We have a choice now: between liberalism or illiberalism, speech or violence.

Someone shot him in the neck.

I’ve now watched that video a couple of times, and it’s as unbearable to absorb as the video of the stabbing of a young woman on a train in Charlotte (whose neck was also sliced). Here we see two young people, living freely in a liberal society — one engaging in dialogue on a college campus, the other simply absorbed in her phone. Then, in seconds, in a flash of terror, you see two bodies slump lifelessly to the ground, gushing blood, before their minds have even been able to grasp what has just been done to them.

Gratuitous, graphic, public murders, murders directed at two core democratic principles: the right to be safe in public, and the right to speak freely without fear.

Charlie Kirk, in the last tweet he wrote, just before his assassination, called for the “politicization” of the Charlotte murder, because it brought to ever-more graphic light the reckless leniency of some judges in letting dangerous, unhinged men back on the streets. I don’t think he was wrong. Nor do I think it is wrong to “politicize” his own horrible assassination. Because it was an expressly political act.

It was political because it struck Kirk in the core act of liberal democracy: debating his opponents. We don’t know the precise motive behind the murder right now, but that’s irrelevant. This was aimed literally and figuratively at the jugular of a free society. In that respect, the murder resembles the hideous knife attack on Salman Rushdie three years ago — also on stage, also engaged in dialogue. It is akin to the attack on Charlie Hebdo, where cartoonists were killed by Islamists for drawing blasphemous images. It is a direct assault on a free society. It is where the illiberalism of both sides always ends up.

Here is the exchange that directly preceded the assassination of Kirk:

Question: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

Kirk: Too many.

Question: Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

Kirk: Counting or not counting gang violence … ?

His last words were those of a classic “master-debater,” as South Park recently quipped — a joke Kirk enjoyed. What he had “mastered” at 31 years was a staggeringly comprehensive data-set in his own head of every single stat or detail of any number of policies that he could deploy to win any argument with a woke college sophomore. Like Ben Shapiro, he could rattle off any number of gotchas — and obscure Bible verses — and barely break a sweat.

This wasn’t exactly wisdom; but it wasn’t entirely sophistry either; and in a university climate that remains so intellectually repressive, where the new orthodoxy is that free-wheeling debate is just another form of structural “oppression”, it was a blessing. And when I went back this week and caught up on Kirk’s videos, debates, and events, I was far more often impressed than dismayed. He treated opponents with respect. He looked them in the eyes. He made arguments — and the young victims of woke indoctrination, rather than arguing back, called it “hate”.

It’s a left technique pioneered during the Bork hearings all those years ago: take principled conservative positions out of context, and call them “hate”. We were told this morning that Tyler Robinson targeted Kirk because he was — surprise! — “full of hate,” a term the woke use to call arguments they disagree with.

So go check out the reddit list of the worst things Kirk has said, the “proof” of his “Calls for Political Violence.” There are no such calls (and no slurs). There are instead arguments. Take the notion — repeated mindlessly by Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates on X — that Kirk supported stoning gay people. No he didn’t. He was simply noting that using Leviticus literally as a guide to politics can cut both ways. Or the idea that he believed black people were “inferior” — when he was, in fact, noting that affirmative action casts doubt on the competence of all black employees, including the very talented. It does.

It is never “hate” to tell the truth: that men are not women; that children cannot meaningfully consent to sex changes; that an insane proportion of murder in America is committed by young black men; that affirmative action means promoting people who are not as qualified because of their identity. And it is not bigotry to be a fundamentalist Christian who opposes legal abortion.

Kirk opposed marriage equality — the cause dearest to my heart — to his last breath, but so fucking what? It’s a free society, and he can oppose a policy for reasons other than “hating” gay people. I would have loved to debate him on it, as I did countless fundies in the Nineties and Aughts. Kirk embraced MAGA gays warmly. He was, it’s true, slowly morphing into a full-on Christianist in the last few years, with eccentric views of the Founders and a garbled take on Tom Holland’s scholarship, but again … so what? A free society allows for a variety of views, and I have found no personal animus, no individual cruelty, no rank bigotry — as opposed to Christianist doctrine.

Yes, he was provocative. Yes, he had a few off-moments. Who doesn’t? Yes, I obviously oppose the kind of populist, authoritarian cult that Kirk was enabling, and the Christianism he backed. But he wasn’t Milo. He wasn’t Candace Owens. He wasn’t Alex Jones. He wasn’t even Tucker Carlson. And he did the hard work of democracy: talking to those who disagreed with him.

For those reasons, we should all grieve Charlie Kirk — because free speech vs violence is much more crucial a divide than left vs right. And the proper response to this horror is serious introspection about how violence has burrowed its way into our widening, post-liberal gyre.

The woke left — especially in the fringes the mainstream left adamantly refuses to rein in, condemn, or control — bears some responsibility, because it has long equated speech with violence. If that is true, then what happened to Kirk was legitimate; if his words were “violent”, then a bullet is no different in kind than a verbal provocation. This deeply illiberal idea has been insinuated into a young generation by the academic and journalistic left, as we saw when so many of these ideologues justified and enabled the BLM violence of 2020.

It is therefore absolutely no coincidence that as critical theory has burrowed into every humanities department and every college’s administration, the number of students who back violence as sometimes justifiable to stop speech they dislike has risen dramatically. FIRE just found that 34 percent of students view violence as justifiable in some way against a speaker uttering “hate”, up from 20 percent in 2022. Of course they do. Critical theory requires no less. It replaces reason with power; and violence is the ultimate power.

Then there is the trans issue, which is particularly charged on campuses drenched in critical gender and queer theory — where we have become familiar with rhetoric like this: “There is an anti-trans genocide and we keep shouting it from the rooftops.” The pattern is clear: First the queers dehumanize their opponents as génocidaire “terfs”; then slogans appear in demos: “Punch a Terf,” “Decapitate Terfs,” “Trans rights … or else.” T-shirts with guns and knives proliferate — and are worn proudly by this statewide Democrat.

Here, by the way, are just some of the tweets directed at J.K. Rowling by members of the “LGBTQIA+” mob: “The j.k. stands for ‘just kill’”, “Girl I wish someone would get on with it and euthanize your old ass already,” “bitch i’ll kill you”. One trans influencer, Gretchen Felker-Martin, name-checked Rowling, Jesse Singal, Helen Joyce and others with the quip: “if they only had one throat, man.” There is a direct line from that kind of rhetoric to “Hey, fascist! Catch!” — the glib, sickening slogan on an unfired cartridge in Utah. “Punch a Nazi” can swiftly morph into “Shoot a Fascist.” And this is the grotesque subculture on the LMAO young far-left: joking about violence, smug, performative, dumb, and bigoted.

But the other revealing — and equally disturbing — aspect of these last few days is how many on the MAGA right have used this occasion to come out as proud, unashamed fascists. Laura Loomer — one of the activists closest to Trump, a woman who vets national security appointments — tweeted the following: “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” Clarifying, no? From a MAGA publisher with over 100,000 followers: “The admin has carte blanche. Don’t bother arguing. Just do what you’re going to do.” From Libs of TikTok: “THIS IS WAR.” And Milo:

Every network news operation, CNN, the Post, the Times. The Ford foundation. Bill and Melinda. Meta and Alphabet. Seize their assets. Shut them down. Do it today.

From Elon Musk: “The Left is the party of murder.” And Nancy Mace: “Democrats own this, 100 percent.” And we can’t leave out Matt Walsh:

We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell. They’re killing us in our churches. They tried to kill our president. They killed Charlie, one of our greatest advocates. … This is existential.

This may be the first time Walsh has approved of a plural pronoun for a single person. But a he, unconfirmed at that point, instantly became a “they” for Walsh. This is Weimar-style polarization, super-charged by social media and videos everywhere, videos that stir the subconscious, from George Floyd’s neck to Charlie Kirk’s.

Social media amplifies this in ways never seen before: images become symbols and symbols tribalize us; and tribes stop talking and go to war. A white cop’s knee on a black man’s neck triggers our collective amygdala shaped by centuries of history. A stabbed white woman’s terrified cowering on a train prompts more “they”s on X, where race war has become a constant theme. And in the blood gushing from a speaker’s neck, we see our own democracy literally bleeding out. Words connect with the rational part of our brains; images target the sub-rational. And in a sub-rational world, liberal democracy simply cannot exist.

I don’t want to offer a bromide in this moment, because it might seem insufficient to its gravity. Yes, America is not new to political violence or assassinations. As recently as the 1960s and ‘70s, we endured a wave of domestic terrorism. But we are in a more tenuous place now than we were then. So much has already unraveled.

The middle class has attenuated; our common religion has retreated or been turned into politics; social inequality has soared; Congress is effectively deadlocked; the media is fragmented; and social media is designed to foster civil conflict. Our usual defense in moments like these — a president who can call for calm and bring both sides together — is no longer an option. We have someone simply incapable of that, someone who has made inflammatory, cruel, personal, vindictive statements his whole identity, someone whose words and actions have intensified the crisis.

Which makes the next three years so perilous and so vital. It really is up to us. We can tip this broken democracy into an abyss or we can walk back slowly, calmly, with perspective. Cool the rhetoric. Find someone in your life you disagree with and have a conversation. Get off social media. Remember how much we still have in common, how blessed we are in this country in so many ways we forget. Tell the truth fearlessly but always be open to correction. Decency, civility, nonviolence, humor, humility, grace: these are the virtues a free society needs to endure. Lose them and it won’t.

We’re trying to do this here on the Dish in our own way — to model robust, civil disagreement in our pods and with our reasoned dissents. Support the sites that do this; leave the sites that don’t. Social media is not going anywhere, so reforming it matters. And stop taking the emotional bait. It’s understandable. It’s human. I get it. I’ve been there. But it’s killing our democracy.

And don’t be afraid. A terrible outcome would be self-censorship for fear of violence. Big provocative ideas can be expressed clearly and civilly — and we need them. The alternatives lead to hell for all of us. Nothing justifies them. Nothing. History tells us that. And the hour is not too late.

New On The Dishcast: Jill Lepore

Jill is a writer and scholar. She’s a professor of American history at Harvard, a professor of law at Harvard Law, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She’s also the host of the podcast “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Her many books include These Truths: A History of the United States (which I reviewed for the NYT in 2017) and her new one, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on FDR’s efforts to bypass the Constitution, and the worst amendment we’ve had. That link also takes you to a bunch of listener comments on last week’s pod with Niall Ferguson, along with an assortment of reader emails.

Money Quotes For The Week

“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence, that’s when civil war happens — because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity,” – Charlie Kirk.

“Knock it off. You are not a member of the online French Resistance; you are a soft and silly adolescent engaging in performative sociopathy to compensate for your real-world deficits,” – Megan McArdle on keyboard warriors.

“We don’t like to incarcerate our maniacs until they kill. Mental institutions have been deemed too terrible an option. So in America, every lunatic gets one free murder,” – Nellie Bowles on the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska.

“Naturally, every entitled fat-keistered slob clogging the rolls of non-functional news organizations is crying [that Bari Weiss] doesn’t deserve it. How many of these plaintive mannequins denouncing her ‘grift’ would have the guts to leave one of the cushiest gigs in the print media and bet on themselves in the open market? Zero-point-zero percent, as in not one,” – Matt Taibbi on the Free Press’ pending deal with CBS.

“Transgenderism, as it does for everybody, turned me into a complete narcissist,” – Katie Coblentz, detransitioner.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy … unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance,” – Carl Sagan in 1995.

The View From Your Window

Stuart, Florida, 1.53 pm

Dissents Of The Week

A reader pushes back on last week’s column, “Why Is The President Breaking Wind?”:

I believe the main issue with wind and solar is that they are produced in China. When you add all the fossil fuels to mine, manufacture, transport, install (massive amounts of concrete) and maintain, wind is not as clean as advertised. And once the subsidies are removed, and you consider the lack of continuous energy generation, wind and solar are not a great deal. Nuclear seems to be our best bet, and I’m glad to see the current administration placing an emphasis on this clean alternative.

Another writes, “As little as I want to defend Trump on anything, I am sympathetic to his perspective on this issue”:

Trump learns that his golf course in Scotland is going to have a wind farm on the horizon, ruining its view. Most of us would feel sad to have a beautiful, historical vista like that destroyed in this way. I think of what I felt when I visited Haworth, excited to see the Yorkshire moors that Emily Bronte had once wandered with her dogs … and instead found a wind farm dominating the hills. Plenty of people have objected to the visual effect of wind farms in Cairngorms National Park and on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland — not just Trump.

Most of us know the proper, progressive response to the dismay we feel when confronted with these wind farms, which is to sigh, remind oneself of the urgency of the climate crisis, and resign oneself to the sacrifices that need to be made for the sake of renewable energy.

Trump’s response was, screw that. He thought of how his mother was from Scotland and how this place is “near and dear to [his] heart,” and he declared that he’s going to do everything he can to preserve its beauty and its heritage. He responded as a passionate human being, not as a cerebral environmentalist.

Because he is now the president of the United States, his decision to express and act upon his personal feeling seems to you arbitrary and despotic. But haven’t most of us been in that situation? Don’t we wish we could stand up against the impersonal, bureaucratic forces that seem determined to strip our world of loveliness and meaning? Isn’t he the id to our superego?

I am no fan of Trump, but what people like about him is that he feels what other people feel in the same situation, and he dares to act upon that feeling in a way the rest of us do not. Those soggy paper straws that were useless when faced with a frappe? Let’s ban them! All those brutalist government buildings? Did anyone who was not an architect ever not hate Boston City Hall or the J. Edgar Hoover Building in DC? Let’s bring back neoclassicism! If Trump lashes out against unpopular decisions made by elites who know better than the rest of us, a lot of people think, “Yes! Finally!”

I am all for wind power. But maybe the powers that be who install wind farms should show a bit more respect for beautiful and historic vistas? Maybe Trump has a point here?

Another has a nit to pick:

You wrote, “That’s arbitrary power distilled like a fine Scottish whiskey.” I’m sure the mixologist from your VFYW contest has already emailed you, but if it’s Scottish, it’s “whisky”. Must be your Irish heritage, where they use the “e”.

Anyways, it’s late. In the words of Groundskeeper Willie, “Now for a wee nip and a wee nap.”

As always, keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

A gorgeous cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the isiZulu language:

In The ‘Stacks

• Benny Morris wonders whether it was wise for Israel to strike Hamas in Qatar.
• Why are 9/11 documents still classified after 24 years?
• After a big conference, Ruy Teixeira has “three big problems with the politics of Abundance.” Josh Barro sees a lot of bipartisanship, and Brian Beutler wants a “Progressive-Abundance Truce.” Richard Hanania floats “Reagan Abundance.”
• The Trump economy is getting flaccid.
• Will the AI bubble burst under Trump?
• Is he getting played by a modern-day Bismarck?
• Matt Yglesias argues that “‘national’ conservatism is un-American.”
• Psychedelics are now being tested for postpartum depression.
• Copyranter pays tribute to “one of the best ad directors in the world.”
• Lawrence Krauss has 20 interviews with contributors to The War on Science (many of them Dishcast alums).

The View From Your Window Contest

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell