His focus on social media won’t bridge this country’s yawning canyon, but it might just get us through this treacherous mountain pass without ending up like the Donner Party.
BONUS:
This week’s Then and Now, a five-minute convo between me and Julian Zelizer about current events in historical context, compares Trump’s speech after Charlie Kirk’s assassination to Robert F. Kennedy’s remarks in 1968 in Indianapolis after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
If you 'decry' 'woke', or say both sides are violent, you're doing their job, in which case not sure what the point of all else is...
I guess that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I was appalled that Governor Cox labeled the Kirk shooting as 'political' before anything was discovered about the shooter. But it is good that he's now pointing out how toxic some social media has become in its role of stirring up and amplifying the rage felt by a whole host of mainly young men. Hooray for that, at least.