On Political Violence

Tonight, people from across the political spectrum should be joining together to condemn political violence, no matter who the target is. It’s never acceptable.

But because we live in a divided America, it’s unlikely that will happen. Some of the people who are speaking out about the death of Charlie Kirk tonight didn’t have the same outrage in the wake of the murder of a state legislator and her husband and the attempted murder of another legislator and his wife in Minnesota, targets of political violence, just this past June. In the early hours following those tragic events, right-wing personality Laura Loomer and Utah Senator Mike Lee both suggested, without basis, that the shooter came from the political left. Utah’s Governor, who expressed sorrow and outrage, mentioned politically targeted attacks against both President Trump and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, but did not, at least in the portion that was aired, mention the more recent murders of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, and the shooting of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman. [Update: I’m told by a number of people who heard the Governor’s full comments that he did mention the shooting in Minnesota, just not the names of the victims. My apologies for the error.]

It’s tempting to resort to deep outrage here—Republicans are only upset when their own are the targets. We are no longer in an era when “when they go low, we go high” works. Charlie Kirk made frequent, negative comments about people simply because they were Jewish, gay, transgender, and Black. But there is a floor here below which our country cannot be maintained. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

We do not have to condone the way Republicans have abandoned principles to express them for ourselves. We can believe political differences should be debated, even vehemently, without resort to violence. When we decide violence is legitimate, or at least to be tolerated as part of our political discourse, everything falls apart.

I have not lost my absolute disdain for Republicans who refused to condemn attacks like those on Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, the Minnesota legislators and others, merely because they were Democrats. If there is a floor for democracy, it is condemning political violence, and these people unambiguously flunk that test. They make their hypocrisy bare when they condemn attacks on Trump and tonight’s violent murder of Charlie Kirk, but not on people who they don’t consider part of their tribe. But here’s the thing: This is not about them, it’s about us.

I understand that many of you will disagree with me. It’s a difficult moment. We should be able to air all of our views on it, and I hope you will leave yours in the comments so we can read them. We can find wisdom in views we don’t agree with if we’re willing to listen. But for me, I continue to believe we should condemn this violence, even if, in the same breath, we condemn people who only condemn attacks on people in their own political party. That’s because rejecting violence isn’t about Donald Trump or MAGA. It’s about who we are and who we want to be. I, perhaps foolishly, refuse to let them make me change what I believe in.

The night of the Minnesota shooting, after writing to you about Loomer and Lee’s shameful reactions I noted, “Reducing this to politics misses the key point: political violence is never acceptable, no matter who perpetrates it or who the victim is. But that sentiment does not seem to hold on the Republican side of the aisle.” After we learned the shooter in Minnesota was aligned with Trump, I wrote, “But that really isn’t the point. The point is that political violence is never acceptable. Even if—perhaps especially if—it is perpetrated by people whose views are aligned with your own, you should call it out. It is never acceptable. Period.” That doesn’t change for me when Charlie Kirk is the victim, even though I have nothing but disgust for his views.

Rejecting political violence in this moment doesn’t mean giving Republicans who have refused to condemn it in the past a pass. How do we do that? Consider the reactions Democrats had to Mike Lee’s indecent comments after the Minnesota attacks. Lee called the shooter a “Marxist” (he wasn’t) and posted this on social media, even though the shooter’s roommate said he was a fan of Infowars and would have been upset if he knew people thought he was a Democrat:

Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith reportedly pulled Lee out of a meeting to express her feelings about his social media posts. Her chief of staff, Ed Shelleby, sent a deeply moving letter to Senator Lee’s office. Shelleby wrote candidly from a place of “enormous grief,” decrying the jokey memes Lee had posted on social media over the weekend as painful, and asking, “Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?”

The echo from the end of the McCarthy Era is unambiguous. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who falsely alleged that our institutions had been infiltrated by communists and made baseless, reckless attacks on public figures' character and patriotism, was brought down when a lawyer stopped one of his attacks by asking in a public hearing, “Have you no sense of decency?”

That’s the question we need to ask right now. We don’t have to abandon our own beliefs to do it. We should stick to them. We can condemn political violence and demand an answer from the people who are transactional about when it is wrong, only condemning it when it impacts one of their own. Charlie Kirk has a family, but so does Paul Pelosi and so did Melissa and Mark Hortman.

“Have you no sense of decency?” is the right response to these people, the people whose sense of humanity is constrained by their politics.

As of the time I’m writing to you, law enforcement has not yet offered a motive for Charlie Kirk’s murder. It’s easy to jump ahead with assumptions that it was about his politics, but it’s important to wait until the evidence is assembled before jumping to conclusions. But you don’t have to know more than we already do to know that it is wrong to kill people for their political views. We can stand for decency.

We’re in this together,

Joyce