The Charlie Kirk assassination has triggered a spate of duelling death counts. The usual media suspects on both sides of America’s epic left-right divide have trotted out set lists of the past decade’s politically motivated violence. For once, the faction that chocks up the most fatalities in this warped real-life video game loses – for the competition is over which end of the political spectrum can blame the other end for the frenzied ideological bloodlust we’ve been told for days now characterises the contemporary United States.
For the left, the starring evidence that the right’s crazies pose the greater threat to the orderly conduct of civic life is January 6th. It’s inconvenient, of course, that the only person who died during the 2021 storming of the Capitol was one of the rioters, ditto the only person whose subsequent death directly resulted from that mayhem. Progressive media have padded the law enforcement casualties after the fact with four not-necessarily-related suicides and a natural death from stroke. Nevertheless, a mob breaking into the legislature to interfere with the constitutional transfer of executive power was (understatement alert) not a good look. Score a major win for the-right-as-the-bigger-baddies.
Astonishingly, the most convincing counter-evidence – suggesting that instead American leftists have been far more berserk than their opponents – never seems to feature in progressive mea culpas. When itemising recent political violence of both stripes, thePBS News Hour and the New York Times, for example, conspicuously omitted the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Which went on for months! Which entailed arson, looting and massive destruction of property, the businesses vandalised often owned by minorities, with insurance losses of up to $2 billion – not including uninsured losses – whereas January 6th caused only $1.5 million worth of damage to the Capitol. Recollections may vary, but the 2020 race riots also killed between 25 and 34 people. You’d think professional journalists would remember a prolonged period during which US political unrest injured over 2,000 police officers, but noooo. Progressive journalists have highlighted the entire hysterical episode and pressed the delete key.
Both January 6th and the BLM riots displayed unique pathologies, and the violence in both involved thousands of people. Yet clear these two ructions away, and what remains as the ironclad proof that American politics have descended to barbarous gladiatorial combat is a mere handful of incidents by lone actors who often had a screw loose: right-wing attacks, such as the bludgeoning of Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the shooting of two Minnesota Democrats; left-wing attacks, such as a shooting at a congressional baseball practice and the murder of UnitedHealth’s CEO, and two attempts to assassinate Trump. To the left’s deplorables, we can add Tyler Robinson, who is, shall we say, strongly suspected of assassinating Charlie Kirk.
The aftermath of this murder has thrown up numerous matters of consequence. It could have unpredictable downstream effects, possibly improving Republican prospects in the midterms. I do worry about copycat crimes; colleagues are already jacking up security and reconsidering open air gigs or appearances before audiences unvetted by metal detectors. We’ve learned that a staggering third of university students endorse violence as a means of restricting bad-say on campus and that only 58 per cent of Gen Z believe one should never use violence to suppress offensive speech. We’re now depressingly up to speed on the callousness and bloodthirstiness of the many left-wingers who’ve relished Kirk’s murder. This same faction celebrated October 7th. These individuals are savages.
Tyler Robinson is not representative of his generation, nor is he an ambassador of the American left
That said, I fear we’re in danger of overinterpreting the decision of one psychically lost 22-year-old to shoot a popular activist whose opinions he didn’t share (and of whom it’s tempting to imagine this loser was envious). Out of more than 340 million Americans, the young men who inflict their personal problems on political adversaries – and who solve the challenge of what to do with their future by ensuring they don’t have one – is proportionally infinitesimal. Those lists of violent, politically motivated actors on the left and right: they’re not very long. I resist making broad pronouncements about an entire country and the viability of its democracy on the basis of a decade’s worth of disturbed misfits who altogether couldn’t populate an average-sized birthday party.
I obviously know what it’s like to have a column due. To wrack your brains over how you can conceivably add value amid a deluge of comments on the same topic. To have a deadline that coincides with national soul-searching in the wake of an occurrence your fellow journalists identify as a ‘hinge point’, inspiring the likes of the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan to write: ‘We are in big trouble.’ I know what it’s like to want to get in on the action. It’s tempting, then, to not only chime in, but to up the ante – to extract ever more apocalyptic generalisations from the Big Story, because catastrophising makes for edgier copy than ‘simmer down, folks, it’s no big deal’.
I wouldn’t downplay the sorrow this murder provokes in all morally grounded people or the gratuitous heartache it’s occasioned for Kirk’s family, friends, associates and fan base. But I would downplay Tyler Robinson. I may find his ‘romantic partner’ being male-to-female trans worthy of passing note (we can infer, assuming we care, that Tyler is gay), as it’s yet more evidence that trans world and cloud cuckoo land heavily intersect. But I don’t believe this sorry son of a bitch necessarily signposts the direction the US is inexorably heading. He’s neither representative of his generation nor, much as I reject its agenda, an ambassador of the American left.
Like rats rummaging rubbish for morsels, pundits scrounge for meaning in the news. But drawing conclusions about America from this one spiteful sad-ass accords the guy way too much power and importance. Don’t reward misguided murderousness by grandly designating a senseless assassination as a historical watershed. It requires a particular journalistic restraint to argue that a headline current event may not mean as much as you think.
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