Secret Pod should drop early this afternoon. Keep an eye out for it.
1. Communities
On Wednesday night I wrote a piece about Charlie Kirk and kept the comments off. I want to explain my thinking.
First off: It’s not that I don’t trust you guys to be your best selves and display grace, empathy, and wisdom. This community has shown, over and over, that it takes life seriously. There is no other corner of the internet I trust more.
Instead, I was trying to model something for you: that sometimes we should reflect rather than react. Especially in public.
The piece I wrote about Kirk was literally the only public expression I allowed myself. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t go on camera with Tim and Sarah. That’s because I wanted to turn off every opportunity to react extemporaneously.1 I wanted to force myself to be considered. So I sat for a few hours and wrote an essay and then worked it through the editing process so that every word, every comma, was intentional.
Why did I impose this modality on myself? Because I didn’t want to make the world worse.
If I’d popped off with something unhelpful, or ill-considered, it might have caused someone pain or contributed to the danger. This is something I’m mindful of every day. But especially in moments of crisis and instability.
People rarely regret not expressing a clever thought. They often regret expressing thoughts they later realize were ill-considered.
I feel this responsibility keenly because I have a platform. But I think everyone should feel it, no matter who they are. So that’s why I closed the comments. I wanted to impose on you the same restrictions I was imposing on myself. I wanted to force you to think about how you interact with the outside world in these moments.
One more thing: There’s an important distinction between public and private discussion. I traded emails with a lot of you yesterday and I found those conversations helpful and nourishing. But that’s because they were private communiques.
Something changes when a conversation is held in public. A kind of Heisenberg principle takes hold, affecting both the participants and their words.
I think of private and public communications as almost entirely different mediums. And certain subjects are better suited to a particular medium.
I encourage you to think about that dichotomy and to meditate on the idea that some conversations, in some moments, shouldn’t be broadcast to the world.
I closed the comments because I was hoping you would get some value out of the negative space and that the experience would make you think in ways you otherwise might not have.
If the negatives of not being able to share in the community during a difficult day outweighed any benefits, then I’m truly sorry.
What I’d like today is to hear from you about this meta question: Did I make the right call? Do you grok what I was trying to accomplish? Am I explaining the difference between public and private conversations in a way that makes sense?
But before you push off into that discussion: Thank you. For being here. For being kind. For building this community into a place I trust and cherish.
I hope you do, too.
Programming note: On Monday I’m going to have a conversation with Heather Cox Richardson live, on Substack. It’ll be at 3 p.m. in the East and I’ll send out an invite on Sunday evening. I hope you can join us. We’ll post the replay on The Bulwark’s homepage and on our YouTube channel.
We’re going to go deep on the question of whether or not conservatism was always going to end up [gestures broadly] here.
2. This *Is* Who We Are
One of the sentiments I’ve heard ad nauseam this week is the insistence that “This isn’t who we are.”
This piety is incorrect. Political violence is a ribbon running through American history literally since the Founding. It is one of our unique characteristics as a country. And it is precisely because political violence is a powerful undercurrent in America that our leaders have a special duty to tamp it town and do everything in their power to keep it in remission.
America was founded on an armed rebellion. Not just violence, but political violence, was there in the buildup to the Revolution: The Boston Tea Party. The Gaspee affair. And then there was the violence of the Revolution itself, from Lexington and Concord on.
In the 1840s the nativist Know Nothing party fomented a series of riots in an attempt to drive Catholics out of the country. In the runup to the Civil War Kansas was a battlefield of political violence as pro- and anti-slavery forces clashed. In the 1860s, New York City was riven with open warfare between rival political gangs like the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits. This era of political violence in the city culminated in the draft riots of 1863.
In 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sen. Charles Sumner nearly to death in the Senate Chamber, in broad daylight. And then, of course, we fought a civil war, placing America in the exclusive and unfortunate club of developed nations that formally divided and then fought full-fledged wars against themselves.
Things didn’t get much better after our Civil War. Reconstruction was one long slog of political violence during which Southern state governments, formal groups of people, and individual citizens waged war against blacks in an attempt to continue their subjugation under Jim Crow. This parade of political violence went on for decades.2 The 1965 beating of John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge is just one entry on a list that could fill books.
Political violence in post-war America existed outside of race and segregation. In 1900 the governor of Kentucky was assassinated during a dispute about election fraud. In 1905 the governor of Idaho was assassinated by a group that was unhappy with his policies on mining and unions.
By the time we hit the 1970s political violence was everywhere. Kidnappings and assassinations were rife: JFK, RFK, MLK, of course, but also a host of politicians you’ve probably forgotten about. During the ’70s radicals set off bombs. Airplanes were routinely hijacked. Political violence was omnipresent.
Since 1980 (give or take) we have been living in a remarkably peaceful era. Perhaps the low-water mark of American political violence. And even during this relative golden era of stability it’s easy to list the incidents.3
Americans might look at political violence and say, “That’s not who we are,” but this is whistling past the graveyard; a child’s prayer. Name another first-world country that’s had four sitting presidents assassinated in just 150 years. (And that’s not counting the near-assassinations of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.4)
So I’m sorry, but political violence is exactly who we are. Always has been.
If you want this kind of sunshine every day, join Bulwark+. 🙄
There are reasons for America’s history of violence. Some are cultural, some are technological. Some are simply geographic. We can talk about them another time, if you like.
But for now I want to hammer home that people in positions of leadership in America have always had a special responsibility to keep this violence in check. And one of the reasons the years after 1980 have been so peaceable is that most of our leaders did just that. They eschewed violent rhetoric and when violence erupted they said the right things. They sought unity; they tried to take the temperature down.
Until Donald Trump showed up.
This is why I keep writing about how it was dangerous for a presidential candidate to encourage his supporters to punch protesters. To tell a street gang to “stand back and stand by.” To summon a mob he knew was armed and tell security to remove magnetometers because he knew the mob wasn’t there to hurt him. To joke about assaults on the families of his political rivals.
To say, as Trump did yesterday, that “we have to beat the hell” out of the nebulous group of people he believes were behind the murder of Charlie Kirk.
It is one thing for anonymous randos on Twitter to spout off like that. It’s not great—as I said up top, we should all feel the obligation to do no harm. But when it’s our elected leaders, it becomes a category difference.
I don’t know if Trump is ignorant of American history and so does not realize what his office requires of him, or if he understands exactly what he’s doing and is attempting to make things worse.
But as always, he is the great revealer. He has shown us who we really are.
3. Free Speech
Nick Catoggio has a clear-eyed piece on Charlie Kirk.
Killing a man for trying to convince skeptics of his position is as raw and ruthless as illiberalism gets. I won’t be mau-maued by the worst people on the right into lionizing Kirk, but there’s simply no disputing that he’s a martyr to free speech. Claire Berlinski is right to compare his murder to the massacre of Charlie Hebdo staffers by jihadists in 2015 after the magazine published cartoons about Mohammed. “Je suis Charlie,” indeed.
But to say, as Klein did, that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way”? I can’t go that far.A face of postliberalism.
I would not say that Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way when he called last month for the “full military occupation” of American cities with high crime rates until the problem is solved.
I wouldn’t say he was doing things exactly the right way when he urged Mike Pence to ignore the electoral votes cast for Joe Biden by swing states in January 2021.
Nor would I say he was a model practitioner of politics when he applauded Trump’s pardon of the January 6 thugs earlier this year, describing them as “hostages” and celebrating their release as “bold action to save people from lawfare tyranny.”
And I guess I wouldn’t say that he was setting a fine political example when he called for a “patriot” to bail out the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and beat her elderly husband with a hammer.
Charlie Kirk was a prominent face in a postliberal political faction. He wasn’t the most ardent authoritarian in the ranks, and he certainly wasn’t the person of lowest character. But the movement he promoted and with which he aligned himself fundamentally doesn’t believe in doing politics “the right way,” and we should all remain clear about that in our grief. It likes to intimidate its opponents, as it’s doing right now with the show of military force in Washington D.C., and it reacts to losing debates by trying to overturn the results rather than accept them, as it did on Election Day 2020.
Kirk went along with it, doubtless realizing that he wouldn’t have remained a bigshot in a postliberal faction for long if he hadn’t. By no means is that to imply that he deserved what he got yesterday, of course, only to stress that sympathy for the victim and fear of what comes shouldn’t stop anyone from acknowledging that the populist right is a movement of civic arsonists led by a pyromaniac. If it’s true, as Trump said last night, that Kirk is “a martyr for truth and freedom,” honor the dead by continuing to exercise your freedom to tell the truth about this sleazy administration’s abiding contempt for practicing politics in the right, i.e., constitutional, way.
Because some of its members are very eager to exploit this horror to limit your ability to do that. . . .
Amid the blanket indictments of the American left as murderers and criminals and cries for “WAR” and retribution, some MAGA types called for state action against lawful liberal activist groups. We must “destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” left-wing violence, failed Senate candidate Blake Masters declared. Others demanded “massive RICO investigations” of leftist billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates. One excitable lad explicitly compared Kirk’s assassination to the Reichstag fire and urged the arrest of all Democratic politicians.
Then the pyromaniac in chief chimed in. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis,” Trump said in an address to the nation. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. 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 it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges [and] law enforcement officials.”
Including the organizations that fund it and support it. Note that there was no suspect in custody when he said that (and still isn’t as of 4 p.m. on Thursday afternoon), so he had no evidence of the killer’s motive. Nor did he mention any attacks on left-wing figures over the last few years in his remarks; to all appearances, his crusade against political violence will be one-sided. He’s so hyped up to wave this bloody shirt as a pretext to persecute his opponents that he couldn’t wait a day or two for confirmation that the culprit is indeed left-wing. The fact that every prominent Democrat in the country from Barack Obama on down rushed to condemn the murder yesterday afternoon mattered not a bit.
I told a Dispatch colleague last night that if Kirk had been assassinated in a blue state, I thought the president would already have the military en route to occupy the city where it happened to punish the locals collectively for the shooter’s crime. Fortunately for Utah, it voted the right way last fall.
Sarah and I taped the Secret Pod this morning and you’ll notice that I tried to talk only in very high levels of generality about the situation and not at all about Kirk himself. I still don’t want to engage on the meat of the subject without the ability to be deliberate about my words.
If you want to be depressed, just look at how long this list of assassinated black state legislators is.
The Oklahoma City bombing. The Congressional baseball shooting. The murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband. This is a very incomplete list, obviously.
How bad were the ’70s? Gerald Ford was almost assassinated twice in seventeen days.
Having read JVL's explanation of why he closed comments on his first post-assassination Triad, I'd like to repeat my own comment on Will Sommer's piece yesterday:
I'm glad that several of the Bulwark folks closed comments in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's assassination and explained why. That is not censorship, self-imposed or otherwise; it's calling for a time-out. We do not always have to say everything we think/feel right away. Discretion used to be counted a virtue. My own life (and, I hope, the lives of those around me) has benefited from judicious "self-censorship" on the occasions when I've had the self-control to practice it.
The Ezra Klein "practicing politics in exactly the right way" is the kind of bullshit I truly hope that those who remain in the pro-democracy camp can avoid. Let's be clear. Ezra Klein wrote that because he wanted to demonstrate how empathetic Ezra Klein is. It was just self congratulatory nonsense.
Here are some things that are objectively true about Charlie Kirk:
- He monetized hate for personal profit. His mission was not to convince those who disagreed with him of the merit of his views. It was to antagonize them for the entertainment of those who already agreed with him
- He was a bigot
- He was a liar
- He was pro-Fascist
- He ran cover for a pedophile
If you actually care about America existing as a peaceful democracy you should not be praising Charlie Kirk in any form or fashion. You should aggressively point out that he was a disgusting human being, and still did not deserve to be assassinated. Because I promise that on the last point the Right doesn't feel that way about you.