The wrath of Republican cancel culture Charlie Kirk’s death has unleashed illiberal instincts

President Trump’s first remarks after the assassination of Charlie Kirk were not exactly peaceable, but they were considerably less opportunistic and inflammatory than one might have expected, given that Kirk was not just a longtime ally and adviser but a personal friend to the Trump family. Responding to questions in front of the White House, the President did launch his reaction in partisan terms, blaming the “lunatics” of the “radical Left”, without knowing the shooter’s actual relation to the radical Left at the time, but he also urged his supporters to respond to the killing of this MAGA standard-bearer with non-violence. He didn’t dwell on the murder as a galvanising partisan event. He didn’t play to the reflex of revenge that MAGA partisans were airing on various media. He didn’t say “war”. He didn’t say what he, being himself, might have said.

Likewise, Trump’s higher-profile opponents in government and the media, presumably also opponents of Charlie Kirk’s conservatism, were generally restrained and respectful in their reactions. There were, of course, many online hotheads and ghouls who took this moment of directionally preferred political murder to celebrate it or snark about it. But more visible liberals denounced the murder in simple terms, declining to waffle in follow-up clauses about how Kirk kinda sorta had it coming. Liberal pundit Matthew Dowd did say Kirk had it coming, and he did say it on TV, but the network he said this on, the devotedly liberal MSNBC, promptly fired him. The New York Times’s liberal columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein even argued that “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”.

Earlier in the day on which Kirk was murdered, the new liberal outlet The Argument ran an essay by Robinson Meyer titled “You’re Being Rude. Put Away Your Phone”. As the muted and mannerly initial reaction to the murder played out, this seemingly unrelated essay stayed stuck in my mind. Meyer was unequivocal in his dark view of iPhones and the culture they’ve created. Of the “infernal mental itchiness” that the iPhone cultivates inside us, our plight of being “ruled by our phones”, he wrote, “this is an unacceptable, horrendous way to go through life”.

These were gratifying words to read. For the past few years, I’ve watched liberal and progressive commentators slowly drop their belief in digital tech as an emancipatory force and begin acknowledging what has seemed clear to me since at least 2010, when Nicholas Carr asked whether Google was making us stupid and my immediate answer was: obviously.

But Meyer’s tone was especially blunt and bracing. Five or eight years ago he might have expected mockery for performing a “moral panic”. He might have hedged his case out of fear of being denounced for opposing the self-empowerment and self-expression of women and minorities and queer people and young people, which the iPhone was said by its progressive boosters to enable. But he just came out and bravely said the obvious thing, that the iPhone and social media have been a scourge.

In the hours before Charlie Kirk’s murder, I was thinking, gratefully, that this belief had finally become a general one, and, in being general, it might turn into an effective sort of collective self-awareness, a possible bulwark against the swarming influence of digital tech. These thoughts coloured my sense of what was happening in the couple of days after the murder. Prominent and high-status people in government and media seemed to be acting less rabidly than I might have expected from the online playing-out of previous crises. With Meyer’s essay in the back of my mind, I thought I might be seeing a critical mass of people, including the President of the United States, declining to act as their smartphones and social media apps had in the past goaded them to act in such moments. People almost seemed to be speaking, not just against political murder and rash and vengeful reactions to political murder, but against the internet’s way of provoking and propagating those reactions. People seemed to be saying: we will not do what the internet wants us to do.

The more recent responses of Republican officials have dispelled those positive feelings. Instead of becoming more measured, some important figures in the government have become more extreme, but in a curious way informed by the worst tendencies of the internet. Instead of soothing the animal spirits of the nation like that great uniter Donald Trump, they’re operating in the manner of people with secret identities keeping beefs alive on social media. They’re sifting the online platforms for maddening content, like any internet user looking to enjoy some recreational hatred, and then they’re mounting their official platforms to thunder with hysterical gravity against the offensive words. In doing so, they’re needlessly raising the temperature of crisis and conflict. And they’re pouring acid on already weakened American norms of free speech while contributing to a rampant, shamelessly hypocritical movement on the Right to punish disagreeable ideas. It’s cancel culture redux and ideologically reversed, enforced by policemen and federal agents instead of Twitter mobs and diversity deans.

In one representative case, a young woman was arrested at a university in Texas after she was captured on video approaching an impromptu vigil for Charlie Kirk and, as reported by the New York Post, “jumping around and yelling at fellow students paying tribute to Kirk, ‘F–k y’all homie dead, he got shot in the head’”. This woman sounds stupid and entitled in the video, though I’m not sure I saw legal grounds for her arrest. In general, the episode seems like typical grist for online video, one of those moments of ugly comportment that make other people feel good about themselves, which is why you see such videos in the first place, why they go viral enough to reach your eyes. The proper response to such a spectacle is to file it away as another online example of how never to act, but then also to feel a little guilty or nauseous about participating in the public execration of a stranger, and also, most fundamentally, to resent the internet for exploiting the more lurid potentials of your bored and conflict-curious brain.

But Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, was not restrained by guilt or nausea in his official response to this video. He wasn’t resenting the internet for tricking him into succumbing to its powerful sickness. He wanted to bring the hidden internet sickness to the political surface. Above a picture of a young black woman in handcuffs, he wrote on X: “This is what happened to the person who was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Texas Tech.” He spaced down a few times and added “FAFO”. Here is the governor of America’s second most populous state acting like just another guy hopped up on the lusty hormones of social media. “FAFO”, if you’re lucky enough not to know, is an acronym for “Fuck Around and Find Out”. It usually accompanies short videos of people causing trouble and then getting beaten up, knocked unconscious, run over by cars or trucks, tased or shot by police, or otherwise suffering violent and disfiguring outcomes the internet understands as “karma”.

As bad as the governor of a major state descending into the digital mud like an everyday troll is his suggestion that the handcuffed woman was arrested for “mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination” — which would be constitutionally protected speech if it really were the reason she was arrested. (She was apparently arrested on still-dubious charges of “assault” and/or “battery” for pushing her phone up to someone’s face, a legal reckoning it’s hard to imagine her facing were her obnoxious speech different in its political valence.)

With Trump being sober and statesmanlike after the shooting, his Vice President, J.D. Vance, stepped in to provide the internet-style melodrama about things he read on the internet, guest-hosting the podcast of his slain friend Charlie Kirk. Democrats in government failed to give him grist for his latent outrage, though, so Vance looked lower, to the reliable villainy of the Left-wing press — an article in The Nation magazine that, without celebrating his murder, aired the familiar progressive case against Charlie Kirk and his project. Vance was furious that someone was using this solemn moment to undermine Kirk’s ideas, even though countless conservatives like him were aggressively using it to advance them. Vance was being a kind of throwback here, performing like a blogger after 9/11, when many leftists said imperialist America had it coming and conservative blogs won clicks by just block-quoting these outré words for their harrumphing readers.

Things got even more serious with Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller, as they tend to. As Vance’s guest on the Kirk podcast, Miller weighed in like an aggrieved commenter in a Facebook thread, though adding the practical threats of someone who might express his grief with the firepower of federal agents. “We are going to channel all of the anger over the organised campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks,” Miller thundered.

But the White House has identified no “network” (let alone “networks”) of Left-wing “terror”. Miller intones about “an organised campaign that led to this assassination”, but it seems clear at this point that Kirk’s shooter worked alone. He doesn’t seem to have acted according to any organised campaign. Instead, he appears to be a system output, a dependent variable of the internet’s behavioural power, another kid made crazy or extreme by the expressive feedback loops of online communication — in this case Discord forums, where he seems to have readied himself to kill someone famous by thumb-typing ironic things about the idea.

Indeed, the “network” Miller seems to be referring to is just… the internet. It appears that he and other powerful conservatives, experiencing the murder of one of their fellows and then seeing indecent but predictable responses to this murder from political opponents on the internet, have lapsed into a useful and dangerous confusion of the one with the other. In this way, Miller’s references to terror are reminiscent of comically familiar Left-wing hysterias, such as — and this happened twice at my kids’ elementary school in California — someone seeing a rope tied in a loop, or just a rope dangling in a way that resembled a loop, and taking that real or notional loop to be a noose, and that notional noose to represent an imminent threat of actual lynching directed at local black people, a real emergency to be addressed by police investigations and tearful town meetings. At work in such episodes is a mode of thinking that resembles the associative, tangential logic of dreams — people seeing one random thing that, by a single semiotic linkage, evokes something else bad and directly threatening that the first random thing has nothing to do with. This is how, in a dream, a TV mother can play the part of your real mother. They’re both nominal mothers, and this, for your sleeping brain in its surreal efficiency, is linkage enough.

Those callous and ugly (and merely upsetting and challenging) Left-wing reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death happened on the communication “network” known as the internet, and you know what else operates in networks? Terrorism! Bereavement seems to have left Miller vulnerable to a brand of fantastical misperception similar to that afflicting people who sincerely believe they’re threatened with a weapon of racial terror when they see a random rope hanging from a fence. Seeing people saying bad things about Charlie Kirk on the communications “network” known as the internet, Miller, perhaps subconsciously excited by the dream-linkage of “network” and “terrorism”, now thinks he’s surrounded by terrorism itself.

But there’s no “network” of Left-wing “terror”, or, if there is, it’s not doing much. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a statistical rarity. After a brief upsurge before the Covid pandemic, acts of political violence have trended dramatically downward in recent years. The assassination’s defining characteristics as a national crisis are mainly that it happened to a personal friend of the most powerful people in America, and that it was caught on video, which was instantly viewable on the internet.

And people with small invisible lives thus talked about it on the internet, thousands and thousands of these people, a totally predictable minority of them induced by the internet’s perverse human logic to seek distinction for themselves through callous celebration of an ugly crime. Powerful government officials, also acting like pawns of internet causality, are now consuming these aberrant speech acts and then regurgitating them as memes and performative outrage and other modes of online pathology that are making American politics much more depressingly dumb and degraded than they were already.

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