American Carnage

The Violence We Accept and The Violence We Don't

Yesterday, Charlie Kirk was killed. Assassinated. In public. On camera. Brutal, intimate, and inescapable. His family saw it. His fans saw it. The whole country saw it replayed before anyone had time to catch their breath.

Within hours, two Americas responded.

From the Oval Office, Trump anointed Kirk a "martyr for truth and freedom" and vowed to "find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity." On Fox News, Jesse Watters screamed: "They are at war with us! And what are we going to do about it?" On the House floor, Rep. Orrin Onder declared the left "pure evil," comparing them to Stalin and Pol Pot, insisting "they literally will kill those with whom they disagree."

Meanwhile, on CNN, David Axelrod quoted Aeschylus about “the awful grace of God.” Ezra Klein published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” — about a man who cited Leviticus 20:13 as “God’s perfect law,” a verse prescribing death for gay people. A man who also said gun deaths were simply part of the cost of freedom. And that’s just a glimpse. He spent years glorifying violence and calling for repression — a record long enough to fill whole articles. If you aren’t familiar with Kirk please read this piece.

One side is preparing for war. The other is busy helping polish the memory of their martyr.

The right is not simply mourning Kirk. They are building a mythology. They are using his corpse as fuel for a narrative where they are noble victims and any action is now justified in self-defense.

It is a deliberate, calculated lie.

The data is indisputable: over the past two decades, virtually all lethal political violence against officials has come from the right. They are accusing the left of the very violence they themselves commit. This is projection as political strategy.

This isn't even original. When Nazi street thug Horst Wessel got killed in 1930 over a dispute about rent and a woman, Goebbels turned him into a martyr. "A Christian Socialist!" Goebbels proclaimed. "A man who calls out: Come to me, I shall redeem you!" The Nazis named military units after him, made his song their anthem, turned his grave into a shrine.

They knew then what Trump knows now: martyrs are more useful than living men. The dead can't contradict the mythology you build around them.

Their lie works because they're tapping into a truth liberals seem unwilling to admit. Violence IS the language of American power. The far right speaks it fluently.

We tell ourselves violence is never the answer while simultaneously accepting it as always the answer. From our foreign policy to how we attempt to prevent crime to how we settle our traffic disputes, violence is always an answer for America.

We ran torture programs. John Yoo, the guy who wrote the torture memos, later said that the president could order the crushing of a child's testicles to extract information from their parents. That same guy now teaches at Berkeley. Don't tell me we're better than this. This is exactly who we are.

I've seen it firsthand. In 2019, I visited Border Patrol detention centers with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Before we arrived, ProPublica exposed a Facebook group—9,500 Border Patrol agents posting rape memes about her, jokes about dead migrants. When we showed up, those online threats became real. Men with machetes, guns, dogs. We asked for protection. They refused—said those people had their "rights."

That was six years ago. Six years of this escalating violence.

Today now we're supporting a genocide in Gaza. We're blowing up Venezuelans in “drug boats”. We're assassinating by drone, starving by sanctions, policing by chokehold. Violence isn't an exception in the US it's our go-to.

It seeps into everything. I live in East Tennessee. Go to Walmart and count the pistols on hips. The campus where Kirk was killed lets students open carry weapons. We have five thousand mass shootings in a decade. School shootings as routine as fire drills.

America doesn't run on Dunkin. It runs on death.

The liberal elite live in a sanitized bubble where violence happens to other people—in prisons, at borders, in poor communities, in foreign countries. They dispatch violence through policy and budgets, then retreat to neighborhoods or TV studios where the blood never touches their shoes.

They actually believe we can maintain civility through collapse. That through economic devastation and what Trump correctly called "American Carnage," we'll somehow keep having reasoned debates and respecting norms.

Meanwhile, the fascist movement understands what liberals refuse to admit: violence is already here. It's always been here. They're not introducing it—they're just willing to name it and use it.

When violence happens to them, they make martyrs. When they commit it, they call it patriotism. They know liberals will respond with op-eds and ancient Greek poetry while they respond with actual force.

You cannot de-escalate with a movement that sees escalation as winning. You cannot quote Aeschylus to people preparing for war. You're bringing poetry to a gunfight.

This is the terrifying truth the fascists aren't playing by different rules. They're playing by the only rules America has ever actually had. They're just not pretending otherwise.

While we deny this and so many other realities, while we insist we're better than this, they're organizing around it. They're using our denial as a weapon against us.

The same people who vote for drone strikes and police budgets cry out that violence has no place in politics. They think they can keep it siloed—unleash it over there, keep it from seeping over here.

They're delusional. Violence doesn't respect your zip code or your graduate degree.

Charlie Kirk's death is an atrocity. But it's not a break in the pattern. It is the pattern.

This is not a call for more violence. It is a call to stop pretending we are not already under attack. It is a demand that we stop the suicidal practice of unilateral disarmament in a political war. It means relentlessly confronting their lies with the truth and treating their project not as an opposition to be debated, but as a danger to be defeated with every legal and political tool we have.

Charlie Kirk won't be the last. Not until we are honest about who we are, and stop bringing civility to a war we’re pretending isn’t happening.