But some liberals did leap—in the opposite direction. “In fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left,” Heather Cox Richardson wrote on Saturday. “The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.” Richardson is a professional historian, not to mention the single most popular politics author on Substack. That she would blithely assert as fact a claim as unproven, dubious, tendentious, and inflammatory as the killer was not someone on the left makes me reluctant to trust anything else she’s written, professionally or otherwise.
We’ll see what the state of Utah can prove in court, but the indictment filed on Tuesday makes a strong case that the assassin was indeed someone on the left, as expected. It cites his mother for the claim that “Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left—becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” In a text exchange with his roommate/boyfriend, who was reportedly transitioning to being a woman, the killer rationalized murdering Kirk by saying, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
For days, theories swirled among the commentariat that the assassin would prove to be another internet-drenched “lost boy” whose politics are inscrutable to everyone except pimply teen gamers and edgelords. Unless the indictment omitted something important, though, the motive was straightforward: Like practically every progressive in this country, he abhorred Kirk’s condemnations of transgenderism. That’s legibly leftist.
Denial.
The most one can say about liberals doggedly refusing to accept that Kirk’s killer is one of them is that it beats the alternative.
“This monster can’t possibly belong to my virtuous tribe” is morally preferable to “I see myself and my tribe in this monster.” An America where assassins are orphaned politically is salvageable. An America where they’re embraced is not.
Two polls conducted before Tuesday’s indictment suggest liberals are keen to orphan Kirk’s killer. One found that 8 percent of Democrats believe him to be a fellow Democrat as opposed to 41 percent who believe he’s a Republican. (In reality, he’s registered with neither party.) Another saw 10 percent of Democrats say the assassin was motivated by left-wing beliefs versus 33 percent who say he was motivated by right-wing ones.
Maybe leftists let their initial moral revulsion guide their understanding of events and will reconcile themselves to the truth now that allegations about the killer’s sympathies have been made, at least preliminarily, in court. But the denial we’re seeing from some might not be a psychological flinch; it could be an information problem of the sort with which readers of this newsletter are familiar. And if it is, the share of liberals who believe the killer was right-wing might grow rather than shrink.
“Propaganda doesn’t concern itself with what’s true, it concerns itself with what’s useful,” I wrote last year, describing how MAGA media does business. It’s useful to the left in this moment to believe, and have other Americans believe, that Kirk’s murderer was inspired by right-wing ideology, but it sure doesn’t seem to be true. How they end up prioritizing between the two as more facts come out will tell us something about how propagandistic they are relative to the average Trumpist disinformation organ.
It’ll tell us some other things too.
For one, it’ll tell us how much they care about discouraging violence in their own ranks. “Healthy political movements do not baby their supporters by tying themselves into pretzels to explain away uncomfortable facts,” Andrew Egger declared today at The Bulwark, lamenting the “ostriching” that some leftists are performing about the killer’s motives. If you want to deter extremism by your own base, facing it squarely is a lot more effective than lamely scapegoating your enemy. Imagine an Islamist group condemning a jihadist terror attack—but blaming it on Israel. Is that a serious attempt to deter radicalism by one’s fellow travelers?
Arguably, it’s a permission slip for more violence. After all, if the enemy can be made to take the blame when its own people are slaughtered, what’s the downside in slaughtering more?
Demoralization.
Scapegoating the right for Kirk’s murder is foolish for another reason, as it implies that White House harassment of left-wing groups might be justified if the killer’s left-wing sympathies can be established. “Robinson seems to have despised Kirk on progressive grounds, not ‘groyper’ ones,” Vox senior correspondent Eric Levitz noted on Tuesday. “There is no point in lying about this. The case against Trump’s crackdown on progressive groups does not hinge on this killer’s motives. To dig in on the groyper theory is to suggest that it does.”
Leftists have better hills to die on. They should concede that the trans cause doesn’t justify murder while demanding that that cause’s justness not be judged by one lunatic’s actions. They might point out that the killer’s transgender lover was apparently horrified by what he did and provided the evidence that’ll probably lead to a conviction and a death sentence. Or they could argue, rightly, that public disgust at Kirk’s murder doesn’t entitle Donald Trump to go on a civic rampage aimed at protected speech.
To fight instead on the hill of denialism, pretending that the shooter didn’t believe the things he evidently believed, is to invite Americans to conclude that the left isn’t serious about restraining certain forms of violence, a potent recurring Trump narrative.
It would also be hugely demoralizing to the dozens of us left in the United States who believe the point of politics shouldn’t be to protect one’s supporters from ever having to confront an intolerable truth, as has been the case on the right for the past 10 years.
That’s what has Egger so disgusted, I’m sure. “Instead of allowing [the disgrace of January 6] to shape and recolor their views of their own movement,” he writes, “Republicans retreated frantically into comforting and then increasingly outlandish lies: that Donald Trump would be exiled, that it was a one-off, that the real perpetrators had been Antifa insurgents, or, later, that federal law enforcement had concocted the whole thing.” He—and I, and you—have seen this movie before and we were hoping never to watch it again. The goal of moving America past Trumpism is not to be governed by a different faction of cranks committed to making excuses for their most degenerate allies.
Ten years of Trump has made right-wing populists so addicted to having their prejudices confirmed, in fact, that some are skeptical of the information in yesterday’s indictment even though “unhinged pro-trans radical” would seem to be an ideal ideological chew toy for them. “I’m particularly not buying those text messages, it just seems too stilted, too much like a script,” Steve Bannon complained. Other MAGA influencers agreed. They’re spoiling for a pretext to harass lawful left-wing activist groups but that’ll be hard to justify if the killer was an idiot kid who acted alone. Their political needs require them to reject “the official story.” The same apparently goes for leftist truthers like Heather Cox Richardson.
“A lot of you really need to sit down and think about how easily you believed a huge, obvious pack of lies about this, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, just because you heard it a lot and found it ideologically validating,” Will Stancil scolded his fellow liberals on BlueSky after the indictment was published. “Barely distinguishable from MAGA conspiracy nonsense.” That’s the sound of a man who recognizes that the derangement caused by America’s appetite for political bespoke realities won’t be solved by Donald Trump’s retirement. I understand his despair.
Luigimania.
We arrive at a mystery: Why is the left so eager to disclaim ideological kinship with Charlie Kirk’s murderer when it was in no rush to do so with Luigi Mangione?
A poll taken after Mangione allegedly shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in cold blood found 28 percent of self-identified liberals willing to admit that they supported the murder. (Five percent of conservatives said the same.) “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren at the time, sounding like a Muslim Brotherhood flack after a Hamas bus bombing in Tel Aviv. “This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
Neither she nor any other prominent Democrat has said anything remotely as menacing as that this week. Kirk “pushed” his opponents plenty on trans rights but no one in a position of influence is claiming it’s understandable that his killer felt obliged to start shooting at him.
Maybe they’re drawing a distinction between speech and action. Love him or hate him, Charlie Kirk was killed doing something that practically everyone agrees Americans should have the right to do. There’s no such agreement on the propriety of health insurance companies squeezing customers on coverage.
There’s also obviously less political salience in murdering a business executive than there is in murdering a nationally known activist for a political party. Plenty of right-wingers harbor their own grievances over maddening experiences with health insurance companies. Leftist bloodlust at the expense of one of those companies won’t offend them the way that bloodlust at the expense of one of their political heroes will.
To put that another way: No one feared that a UnitedHealthcare employee might go rogue in a fit of grief and shoot a left-wing activist in reprisal. Everyone fears a right-winger doing that after Kirk’s murder. Turning down the temperature is more urgent.
There may also be a “Trump factor” in the left’s reaction, although they’d be loath to admit it.
You can and should despise how the president abuses his power to get his way but let’s not pretend that it’s not effective. Between the many populist fanatics who’d like him to rule as a dictator and the many more cowards and opportunists unwilling to cross him by speaking out, there isn’t much popular outrage left in America anymore for his enemies to tap into when he starts behaving ruthlessly toward them.
Leftists have watched him flagrantly violate laws, watched him shake down law firms, corporations, and universities, watched him bypass due process to blow people up and to throw others into foreign gulags, and watched him send the military into American streets. Now they’re watching him and his flunkies babble about investigating left-wing “terrorist networks,” whatever that means, and imagining what sort of draconian new abuses that might produce before the midterms.
Best not to antagonize Trump about his good friend Charlie Kirk under those circumstances, eh? Better to play this one a little cooler than they did with Luigimania.
Right-wingers will luxuriate in the idea of their opponents being cowed into respectful silence by a lawless president’s belligerence, never mind that that’s the sort of nightmare scenario the First Amendment was written to prevent. But, for the left, the moment calls for strategic thinking: In addition to not tempting the devil by dancing on his ally’s grave, what can they do to delegitimize the persecution campaign he’s planning against them?
Well, they can go on insisting that the person who murdered Charlie Kirk wasn’t a leftist at all, the available evidence notwithstanding.
It would be a Trumpy tactic, ironically. The president’s goal in lying as often as he does has always seemed less about persuading everyone that he’s right than in persuading enough people that he’s right as to leave undecideds believing the truth is unknowable and therefore not worth fighting about. The “rigged election” nonsense was the supreme triumph of that strategy. Most Americans don’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen—but enough do that swing voters didn’t hold Trump’s incessant propaganda to the contrary against him at the polls last fall. Who can say what the truth is?
The “Robinson was right-wing” progressives might be hoping to pull the same trick. Insist forcefully and persistently that Kirk’s assassin wasn’t on the left and the White House’s harassment campaign against left-wing groups may come to seem illegitimate and grow more unpopular. One side says he was left-wing, the other says right-wing. Maybe his politics are unknowable. Who can say?
It wouldn’t be true but it could be useful. And that’s how our political factions prioritize, now more than ever.
