It’s been about three rough weeks since the assassination of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk. In that time we’ve seen the president declare “antifa” to be a domestic terrorist organization, the so-called “secretary of war” excoriate generals for being fat at a meeting where he and the president also declared their desire for war on Americans, and a bunch of Kirk’s former colleagues, the usual rogue’s gallery of Fox News hosts and Daily Wire podcasters, remember their bloodlust for anyone who cracks wise at Kirk’s demise—or even just reminds us of who Kirk was, in his own words, presented with little to no commentary. Briefly, we saw something fairly extraordinary: the state, through FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, actively suppressing the speech of comedian and late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who made an offhand remark about the way right wingers were scrambling to prove Kirk’s assassin, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, wasn’t one of them. (Of course, it’s only extraordinary if you ignore all the other ways the state has suppressed speech in this country since January.)
One of the more disappointing aspects of the last month was watching all the liberals—and I don’t mean that as a hyperbole, I mean nearly every single liberal—bend over backwards to not simply offer condolences to the Kirk family or call for a national temperature drop, but to help sanctify Kirk, to hold him and the organization he fronted, Turning Points USA, up as the exemplar of how our national politics should be, instead of speaking plainly about how they were major contributors to the overwhelming sense of polarization and divide that permeates the US. No liberal commentator better signifies this attempt at whitewashing Kirk’s legacy from the center-left than Ezra Klein, a podcaster and columnist at The New York Times who published his eulogy for the late provocateur, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” less than 24 hours after Kirk’s death.
“The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence,” Klein wrote. “To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.”
Plenty have rebutted Klein with Kirk’s own language, citing the many times over the years Kirk said things like sacrifices needed to be made to protect the Second Amendment to the Constitution, or how he hated the concept of empathy. What I’ve seen less of is any acknowledgement that, for many, politics is violence. When we see the Trump administration couch what they’re doing—terrorizing neighborhoods and communities, brutally separating men, women and children from their families, throwing them in concentration camps, alienating them from legal representation, sending them to random countries around the world, deploying the military to make sure nobody can fight back without significant escalation—in the language of law and policy, that is violence. When the president himself takes up the position of head retributionist, proclaims that he hates his political opponents and enemies, demands that mere ideas such as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” be grounds for investigating someone as though they were a terrorist, that is violence.
It’s not that Klein doesn’t recognize this; it’s that he wants a piece. After listing off other high-profile instances of political violence in the past handful of years, Klein waxes envious of Kirk’s apparent ability to break the left’s “hold on the hearts and minds of college students,” and expresses a desire to shape liberalism more in Kirk’s image. He cites the first episode of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast, on which Kirk was a guest, where the Governor told the pundit that “his son was a huge fan.” Rather than find this in any way appalling, Klein is starstruck: “What a testament to Kirk’s project.”
Klein tut-tuts the left for doing what he won’t: putting Kirk’s assassination into the context of Kirk’s own worldview. To give himself maximum centrist credit, he also tut-tuts the right, for… “[turning Kirk’s] murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time.” At no point does Klein seem to recognize or even care that these reactions are not in any way similar to each other, or that the desire for violence seems to be—seems to have been, is usually always—lopsided in a decidedly rightward direction. The prospect of a world consisting of and constrained by political violence horrifies Klein, but his focus on the sporadic attempts on public figures’ lives throughout history and not on the myriad legally-justified heinous actions of the state, makes this a selective horror.
And then he gives the game away: “American politics has sides. There’s no use pretending it doesn’t,” he writes. “But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project—we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment.”
Again: “antifa” is now supposed to be a terrorist ideology in the eyes of the state.
As most know at this point, “antifa” is a shortening of antifascist. The work of antifascists over the years, certainly over the last decade but going back farther, has always been with the aim of community defense. This is because fascists are active dangers to the communities they live in, not just passive “thought criminals” as some on the right like to claim. They believe in a politics of mass exclusion, and they have an ethos of real, pure violence. When left to their own devices, unrestrained fascists will harm people in their communities, especially those they believe should be excluded from (white) society. When ICE permits agents to mask up to obscure their identities, they do so—and this was admitted by department heads in a recent district court case—to prevent doxing. Because they are a danger to any community they’re in, and they know it.
Antifascism is terrorism, according to the government, not just because antifascists defend communities by outing and confronting fascists, but also because of [checks notes] their general beliefs about society and the state. Antifascism is a tendency of a broader antiauthoritarian left, of anarchists and socialists who see the broad curve of history not as though it inexorably trends towards justice but rather as it is: easily diverted towards oppression if nobody intervenes to stop oppressors.
When we are accused of espousing “extremism” on immigration, race, and gender, our positions are in reality radically simple: no one is illegal; everyone should be able to freely move across the land; white supremacy is a fundamentally destructive ideology, and multiculturalism is an unvarnished good; trans people are fucking real and deserve to live happy lives regardless of how anyone else feels about it. When we’re accused of displaying “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” we can’t help but remember all the ways in which these supposed pillars of our society have been used as bludgeons. We see the way women and children suffer under laws restricting reproductive health and divorce, we see the way queer people are suppressed by laws aimed at upholding the narrowest view of morality, and we see the way religion has been used to justify everything from the colonization of this entire fucking continent to the suppression of basic science education.
Are we anti-American? We oppose the American state and want its people—along with all people, around the world—to live in peace and freedom. Are we anti-capitalist? We want an end to all systems of domination and control, and capitalism represents one of the largest nexuses of control there is. Are we anti-Christianity? We are against forms of Christianity that promote domination and subjugation. We want people to flourish, regardless of who they are. We want to return siblings and cousins and husbands and wives and partners to their families. We want to free as many as possible from the absurd stranglehold of this and any future presidential administration that seeks to polish their jackboots with our tongues.
According to Ezra Klein, not only is this domestic extremism, it’s also not doing politics the right way.
Good! May all gormless, simpering powerbrokers-in-waiting soon find themselves without purpose!