The Kirk assassination is indeed an "inflection point"

Not so much because of our appetite for violence, but because we simply don't care what language means any longer

The Charlie Kirk assassination, as would be expected, has stirred up a hailstorm of rage, taunting, recrimination, reviling, and threats of retribution.

Even further threats of assassination!

Because of Kirk’s high public profile, his friendship with President Trump, his iconic affiliation with the MAGA movement, and – perhaps most importantly – his ability to get an effective message through to college students despite the cognitive and conceptual jamming system that higher education regularly deploys against all forms of conservative thinking, his death was bound to touch off paroxysms throughout the social mediasphere.

The fact that the assassination itself, blazoned in real time on live video, took place less than 24 hours before the 24th anniversary of that epochal American trauma remembered as 9/11 is even more than ironic.

9/11 set in motion trajectories of events, especially two “forever” foreign wars along with the rapid expansion of the security/surveillance state, in consequence of which we have never returned to the status quo.

Notwithstanding the sincere, courageous, passionate, and thoughtful pleas from certain high-minded public officials such as Utah’s governor Spencer Cox, the ugly and toxic politics of the United States is relentlessly thickening.

The current mood seems not to have changed much with the shift in the past year from a Democratic to a Republican administration. In the spring of 2024 polling showed that anticipation of some sort of widespread violent eruption was, like now, unavoidable.

The glaring difference lies, however, in which specific constituency is most likely to push us over the precipice into outright civil war.

During the Biden era it was Republicans who were most fixated on the possibility. Now that Trump is President the worm has turned, and the same sample of opinion prevails among Democrats.

Given such data it appears tempting, therefore, to view the crisis through the lens of what the renowned American historian Timothy Snyder has dubbed “bothsideism” - the journalistic or rhetorical practice of posing two opposing sides of an issue as if they are equally valid or factual.

Bothsideism is one version of the well-known logical fallacy of “false equivalency”. According to research, such a strategy of argument has become prevalent on both sides of the political divide.

But the back and forth partisan public blame-casting is a symptom of something far more malign, which in many respects has little to do with the ever more brutal clash of ironclad ideologies.

It is easy to point the finger at the ubiquity of social media and it termagant algorithms that amplify partisan hostility and, as various clinical social psychological studies have shown recently, “exacerbate human behavioral biases”.

Yet, as University of Chicago professor Robert Pape notes in an interview with CBS News, our propensity for wallowing on the wild side of the internet is “like throwing gasoline on the fire, but the internet is not the fire itself”.

Like all those who abide mindlessly in the clamorous, caste-ridden echo chamber of the American left, Pape identifies the “fire” as “populism” and Trumpism, a now overdetermined and abusive cliché to which few except the shrinking minority of brain-dead East and West Coast media pundits assign much credence.

One should consider a uniquely prescient and penetrating piece by Charles Fain Lehman in The Free Press, who attributes the spiral of violence over the last few decades to a phrase coined during the Vietnam era by a well-known statesman of that day – “defining deviancy down”.

Lehman’s thesis is patently simplistic. “Shocking killings do not come from nowhere. They are the product of failures of control—failures to incapacitate and deter criminal offenders, failures to socially sanction inciting speech, and failures to assert that the law is the law and should be followed”.

Note that Lehman is not arguing for curbing “free speech”. He is arguing for the failure to socially “sanction inciting speech”.

Lehman has an important and extremely insightful take on the actual magnitude of the problem. But while the “fire” this time reaches inferno proportions, is such “sanctioning” even possible any longer?

In our emergent epoch of white-hot polarized politics it is becoming increasingly obvious that the size of the gap between political speech and “inciting speech” wholly depends on the partisan lens of the speaker.

Even though “hate speech” per se has been guaranteed since a Supreme Court decision in 2017, it is still disallowed if it entails genuine threats to a person, or group, or as well as instigation to law-breaking.

Such an exception, upheld by the high court since 1919, is known as “the Brandenberg test” and is named after the plaintiff in a famous 1969 decision. The exception is encapsulated in the legal phrase “fighting words,” again from a separate landmark case.

Nevertheless, much of the argument against the Brandenberg test that has evolved, especially on the left, in recent years can be traced to the influential writings of University of California political theorist Judith Butler, author of a book published in 1997 and entitled Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.

Butler, who is also largely responsible for the development of contemporary gender theory, argued in her 1997 work that language is inherently capable of “injury” and can have pernicious public impact even if it does not do so in an immediate act of speech.

“Speech is always in some way out of our control”, she wrote, suggesting that even if the “wounding” that occurs when language offensive to someone uttered in a given context does not transcend the moment, its regular “deployment” among a variety of actors makes it politically problematic.

Butler herself was by and large against censorship of “hate speech”, especially because as a champion of LGBTQ rights she seemed convinced that restricting such speech for moral reasons could be just as easily be turned against “queer” advocacy.

Yet, like most principled positions that are corroded through popular misuse, her notion of “excitable speech” became an instrument of suppression of conservative speech among radical campus activists on the grounds that it inflicted serious harm indirectly.

Unsurprisingly, many rightwing activists are now marching in lockstep to the very same drumbeat.

It is extraordinarily telling that Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, justified his killing of the conservative youth leader on the insouciant assumption that the latter “spreads too much hate”.

How did he form such an opinion so firm and so fast, especially since his family and friends have vouched that he was mainly apolitical until very recently?

Could it be that he simply imbibed the garden variety “wisdom” spouted by most people on left these days that the growing conservative pushback against “transgender ideology” is ipso facto “hate”, and that the fact he had a transgender lover pushed him over the edge.

Kirk had strong, very conventional Christian evangelical and familiar populist opinions. While your average American evangelical churchgoer did not know much about him, or pay much attention to him, Kirk had an uncanny talent for parlaying religion with politics to capture the attention of conservative college students with a formula about which your average campus “Christian” cadres remained clueless.

The New York Times in an article (ironically) from Sept. 11 outlined the “views” for which Kirk was supposedly notorious or controverssial. Most of them match up with or are less excessive than anything President Trump has said publicly.

They include off-the-cuff outbursts about the purported use of DEI to hire racial minorities that are not the most qualified as well as jeremiads against gun control and denial of climate change.

Here is some of Kirk’s most oft-cited verbiage on the part of his critics. In April 2023 at a Turning Point USA event Kirk said:

I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

Kirk went on to compare gun deaths to deaths from car accidents.

Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price -- 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving -- speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen.

Regarding transgender identities, Kirk proclaimed:

I refuse to lie. I will not call a man (a woman) or a woman a man, like, I refuse to do that. And in fact, I reject the entire premise of transgenderism. I don’t think it really exists. I think it’s a mental disease, and we’ve allowed it to all of a sudden become an identity. I think that there are two sexes, zero genders and unlimited personalities, and what we used to call a personality disorder we now call a gender disorder that we treat with body treatment when it should be brain treatment. So, transgenderism is a brain problem, not a body problem, and that’s how we should go about it.

These statements may be provocative, even extreme to some, but they are certainly not hate speech. They may have been shared, in fact, by a substantial plurality of voters in the last election.

The one generally regarded instance of hate speech for which Kirk has been impugned – his presumed espousal of “Great Replacement Theory” – turns out to be viral disinformation, according to factcheck.org.

The same website also details numerous examples of how left-wing opponents have in recent years and, to be sure, following his death tortured and twisted his actual words to make him sound much more off the wall than his ipsissima verba.

Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swain has documented this phenomenon with precision.

All things considered, Kirk’s views overall are hardly any more extreme that what might have been mainstream consensus only twenty years ago.

Returning to Lehman’s observations, it is quite evident that the problem is far greater than a reluctance to resist inflammatory discourse. It is a matter of allowing the very meaning of words to be adulterated and inflated beyond their routine signification to the point that ordinary language itself is weaponized for extreme hyperpartisan ends.

Robinson was not an agent of such inflation. He merely succumbed through a process that remains still quite opaque to what might be considered “peer pressure” to see such weaponization of everyday parlance as legitimate.

The alchemy of everyday language by numberless academic sorcerers in the humanities and social sciences into “hate speech” to such a degree it becomes “inciting” or “excitable” (in Butler’s idiom) underscores the real crisis at hand.

Through the catalyst of Orwellian “doublespeak” the normal is now recast as abnormal, and the “abnormal” as normal.

Call it the very shadow side of “wokeness”.

That is not to say the right itself has not been guilty of practicing the same alchemy minus the left’s arcane theories to justify it. The familiar reflex of denouncing all spokespersons on the left as “communists”, or tarring every pedagogical effort to remind us that American exceptionalism is indeed stalked by the specter of slavery and Jim Crow as somehow a discredited sgement of “critical race theory”, quickly comes to mind.

To my chagrin I have learned this past week that many, though not necessarily the majority of, current college students and their professors are prepared to go to war against a sizable portion of America because, for them, such alchemy summarizes for them “just the way things are”.

Or at least the way things should be.

They are not interested in debate or conversation, or even questioning the premises of their own enraged militancy. It is clearly their way or the highway.

The so-called “inflection point” in American history that present internet pundits are proposing Kirk’s assassination represents may indeed be upon us.

The governor of Utah in his high-minded press conference exhorted us to take stock of where what we have become while striving to summon our better angels.

But I fear it is the far worse ones who will at last be exceptionally motivated to make their presence known.