Is the Kirk killing the spark of a new civil war?

Loud voices are calling for a crackdown on "the left"

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One of the most prominent figures in MAGA politics, Charlie Kirk, was shot dead yesterday while speaking at a university in Utah. Rather than restating the basic facts - which are plastered all over every media outlet - let me make some deeper points:

1. This is the most significant assassination of a major political figure in the United States since the 1960s. Kirk is little-watched or listened to outside of his own right-wing circles, but within those circles he was huge. Beyond huge. Tens of millions of Americans listened to his podcasts and watched his videos. They developed a para-social relationship - a one-sided emotional bond - in the way many of us do with our favorite media personalities. He wasn’t just a member of their tribe; he was someone they felt a personal connection to.

2. The authorities still don’t have the shooter. They first arrested an elderly white guy who is apparently known to local police, then they arrested an Arab-American in the audience who turned out to be a staffer at a right-wing think tank (nice racial profiling, guys). This suggests they the authorities are flailing.

3. I don’t know anything about guns. But Kirk was killed by a single shot to the jugular vein from about 200 meters away by a concealed shooter who escaped undetected. The shooter could have been anybody, but the skills to do something like that are not distributed evenly over the human population. This person knew what they were doing and that suggests a certain profile.

4. (I have watched the video of the shooting. Its wide availability massively increases the emotional resonance of the event. I strongly suggest that you do not view it, because it is truly, truly horrific).

5. Logically, you can look to two places to find a profile like that: foreign or domestic. Foreign would mean that this was the work of a state actor - perhaps Iran, which has planned and even carried out assassinations on U.S. soil many times before. Domestic would mean an American resident motivated by politics, grievance, grief, or something else. The manner of the killing reminds me of the 2002 DC sniper attacks, which were carried out by a veteran.

6. Figuring out who it was now falls to Kash Patel’s heavily politicized FBI. Since January, Patel has been busy degrading the capacity of the FBI to deal with sophisticated foreign or domestic threats. He seems to view FBI agents as glorified beat cops and has been directing their attention appropriately. At the same time, he’s been open to using the FBI to cracking down on the Trump regime’s domestic enemies.

7. This creates a scary situation. If Patel’s degrading of FBI capabilities were one reason that a foreign threat slipped through the net, he is going to have absolutely no incentive to pursue that lead. And he is going to have every incentive to shift the blame away from himself and frame this as the work of “the left”, justifying a crackdown.

8. What might that crackdown look like? The outlines of it are widely talked about in MAGA world, and were echoed by Trump yesterday. According to the MAGA narrative, this killing was the work of “the left”, which has “declared war on America”. “The left” is depicted as a radical terorrist organization consisting of the Democratic Party, liberal donors and activist groups, and media figures. To save America, these people must be arrested and their financial resources confiscated.

9. This is a blueprint for the end of competitive democratic politics in the United States of America. Will the Trump regime now try to make it happen?

10. And then there’s the specter of more violence. People often talk about “the next American Civil War”, but the Civil War is the wrong framework through which to view this. The Civil War was about two geographical regions of America warring on each other. Today’s divisions run within every state, every city, every community. The pattern of violence that this would produce is different - not rival armies meeting in the field, but widespread, decentralized civil violence.

11. Better analogies than the American Civil War are perhaps the Troubles in Ireland, or the Italian Years of Lead: an escalation into tit-for-tat killings involving a mixture of individual citizens, private militias, local police, and federal and state security forces. That is one possible future, either from this spark or the next one.

12. At times like this, it’s particularly difficult to take care of your own little piece of the world, to protect and nurture you and yours, and to remain calm. But for most of us, doing those things are the most concrete ways that we can help keep the world turning. We must hope that violence does not win, that death does not win, and that America and the world’s greatest years still lie ahead. In the meantime, we have to hold steady, however we can.