A week ago today, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. In the days since, details about and reactions to the very public and widely-watched murder of the prominent conservative commentator and organizer have been everywhere.
Supporters of Kirk are devastated and frustrated. And many have documented the blatant celebrations that took place in many progressive corners of the internet and the ongoing references to wanting someone to do “The Thing” (which means killing Trump) that are everywhere in these online spaces to argue that the collective delusion that a literal 1930s-style Nazi takeover of the US is taking place that in all likelihood convinced two gunmen to try and assassinate Trump last year has not been adequately reckoned with and is just as present as it was last summer.
People on the left and establishment figures closer to the center have countered by arguing that the killing of Kirk takes place in the context of a larger uptick of violence aimed at public figures that does not fall easily within partisan lines but that is increasing at a concerning rate.
Both are right.
Many people in politics, media, and industry who had been doing well before the Trump years have maliciously exaggerated and embellished many aspects of the MAGA movement to terrify millions of people into thinking that a minor threat to the establishment’s power is actually a threat to their very lives. This is a sentiment that those in power, who are stoking these fears, clearly do not believe themselves—as could be seen in their cordiality to Trump after he was shot and Kirk after he was killed.
But this is not the only source behind the surge of violence in American political life that we’re now living through. Delusional online worldviews, collective fears about the future of the country, and even suspiciously belligerent FBI informants have increasingly been convincing people of many different ideological persuasions to adopt more violent means in attempting to achieve their political goals.
Where most have erred, however, is in viewing the “political violence” we’re seeing these days as some kind of unprecedented deviation from the political norm. It is not.
Politics is violence. Political history is full of violence. And, even though this kind of officially-unsanctioned violence against public figures has been mostly absent from domestic American politics since the late 1960s, Americans have—all this time—lived under a very violent regime in Washington, DC.
The only reason that may not seem obvious is that most of our government’s violence has been committed against people in foreign lands. And that is only because, for the familiar past, no serious threat to their power has materialized here at home. So the unseemly activities of our so-called leaders happen mostly out of sight.
But that cannot remain the case for long as the size of the federal government continues to rapidly grow. As the government comes to control more and more aspects of our daily lives, the sheer amount of alluring power available to whichever political tribe can momentarily grab the reins grows too. As does the danger of losing to an enemy tribe that—like nearly all political tribes—seeks to dominate their ideological enemies.
Adding fuel to that already perilous fire is the fact that young Americans—especially young American men—are growing historically disillusioned and disenchanted with the current system, mostly for reasons that are not their fault.
They were born into a world where politicians have borrowed an absurd amount of money, which is ratcheting up the future tax burden. These politicians have also deliberately destroyed the value of money, structured the entire economy around short-term consumption and debt over meaningful investment and production, prioritized the well-being of about every group above young native-born Americans, and turned nearly every big industry into a giant racket designed to transfer as much money as possible to well-connected companies. And now, as a result, Gen Z is at serious risk of being the first generation in American history to not live as materially or financially well as their parents’ generation.
Growing disillusioned with a system that is ripping you and your entire generation off is absolutely justified. But things can quickly get much worse if all that righteous anger is not mobilized and deployed in a precise, effective, and ethical direction that actually addresses the root cause of the problem.
And unfortunately, as righteously disillusioned as young Americans are, they remain mostly adrift.
Many have fallen into fringe, incoherent online ideologies or fallen for insincere political figures who promise imminent change without having any serious intention of delivering that change. Others have completely checked out of not just politics, but social life entirely—showing no interest in having a career or starting a family. And having a lot of young, out-of-work, single, disenchanted, and overall frustrated men, especially, is a major driver of violence and chaos.
So, again, the stakes of American politics have gotten much higher for all sides at the same time young American men are becoming more isolated and frustrated than we’ve seen before. So it is reasonable to expect that we will only see more “political violence” in the future. We’re on a bad path.
There is a better one. But getting there involves bringing about a significant rollback of federal power and dramatic political decentralization—not trying to grab federal power, expand it, and use it to subjugate your ideological enemies in the ahistorical assumption that it will get them to calm down.
It also comes from those who are justifiably disillusioned, recognizing that the real source of our problems stems less from their pink-haired leftist college classmate or some tiny purposefully provocative anonymous account on X and more from the government officials and bureaucrats actively running all the corrupt rackets in Washington, DC.
But above all, if we’re ever going to see meaningful improvements to our national situation, we must face the fact that evil exists and that it is present in our country and in our political system. And that, especially when it seems advantageous or tempting in these increasingly frequent highly-charged moments, it is imperative that we do not give in to that evil, but—as a great man once adopted as his personal motto—that we proceed ever more boldly against it.
