Political Violence and the Reality Distortion Field

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-10-political-violence-reality-distortion-field-charlie-kirk/



There have been 47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year. The 47th took place at a Denver-area high school, 26 years after the Denver-area high school shooting in Columbine, where three people were shot on Wednesday, two of them students. The 46th school shooting of the year had just one victim. Charlie Kirk, the conservative campus activist and podcaster, was shot in the neck during a question-and-answer session at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He died shortly thereafter. The question he was being asked, right at that moment, was about the number of mass shootings in America.

I abhor political violence, as I do all violence. It is simply not an answer to political disagreement. When an assailant dressed like a police officer shot Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman in their own homes, it was tragic. When Kirk was killed by a long-range rifle during a public gathering, it was tragic. (When those two students are shot in Colorado, it’s also tragic, even as we’ve spent decades in this country pretending to ourselves that there’s nothing we can do about it.)

Political violence puts all of us who participate in politics, and indeed the very act of participating in politics, at risk. I am speaking at a public event next week and I am fully aware of the world we live in. And I shouldn’t have to think twice about my own vulnerability, nor should any conservative. My view of this is not very controversial or provocative. It has been shared by every Democratic political leader who has made a statement about this, at least the hundreds that I’ve seen. But what I say in this moment, or what any of those leaders say, doesn’t really matter when there’s an open struggle, in these moments of confusion, to redefine reality.

“The Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization,” said Sean Davis, a conservative activist who was merely echoing the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just a couple of weeks ago. “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination,” said writer Tim Urban. “The Left is the party of murder,” said incipient trillionaire Elon Musk on his personal microblogging site, X. This effort to amp up your political side in times of extreme emotion, to not just condemn the individual act but to slander all your political opposition at once, is the kind of thing you see in societies in open civil warfare.

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