Action Items

I don’t do this very often but I’m going to quote a lengthy chunk of Gerard Baker’s most recent Wall Street Journal column:

It is almost quaint the way some try to play by old rules. Traditional news organizations (like this one) carefully edited the video so that it faded to black before the fatal moment. It was a decent but wholly obsolescent act of restraint in an age of moral destitution and rancid self-indulgence. It was a little like watching someone trying to enforce those old movie-studio rules about no nudity while millions of viewers peer into their smartphones to access the most explicit sexual content the human imagination has ever conjured.

Then of course there are the helpfully tendentious political interpretations of Kirk’s murder, neatly unfolded for us in the universe of X and its imitators. The stomach-churning celebrations from one side by human degenerates insisting he somehow deserved it. The subtler, nuanced “commentary” that carefully clears its throat with a ritual condemnation of violence but quickly expatiates at length on Kirk’s allegedly wicked contributions to political debate.

From the other side, the eager attribution of this and other acts of political violence to a vast dark army of forces committed to the erasure of all those who oppose their ideology. The unarticulated but clearly identified “they” who are out to kill “you” or “us.”

We could have a proper debate about the extent to which there has been a dangerous escalation of rhetoric—and sporadic acts of violence—against those of us who seek to roll back the progressive tide. Or we could ascribe all murders like that of Kirk to the amorphous nearly-half-the-country conspiracy of Democrats, mainstream media, left-wing academics and transgender militants roaming the country picking off their critics.

What hurts especially hard in the wake of such a terrible event is the grifting quality to all this: the rapacious, unending hunt for clicks and likes and donations and descriptions kicks into a frenzy as a young man lies dying.

This reflects a paradox of our newly democratized digital media. The overwhelming majority of Americans are decent people, appalled by violence, eager to respond with a constructive determination to do what we can to root it out. But the discourse is led by a small minority of opportunistic ghouls (not to mention, I suspect, a significant number of foreign enemies, successfully promoting bitter division among Americans).

And we can be sure of the recycling effect of all this on the climate of political violence itself—the way this hate and gore and menace is recycled in the minds of the young men who then go out motivated to commit acts of murder.

A historian will object that alarms about the contemporary media landscape are ahistorical. The modern web is only the latest forum in which the appetite for the worst of humanity has played out. The Romans had their gladiatorial combats in packed arenas; the medieval British their public disemboweling and executions. There was no social media to blame for what went on in the minds of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

True. But it isn’t much of a consolation. The current public American temper is getting more and more like that of the French Revolutionary terror of the 1790s—a civilization at war with itself ever more willing to justify internal violence. If we don’t change course soon, I fear we will become a nation of latter-day tricoteuses, spellbound by the roll of the tumbrils and the swoosh of the guillotine.

Inspired by that I want to make some observations and suggest some action items.

Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. Full stop. It doesn’t make any difference what he said, what he believed, whether it was hateful, or whether it hurt your (or somebody else’s) feelings. Words are not violence. Beliefs are not violence. Violence is violence.

The Democrats did not kill Charlie Kirk. Neither did “the left”. An individual did. They’re fuzzy right now but we’ll gain some better notion of his motives and state of mind in due course. Our political parties are not at war with each other.

Calling Republicans “Nazis” or “fascists” has been a staple among fringe elements loosely supportive of the Democrats for almost 70 years. Before Trump Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush were all called “Nazis” or compared with Hitler by somebody at one time or another. That is a practice not becoming of public figures. That includes entertainers, media figures, and politicians. It needs to stop.

Republicans calling Democrats “communists” or Trump calling his political opponents “scum” are not equivalents to that. Here’s how we treated Nazis:

and

Here’s how we treated communists:

and

We went to war against the Soviets once, a century ago, and that was a half-hearted expeditionary force. We never went to war directly against Mao’s China. The closest was in Korea and we didn’t bomb either Beijing or Moscow.

Calling someone a “Nazi” or “fascist” is an urgent call to action, including violent action. Calling someone a “communist” or “scum” is not.

Democratic leaders need to address their supporters, telling them we are not at war.

Republican leaders need to address their supporters, telling them we are not at war.

These statements need to come from the leaders to their own supporters, not generally as “we all”. It needs to be more specific than that.