Attorney General Pam Bondi learned a tough lesson yesterday: There are still some pieties of the old right conservatives aren’t ready to abandon, and bristling at the concept of “hate speech” is one. One day after pledging to “absolutely target” anyone using “hate speech” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Bondi walked it back, insisting she’d only meant speech that “crosses the line into threats of violence.” Happy Wednesday.

Against the Ostriches

by Andrew Egger

The immediate aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk presented us all with an epistemic challenge: what if the killer came from our tribe?

From the moment the heinous footage hit the internet, the likeliest explanation was that the shooter hated Kirk’s political activism, which would suggest he was likely of the political left.

But in the absence of concrete evidence to this effect, parts of the online left began pushing a different theory: that Kirk had in fact been gunned down by a disciple of fringe ideology further to Kirk’s own right. This “Groyper theory” was rooted in a few true facts—Kirk had indeed clashed with followers of the white-nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes over the years—but, again, there was never any actual evidence of it.

Now, we have some evidence. And it is time to move beyond those epistemic challenges.

Utah prosecutors unveiled charges yesterday against Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer. And although they stopped short of declaring a motive, they offered the clearest insight yet into Robinson’s stated motivations. Although he was raised Republican, authorities said, citing his family, Robinson had moved left in recent years. He had a transgender partner, whom he had texted after the shooting to say he had had “enough of [Kirk’s] hatred” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

It is important, here, to make note of what prosecutors did not unveil. Speculation from the president and his allies notwithstanding, Robinson had no known association with “leftist” groups. We also don’t have much insight into the full breadth of his politics. While the picture of Robinson is being filled out, it also remains frustratingly incomplete.

But at this point the most salient fact now seems clear. Kirk was widely reviled on the left for his often noxious rhetoric about minorities in general and trans people in particular, and a person with a particular interest in sticking up for trans people shot him for it.

To deny this now is not just an act of willful blindness, it is deeply counterproductive. If we want to confront the problems of political violence—from the radicalization of our youth, to the toxicity of online culture and discourse, to the heightened possibility for damage in a nation awash with guns—we must first recognize how far the problem has spread, and to whom.

And yet, what’s clear about the aftermath of the Kirk shooting is that human beings find it a lot easier to rush to judgment than to rush back to realities. Some on the left have found themselves spinning ever more outlandish theories to explain away the Robinson texts. “No one is buying these text messages,” posted one prominent influencer, JoJoFromJerz. “I don’t believe these text messages were written by Tyler Robinson for a second,” offered another poster in the mold, the account known as Brooklyn Dad. (In this matter, these accounts were making common cause with MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon and Candace Owens, who have been similarly unable to let go of preconceived notions of the shooter’s motivations: in this case, that it was some larger, perhaps international, plot.)

This is ridiculous cope, and it should be treated as such. Healthy political movements do not baby their supporters by tying themselves into pretzels to explain away uncomfortable facts.

The reason the Groyper theory took off is obvious: It has enormous emotional power for liberals who themselves hated Kirk’s advocacy in a more quotidian way. But falling back on comforting fibs, like the notion that political violence is something only the “other guys” do, is like wrapping yourself in a psychological security blanket—easier, warmer, safer.

It’s also deeply unhealthy, particularly when carried out at scale. We know this because we’re currently living through it.

A few years ago, everyday Republicans were confronted with the unpleasant fact about their own side’s capacity for political violence when a mob of MAGA supporters stormed and ransacked the U.S. Capitol, attempting to overthrow the 2020 election. Instead of allowing this fact to shape and recolor their views of their own movement, Republicans retreated frantically into comforting and then increasingly outlandish lies: that Donald Trump would be exiled, that it was a one-off, that the real perpetrators had been Antifa insurgents, or, later, that federal law enforcement had concocted the whole thing. Having soothed themselves back to sleep, those same Republicans then awoke to discover that that appetite for violence had swallowed their entire party. Before you knew it, January 6th choirs were singing at political events, the rioters were pardoned, and Ashli Babbit was getting a full military funeral.

There are many obvious differences, of course, between the sort of political violence that takes place at organized scale and the sort carried out by a lone-wolf shooter. No major Democrat is rallying towards Robinson. And, again, it has to be noted, we still have very little insight into Robinson’s politics writ large.

But there are plenty of reasons for liberals to be concerned about the appetites of some in their own ranks too. One need only look back at the hagiography for Luigi Mangione in certain corners online.

A YouGov poll taken in the days immediately following Kirk’s death seemed to support that idea that political violence was growing more acceptable on the left. But what it really showed was something a bit more profound about our current moment: that those people out of power increasingly see it as a useful tool of opposition. Another 2023 survey found a third of Republicans agreeing with the statement that “patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” compared to only 13 percent of Democrats.

In this moment, this is what we must guard against, and what liberals in particular must be wary of. Reactionary politics can lead to violent outcomes. To ignore this fact based on the fear that acknowledging it would allow Trump and his Republicans to brand Democrats as crazed is to create a permission structure for more quiet support of violence to spread. If we mean what we say about absolute unacceptability of political violence, we cannot retreat behind these comforting fictions.¹

Instead, we should recognize that we have a particular duty to denounce violence when it originates on our own side, whatever side we are on. We should not speedrun through rote recitations of “all violence is bad” in order to skip to the part where we get mad that it’s harder for the side that just suffered violence to do the same. The goal of making such violence unthinkable requires nothing less.