America unhinged
By 
The reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk illustrates a number of things about the state of the nation, none of them good.
First, the instantaneous transformation of a hatemongering propagandist for Donald Trump’s ongoing neo-fascist attempt to destroy liberal democracy in this country into a kind of innocent victim of overheated political rhetoric is all but clinically insane. I realize Ezra Klein is kind of a hate object for a lot of LGM commenters despite the fact that he often does excellent work, but this right here is a catastrophic failure of judgment and analysis.
On social media, I’ve mostly seen decent and human reactions to Kirk’s murder. There is grief and shock from both the left and the right. But I’ve seen two forms of reaction that are misguided, however comprehensible the rage or horror that provoked them. One is a move, on the left, to wrap Kirk’s death around his views — after all, he defended the Second Amendment, even admitting it meant accepting innocent deaths. Another is on the right, to turn Kirk’s murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time.
I don’t even know what to say about this. OK let’s give it a go: What exactly is in any way inaccurate about pointing out that having hundreds of millions of almost completely unregulated firearms floating around makes the odds of getting shot in this country exponentially higher than in, say, Japan — a country one third the size of the US in which the number of homicides committed with a gun in any particular year can often be counted on the fingers of one hand? Klein even admits that Charlie Kirk himself pointed this out repeatedly, except he saw it as something to celebrate about America rather than deplore.
But much worse than this is the both siding, which is frankly unhinged: These people over here are pointing out an ironic conjunction of undeniable facts, which for unspecified reasons is a bad thing to do, while these people over here are trying to violently overthrow liberal democracy in America — a project which Charlie Kirk dedicated his entire adult life to aiding and abetting.
Which brings us to the second point. In Donald Trump’s America, pious intonations about Political Violence = Bad Thing run into the awkward fact that Donald Trump tried to violently overthrow the government of the United States once, and was allowed to get away with this with no legal consequences whatsoever. Morever, he will almost certainly do this again if he loses an election which may or may not be “free and fair” as the UN observers would say, or indeed which may or may not happen at all, because — breaking news right here — Donald Trump and the political movement he leads have zero commitment to the peaceful transfer of power, which I happen to know because I own a TV that was in working order on January 6, 2021.
What country do people like Klein imagine they are living in at this moment? Fascism doesn’t oppose violence: it celebrates it, valorizes it, and most of all uses it, ideally via the modalities of the state, against its opponents. If you think this is somehow an exaggeration when it comes to describing the Trump administration, you may not have noticed that Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are running the FBI and the DOJ, while they each regularly deliver completely open threats of legal and extra-legal violence against Donald Trump’s enemies. And you may have overlooked that Stephen Miller is even now transforming ICE into a paramilitary terrorist organization to carry out his cleansing of the blood of the Fatherland, to mention just a couple of current events that Ezra Klein et al seem to have forgotten over the course of the last 18 hours.
Third, the New York Yankees held a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk before their game with the Detroit Tigers last night. This is wrong on so many levels that again I hardly know where to begin. I’ll just mention one: We at the moment have literally no idea why whoever murdered Charlie Kirk did so. Even calling this murder an “assassination,” which our worthless media are apparently almost universally doing, is a gigantic leap of logic in the face of what remains complete ignorance about the identity, let alone the motives, of the killer. This is without even getting to the fact that many “political” assassinations are in fact only political in the loosest sense. When violent obviously mentally unbalanced young men like Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, and Thomas Matthew Crooks do what they do, it turns out their motives are “political” only in the sense that they are trying to get famous by killing a famous politician, with little or no regard for the politician’s particular views or ideology. That could well turn out to be the case here, or of course it could turn out that the killer wasn’t “political” in even this extremely attenuated sense. And if the killing was political, it’s perfectly possible that the murder was carried out by a violent right wing fanatic, which would then reflect the inherent violence of Trumpism is a very direct and ironic way. We simply have no idea at the moment, so any attempt to construct a martyrology around Kirk is pure fantasy and projection.
There’s a lot more than could be said about this, but the reaction to this murder illustrates with special clarity how far around the bend this country has gotten, both in terms of the fanaticism of the right wing, and the complete failure of “responsible” liberals like Klein — and in this respect he merely reflects the entire Democratic party establishment — to understand that there’s something happening here, and what it is is exactly clear.