Last Act

I was coming home from having spent the evening with some friends when I passed this small rally? memorial? for Charlie Kirk. This was out on the edge of the greater Seattle metro area, the "drive until you qualify" zone that high housing costs closer in tend to push people to. As a result, it's something of a convergence zone between the deeply-Blue Seattle area and the fairly Red rural parts of the state.

Most of my social circle, and pretty much all of the people within it that I actually see on a regular (even if infrequent) basis are left-of-center, even the ones who live out in the boonies, and passing this prompted me to wonder how much it matters whether political segregation in the United States is physical or not. I doubt the men in this photograph have been talking with their more Liberal neighbors, given that none of the Liberal people I know in the area have been reporting such conversations.

This is not to say that no such conversations are happening. I still talk, sometimes, with the more Conservative members of my circles. But these are people that I've known, sometimes for a very long time. They aren't the result of outreach "across the aisle," as it were.

The idea that Charlie Kirk was in the business of dialog and debate has become something of a given for many people, in the days after his death. But one of his best-known tactics, that of making assertions about some topic (or some people) and then inviting people to "prove him wrong" wasn't a style of debating; it was simply showmanship. No random person on the street (especially not a random college student) was going to have the very specific information needed to force a concession from Mr. Kirk or his audience that, say, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor or Jackson never benefited from any formal or informal "affirmative action" initiatives; if for no other reason than such programs aren't about individuals. The "Little Rock Nine," and other situations where schools were forced to make room for specific, named individuals, and it was clear that they wouldn't have been admitted otherwise, is not the norm.

There's nothing wrong with showmanship and advocacy, or even blending the two. A lot of people who have driven significant social change in the United States have had some level of a showman's instincts. After all, there are a fair number of preachers on the list, and the line between a good preacher and a good showman has always been thin.

But putting on a good show is not the same as really communicating with other people in a way that advances the two-way movement of ideas an understanding. 

Decreed Quiet

If there is going to be a discussion of the role of social media in spreading violence, with the goal of making the point that it's now reasonable to suppress online speech in the name of a safe society (for some definition of "safe"), I would submit that domestic violence is a much more pressing problem than political violence.

Political violence makes headlines precisely because of its rarity. That, and the fact that it tends to befall people other than the usual victims. Domestic violence, on the other hand, is newsworthy only locally, if at all, specifically because it is so common, even if it's only about 20% of the overall homicides that take place in the United States. Unless it's a wealthy or a celebrity family, it's simply background noise.

Political violence tends to be regarded in the same way as (suburban) school shootings; political figures, like suburban schoolchildren, are presumed to have an entitlement to "safety" that large swathes of the general public (including many married women) are not granted. It's only certain violence that's "not supposed to happen." But if society is going to be okay with the rest of it, the sudden hand-wringing over specific incidents feels like people attempting to make the things that frighten them into public concerns. Which seems a tough sell in a nation that's demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore the problems of millions of people through judicious application of the Just World Fallacy.

There's no reason why, however, if the propensity for violence is transmitted from one person to another via uncontrolled online forums, that domestic violence wouldn't move from person to person this way. It doesn't take long to find examples of violent sexism online... one doesn't really even have to look for them most of the time. There are any number of male-dominated online spaces where casual, and sometimes unthinking, justifications for violence against girlfriends and wives are nearly guaranteed to pop up. Stopping the spread of such speech, even if it only cut the rates of intimate partner abuse by a quarter would likely do much more than dropping the rate of politically-relevant killings in the United States to zero.

Humanity has managed to be remarkably violent long before the advent of social media. Accordingly, the idea that clamping down on Facebook and the like will make it easier to maintain peace seems to be wishful thinking. And many people suspect that the Trump administration understands as much. While much of the criticism is clearly partisanship talking, the President is open enough in his opinion that his political rivals should lack the equal protection of the law that a suspicion that this is the actual end goal doesn't seem unreasonable.

But it's worth pointing out that there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for the idea that protecting everyday women is a better reason to go after freedom of speech than protecting the Conservative celebrity class among the Republican base. And I think that this is less about overt sexism than it is about partisanship. For many people, the difference between a random crazy person and a "radicalized," politically-motivated assassin is the politics of the target, and therefore the presumed politics of the killer. Politics is something so important that only other people would kill for it. As I noted before, domestic violence is widespread enough that it's everywhere.

And that, I suspect, really makes the difference here. Cracking down on social media companies in order to force them to police the speech of political opponents is just that, a way of going after political opponents, people on the wrong side of a high-stakes debate over the future of the nation. Looking to the social media (and regular media) landscape to protect the public at large tends to implicate the public at large. And it's common for people to avoid mirrors when they think the reflections won't be flattering.

Facing

A lot has been going on in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's shooting. President Trump and other prominent Republicans have called for those who were critical of Mr. Kirk, or seemed to celebrate his death to be fired from their jobs, and there have even been calls to round up and prosecute people believed to be a part of "the radical Left." The accused gunman, now in custody, is facing calls for their execution, which started even before formal charges had been filed.

This seems to fly in the face of Mr. Kirk's advocacy of the First and Second Amendments. He said that real problems would start when Americans stopped talking to one another, and he seemed to be aware of, and okay with, the idea that in an armed society, the wrong people would wind up being killed, so one presumed he understood that he might be one of them. (I would claim that he understated the problem, as even only taking homicides into account, some fifteen thousand or so people die every year from shootings.) But none of this has stopped angry voices on the Right from calling for more firings, at the implied risk of government sanctions, and calls for vengeance after the incident.

This is, to a degree, simply to be expected. Partisans tend to be good at mobilizing anger; it's a very effective tool for fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts. And there's nothing new about calls for violence after the killings of those who avoided calls for violence themselves. Few things seem to convince people of the necessity for violence more than the death of a peacemaker.

But they do tend to have a tarnishing effect, at least in the immediate aftermath, on the deceased. In this instance, Republican calls for those who are critical of their politics to be punished with unemployment are nothing new. So was Charlie Kirk simply a useful shield against criticism? Someone to hold up when it was pointed out that American Conservatism seemed to have no problems with "cancel culture" when they were the ones calling for cancellation? Or was Mr. Kirk a willing smokescreen, having taken it upon himself to present a false image of the American Right that people could cloak themselves in?

There's no way of knowing, but the seemingly immediate and quite public discarding of the tactics that Mr. Kirk appeared to pursue (at least at times) seems to justify the questioning of how important they were to the broader Conservative movement of which he was a part.

Of course, a lot of this is led by President Trump, and conflicts are too much a part of his standard operating procedure for him to ever be credible in calls for peace and unity. If there's anyone from whom calls for a ceasefire are cover for reloading the guns, it's the President. And given the degree to which the President single-handedly directs the Republican Party, it's no wonder that everyone who is anyone in the party simply does what they perceive him to want.

And that shifts the focus to the relationship between Mr. Kirk and President Trump, and I, for my part, suspect that all of the President's political relationships are fundamentally transactional. And that in this case, that worked both ways. And Charlie Kirk is mainly of use to the President as someone whose death can be held up as a vehicle to convey to the Trumpist base that they're under threat, and that only the President, with a compliant (to be generous about it) Congress can save them from the hobgoblin of "the radical Left." Whether Mr. Kirk would have approved is something of a moot point.

 P.S.: Big picture, this isn't a knock on the President; it's just how politics in a polarized society works. Recent events, however, have brought it into sharper focus. 

Recoil

Reactions to the shooting death of Charlie Kirk are everywhere, and that means that LinkedIn is no exception. What I noticed, however, was that the mentions of Mr. Kirk's life and views were all really anodyne, and stripped of the things that made him such a controversial figure. Mr. Kirk's advocacy for gun rights wasn't the thing that stood out about him and Turning Point USA to many of his critics. After all, one could plausibly make a case that Mr. Kirk was a White Supremacist, and to many in the LGBT community, he was an open bigot.

And that becomes the problem. Because there seems to be an unspoken idea that if it's admitted to that Charlie Kirk was a bad person by some or another standard, that his shooting becomes justified. And so people who want to make the point that political violence has gotten out of hand, or that it's wrong to celebrate the death of another human being wind up needing to sanitize his image, in order to make caring about his fate acceptable.

But it shouldn't need that. Okay, a case can be made that Charlie Kirk was a right jackass. That's an awfully low bar to justify a shooting.

And maybe that's all that needs to be said about it. Charlie Kirk didn't need to be a hero to everyone for his death to be a tragedy, and an unnecessary (if not wholly unexpected) one at that. But this is what a combination of hate, fear and distrust do to a nation where it's easy to be armed. Whether Charlie Kirk was legitimately a source of that hate, fear and distrust is beside the point. Even without him, it would have been there. It was Mr. Kirk's high public profile that made him a target of it. And his death exacerbates it.

Which means that, before long, it will hunt down someone else. And if that person may have had a hand in it, that will be excused, at least by some, in the understanding that humanity in death is something that must be deserved, rather than simply being something that everyone has some entitlement to.

By Association

While the United States isn't as openly Puritanical a place at it once was, there is a still a certain desire for spotlessness in some things, and this lends itself to a level of needless dishonesty.

"The president did not write this letter [to Jeffrey Epstein], he did not sign this letter, and that's why the president's external legal team is pursuing litigation against the Wall Street Journal," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday.

Trump is used to shaking off criticism - but the Epstein story is different

Personally, I wonder what the external legal team is going to say: That it's patently clear that the handwriting only looks like that of Donald Trump? Claiming the note is faked is going to be a heavy lift; the President's legal team/supporters are going to have to find a forger. If a chain of custody can be established for any length of time, there would need to be a claim that the book was planted prior to that, and it's already been pointed out that this would be a difficult accusation to square.

Democratic lawmakers and other elected officials are hoping that some ability to tie President Trump to Jeffrey Epstein will restore the law of political gravity, which is, in my opinion, wishful thinking. But the bigger question is why should it serve to bring the President down? Okay, so Mr. Epstein turned out to be a sexual predator. What does that have to do with anyone else?

The BBC article notes that people like the UK's ambassador to the United States, Lord Peter Mandelson, "very much regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein." I get that this is something of a requirement for people to stay in the public's good graces, on either side of the Atlantic, it speaks to another of those standards that people have, but don't tend to hold themselves to. If simply knowing, or being very good friends with, someone who turns a criminal was that bad, a lot of people should be in very deep trouble. But "friend" and "accomplice" are not synonyms.

To be sure, the the Administration is attempting to dig itself out of a hole that it dug for itself; if one is going to make a big deal about guilt by association, it shouldn't be in connection to someone that there's plenty of photographic evidence that the President was, once, associated with.

Still, it seems a bit over the top. Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had a falling out in 2004, about the time when the very first allegations were being made. And there's no indication that he and President Trump ever reconciled after that point. So what does it matter that the two men moved in the same circles? Money and power have always sought access to each other, and themselves. This is simply the way the world has always worked.

Jeffrey Epstein's toxicity, even years after his death, makes him a useful tool; there's political benefit to be had in smearing him on people. But that benefit is a the result of the public not wanting to believe that a pervert can avoid surrounding himself with other perverts, and a populist desire to want to prove that the "Élite" are deliberately evil and dangerous. And one of the things that buttresses that worldview is people's willingness to play into it. Granted, it's not as if the media, politicians and other tastemakers suddenly all dropped it, that it would go away, but its influence likely would be lessened.

And that, I think would be a good thing. If for no other reason than it would make a lot of public life more honest. People keep secrets, even from people close to them, let alone people they socialize with for the sake of being seen with them, or because they're looking for some or another favor from them. They don't spill the beans to everyone they talk to who happens to be of the same social class, or has a similar bank balance. (Or happens to be in the same holding cell. I'm impressed that juries still believe random jailhouse snitches.)

I'd say that people's fear of letting "bad people" get away from them is fueling what comes across as a hypersensitivity to any indication that someone isn't entirely on the straight and narrow, but that seems to undersell what's in play.