Audio only:
The tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk has shaken the nation, and highlights some horrible phenomena manifesting in our political landscape. Joe looks at some of the deeper problems and asks for all to pray for Charlie, his family and the shooter.
Transcript:
CLIP:
I go around universities and have challenging conversations because that’s what is so important to our country is to find our disagreements respectfully. Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence half and violence half and violence
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And I want to talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk because honestly it hit me harder than I thought it would. I’m not a super political guy, but I think it bodes poorly in two ways that I’m not hearing enough people talk about that I wanted to talk about. The first is the rise of what Kirk himself referred to as assassination culture, and I’ll explain what I mean by it and what I think he means by it. But basically it’s the idea that because other people’s ideas are bad, you can suppress them violently, including by murdering people for disagreeing with you. And so if you think about it this way, Kirk is a representative of the idea that you win by having better ideas. His whole shtick was, prove me wrong. And so he would make a case and he would challenge students on the various campuses.
He would go to argue against him, and then he would show them where he thought he was wrong. That’s one model that the marketplace of ideas exists, and the way to establish your ideas as the ones that are dominant is by debating them, by conversing, by using logic to show why that’s right. The other approach is the one that his as yet unnamed murderer used, which is if you don’t like what somebody is saying, you kill them, you use violence or you use other kinds of force to make sure they can’t share the ideas that they want, that you find controversial or objectionable. Now that’s controversial in any form. What role should the government play in censoring speech, for instance, but it’s in its most egregious form when it’s private individuals trying to decide for the entire society what people are and aren’t allowed to think.
This is our version of the Charlie Hebdo murders. Either you stand up to this and say whatever. I think of the ideas being defended. We need to be able to say a small group of people don’t get to just dictate this based on their own private vision of their own totalitarian idea of what is and is an acceptable speech. I’m reminded here of an event my mom told me about many years ago when I was a kid. She was talking about how when Martin Luther King was assassinated, it was announced over the radio and her brother had a friend over at the time, and the friend cheered for this. And my mom, even as a little kid, was horrified and aghast. How do you cheer for murder? How do you cheer for some family being left without a husband and father, whatever you think of the guy’s idea, if you are rooting for assassination and murder, you are not on the side of the good guys.
You’re just not. And yet we’re finding this at a shocking rate. The sheer number of times I’ve seen, even today I’m recording this, the evening of the assassination and virtually every Facebook or Twitter posts that I saw talking about it, regardless of where the speaker was coming from in the comments, people using their real names were going to criticize Kirk or to suggest that his assassination was justified to defend it in various ways. And Kirk is not that it matters, but Kirk is not some wild provocateur representing some radical lunatic fringe of the far right. He’s not. He was center right and his murder is being shared by a shocking number of people, and it is not a standalone event. I would suggest that the reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, I would suggest the Luigi Mangione murder of the healthcare CEOI would suggest various other actions of political violence where it’s not just that the political violence was happening, that’s bad enough, but that huge numbers of people are openly cheering for it with no any kind of a consequence for this extreme action. I mean, just look at this clip from SNL where just mentioning Luigi Mangione, the crowd starts cheering for a murderer who killed a random healthcare executive.
CLIP:
Luigi Mangione dropped. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Woo. You’re wooing for justice,
Joe:
Right? Whatever you think about politics, whatever you think about healthcare, and I think most people would say healthcare is a pretty messed up situation. Hopefully we can recognize that if you’re murdering people or if you’re applauding murder, you’re not one of the good guys. You’re just not how we resolve problems. Healthcare is a tricky thing to solve, and murder isn’t going to solve it for that matter. Politics is pretty tricky. Murder’s not going to solve that either. Kirk saw the rise of this as many of us have, and he called it out. He said, assassination culture is spreading on the left. And he doesn’t just claim this vaguely. He points to a study, which I’m going to look at in a second, which found that 48% of liberals said it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk, and 55% said the same about President Donald Trump.
And then he points to other instances with this, but the numbers really do speak for themselves. And those numbers are coming from a Rutger University report from the NCRI, the National Contagion Research Institute, and it gives the term assassination culture for this phenomenon. And sure enough, they find exactly what Kirk said that about half of self-identified liberals were supportive of assassinating. Elon Musk, a private individual, albeit a very rich one, a very influential one, and a majority, a slim majority, but still a majority thought it was justifiable at least a little bit to assassinate the president. When you get into the numbers, there’s about a 10% fringe, which is a pretty big fringe. That said it would be completely justifiable, like just openly. You are answering a survey and your answer is, I think we should kill the precedent. If anything, the alarming thing is based on how people normally respond to surveys that might actually be low.
So it, it’s alarming. And the researchers looked at some of the predictive factors for it because they found, obviously the people who were most likely to say that they’d be cool with murdering Musk were also most likely to say that they supported Luigi Mangione and would be okay with murdering Trump and so on. And what they found, this is part, you can go read the report yourself. The regression analysis found that support for assassinating Musk was predicted by a clear set of ideological and psychological factors. The strongest predictors are far left political identity and what they call left-wing authoritarianism. They explain the footnote, you can read more about how to define that, but it’s a political orientation suggesting that the justification of violence is underpinned by politics and ideology. They also found that the more time someone spent on Blue Sky, the kind of Twitter alternative, the more likely they were to justify political violence against figures on the right.
And then significantly, and I think this is worth stressing, there’s a psychological dimension to this as well, that external locus of control, the belief that one’s outcomes are shaped by outside forces was linked to greater support for violence, suggesting that feelings of powerlessness may fuel justification for extreme action. They conclude these findings support the hypothesis that assassination culture is not random, but structured, ideological and amplified in specific digital environments. And I’m glad they mentioned digital environments because I do think online spaces where you are on the one hand maybe using your real name, but on the other hand you’re behind a screen and there’s a little more anonymity and you just are more isolated, it makes it more likely to dehumanize other people. It becomes easier regardless of ideology to get in a place where you don’t treat people in a way you would in a face-to-face encounter.
And I think there are a lot of things going on here. There are political things, there are psychological things, there are environmental factors and technology and all of this. I don’t think most of the people saying absolutely horrific stuff right now online would go to the Kirk family at a funeral and laugh in their face or tell the kids they’re glad their father’s dead or anything. I think most of the people are at their worst here online, and we should recognize that, but also recognize that these online spaces are making people worse, like actively demonstrably, measurably, making people worse people. And so if you find yourself in that bubble, leave it, delete blue sky, stop associating with pro murder psychos and become a better person by touching grass. But additionally, that external locus of control thing, part of that is psychological, right? People who feel like their life is out of control are much more likely to adopt a sort of locus of external control, external locus of control, excuse me.
The idea that they are not in control of their own destiny. It’s all just outside factors. But there’s a political dimension to this as well, because a culture of victimhood increases this feeling like you’re not in control of anything, the corporations or the government or the other political party or whomever, they’re just controlling your entire life, that you’re just a helpless victim that’s powerful at driving political support, but it’s incredibly psychologically damaging to convince someone that they have no control over their life, that this culture of victimhood is really harmful to oneself because why try if you have no control over your life, but also as you see it, it promotes this kind of desperate violent backlash where you just want to lash out against the system because you feel helpless. So a good bit of research on this was a book that has been incredibly influential in my own life called The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Loff and Jonathan Het and I have found this book very helpful in how we parent.
That’s a whole other thing. But Greg Loff works for Fire, which is like a free speech organization on campuses or originally that’s what it started out as. It’s more than just campuses now. And he described how in the old days, he and the students would stand up to administrations which had really burdensome political correctness, free speech codes, and they would fight for the first amendment rights of students on campus and so on. And he described around 2015 this shift where suddenly students wanted to be protected from bad ideas, where suddenly they wanted the administration to help them. They weren’t pushing for more freedom and free expression. They were pushing for less, and he was alarmed by this. And so he did a lot of digging in the research to find out what they could about where this was all coming from and fantastic, phenomenal, fascinating book, which is very heavily data-driven. And one of the ideas that they cite as really problematic is this idea that words are violence, but that violence is safety. And they give an example of Milo Yono, a much more provocative right wing figure who tried to come to Berkeley and he was shut by a violent protest.
CLIP:
This YouTube video shows a woman named Katrina Heimer getting attacked by masked demonstrators last February 1st,
Overnight mayhem on campus, the University of California Berkeley erupting in flames as over a thousand, came out to protest an appearance by the self-described right-wing internet troll. Milo Yoli, we’ll not tolerate racism or sexism or hate crimes and violence. He’s a
Joe:
Fascist, and Berkeley did not welcome him. But the issue wasn’t new that a massive number of Berkeley students came out to protest free speech, to fight against free speech, but that they then defended these wild actions of violently rioting and hitting people in the face and destroying property and all of lighting fires and fighting with the police and all of this stuff just to avoid hearing a conservative make a case on campus. They defended this in some really fascinating ways. So in the Daily Californian, Desmond Meley, who was one of the students argued that if you dim the actions that shut down anolis, his literal hate speech, you condone his presence, his actions and his ideas. You care more about broken windows than broken bodies. So you can’t be okay with somebody else having free speech unless you agree with their ideas. And if you defend his right to speak, you must not care about broken bodies.
You care more about property rights and human rights. And Mely goes on to say, I can’t impeach Trump and I can’t stop the alt-right from recruiting nationwide. I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist in my hometown. So it’s time for those waiting in the center to pick a side. Now, what’s striking about this is how insane it’s, and I say that very bluntly, but literally these are what are politely called cognitive distortions. This author’s view of reality is wildly at odds with real life, and that’s exactly what Luke and off and height point out, taken at face value, he seems to be engaging in a number of cognitive distortions. First is catastrophizing. If Milo is alive to speak, there’s going to be broken bodies on our side. I might lose my right to exist. Therefore, violence is justified because it is self-defense.
Catastrophizing. You probably know from just the word itself is when you treat ordinary setbacks as catastrophes, and this is actually associated with an external locus of control, something doesn’t just go bad. It’s like, oh, this is it. This is the end. I’m ruined, I’m toast. The more you buy into that extreme kind of thinking and understand internet, like social media, et cetera, really amplifies that. It’s always like this is the biggest election, this is the biggest. Everything hangs in the balance here. So if you lose now, you don’t even expect to have an America in four years of that kind of thinking. And you see it on both sides. This is a phenomenon not just of a political party, but that catastrophizing is really psychologically damaging. This is the kind of thing that wrecks you, whether you do this in your own life or whether you do it in your political life.
And here we see a pretty clear example of an author so afraid that someone might come on campus and give a different, maybe even controversial, maybe even extreme, maybe even insane kind of presentation to the students. And that’s going to somehow result in broken bodies as if Berkeley is this close to becoming some fanatically, rightwing powerhouse that all it takes is that one little match and that’ll light the whole thing that is wildly at odds with reality. Like any measurable, I mean just how many broken bodies were there last time Milo spoke, and if there were any, how many were caused by protestors, that kind of thing. And again, you don’t have to like Milo, this is literally not about the politics of any of these speakers at all. It’s about people who hear a slightly, slightly or even extremely different point of view and react by thinking that this is the end of the world and they have to fight back with violence.
They go on to say, the author also engages in dichotomous thinking. If you condemn my side’s violence, that means you condone. OUIs is ideas. You must pick a side. You’re either with us or against us. Life is a battle between good people and evil people, and if you disagree with us, you’re one of the evil people. And it’s worth pointing out that these ways of thinking are really seductive. They’re really attractive, this kind of vision of reality where you are the righteous one on a crusade. Number one, it fills a moral void. We’re going to talk about that in a second. We have a longing to be morally upright, and even people who are godless, even people who reject religion still have a deep seated need for morality. And so they can easily become moralists. They can become as big a moralist as the worst Pharisee as the worst puritan.
And so they can have this incredibly doctorate position that you have to, if you are two degrees to the right of them, then you’re just like a horrible fascist and you need to be destroyed, literally physically fought against because you are a threat to civilization. Look at the reaction to JK Rowling, for example. She is nobody’s idea of a right winger, but she’s slightly to the right of her critics and they treat her as if she is literally like Ava Braun. It’s absolutely wild. It is the tyranny of small differences. But in this world of this strict dichotomous thinking, you either are on the same page on all issues or you’re evil and have to be violently put down, that’s a dangerous worldview to have. I was struck, so I showed earlier this flyer from the University of Washington for the Prove Me Wrong tour that Kirk was on.
And in response to it, some students put together their own flyer that said The University of Washington is endangering students because they invited Kirk to speak on campus, and this free Palestine group said in response, tell the administration to cancel this event and keep students who are practicing their first amendment rights safe. The irony, the sheer unintentional, delicious irony that you are going to try to suppress a speaker from coming on campus just because you don’t like their views and you’re going to falsely claim that you’re physically in danger even though there’s literally no evidence of that. While cling yourself in the first amendment, while you actively fight against the first Amendment, there is just something rich and ironic about that. And if it weren’t so serious, it would be pretty funny. Now, in Kirk’s case, I mean he’s just not some fringe figure. He simply is not that he was not saying, let’s go on a murderous campaign. The worst thing I’ve seen people point out is him defending the Second Amendment, even though he forthrightly acknowledges that in a world with liberal gun laws, more people are going to die.
CLIP:
Now we must also be real. We must be honest with the population having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That’s a price you get rid of driving. You’d have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services, is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You can significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home
By having more armed guards in front of schools. Yes, yes, we should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one. You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s dribble, but I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.
Joe:
But the issue here seems to me like number one, whatever you think of his position on guns, and I recently argued for more gun control in response to the Minneapolis shooting, whatever you think of his position on, he’s right number one, no one has a plan to get to zero guns. And number two, there are always these trade-offs. If you said, I want to make sure there are no murders in America, you could do, for instance, a mass incarceration of all young men, young men, wildly, disproportionately, make up the number of murderers. So you could incarcerate men from say the age of 14 till 40. That would be a huge restriction of liberty, wildly unconstitutional, but no one could deny it would lower the murder rate. You could have mandatory life sentences for anyone who’s ever convicted of any crime and you don’t have any repeat criminals in that case, again, huge restriction on liberty, but it would save lives.
And Kirk’s point it seems to me is we are always making these trade-offs. Even something as simple as your freedom to go 65 or 75 on the highway, that kills more people than if you went 55 or if you went zero because you just walked. I mean, hopefully you’re walking above zero, but you get to the point there would be no automotive deaths if the government outlawed cars. But we’ve decided there’s got to be some balance. And that balance shouldn’t be extreme. You shouldn’t say, let’s do 120 in a school zone, but you should recognize that everyone’s slider between more liberty and more safety is somewhere. This is why I think Colina of the American mind is really helpful because they make the point. That is when you’ve become indoctrinated with this idea that you need to be kept safe from everything that you start to think, you have to be kept safe even from things like ideas.
So I’ll refer you to that book, and I would instead say the response to this has to be to strongly defend the idea that we want to win in the marketplace of ideas. We want to defend what we believe, not by violently imposing it, not by murdering people who disagree with us, but by making good arguments. To that end, the original video I was going to have today, I already released it on Patreon before all of this happened, was about eight conversational moves to help win converts. There are actual ways, even if you’re feeling like this is overwhelming, like the other side is just so extreme and irrational, you can’t even talk to them. Rest assured that that is not true. There are people who are emotionally wired in such a way it is very hard to talk to them right now, but it is nevertheless true that you can speak with other people in ways that are productive in moving past this kind of dichotomous thinking and moving past this kind of catastrophizing.
Don’t fall into those things yourself in response to seeing the ugly results of people falling into that. So I’ll refer you to that video next week. I think I’ll probably release it on Tuesday. And I just say that to say, don’t despair. Don’t let this make you think that there’s no hope, that you just have to respond to violence with violence that is not the answer. And that kind of thinking, that kind of us versus them mentality, the kind of we are doomed and we need to fight back. That is exactly the kind of cognitive set of distortions that get us into this mess. But I think there is even bigger than the whole assassination culture problem. And it is a real measurable, observable, and worsening problem is this idea that in the words of Jason Whitlock, who I know is echoing a longstanding phrase that goes back at least to the 1940s Christ or chaos.
Jason Whitlock, if you don’t know, is actually a sports commentator, but he also does a fair amount of cultural commentary on the side, and his reaction was a beautiful one. He just said, we all must repent and surrender it’s Christ or chaos. It’s the only solution. And I love that he used his position of some public prominence to proclaim that because I think it’s absolutely true and I think I can defend it even to someone who’s not Christian. And here’s how I would do that. I would start by pointing out er McIntyre’s observations in his book After Virtue, he in 1981 is describing the state of contemporary moral discourse in his time. And I think 45 years later almost we find the exact same problems that he was observing before I was even born, before Kirk was even born. McIntyre said, the most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements.
In other words, we have a whole moral vocabulary. People have very strong moral sensibilities about right and wrong, and we use that a lot in debates. And the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. In other words, we have these highly contentious, morally charged debates that don’t go anywhere. He says, I don’t just mean by this that they’d go on and on and on, although they do, but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There’s no resolution to the debates. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement and our culture. And when you think about that, that we have all these political fights and he sometimes seems like if we just can come up with a better political strategy, we’ll just resolve this one. Everyone will agree and go home, and it just never happens.
And he gives three examples about war, about taxes and about abortion, and all of them make as much sense in 2025 as they did in 1991. For instance, on abortion, he imagines three different people, each one making moral claims and coming to different positions, but significantly each one making moral claims that seem to logically follow. So the first person says, well, everybody has certain rights over his or her own person, including his or her own body. Okay, that’s a moral claim. And they follow from that. At this stage, the embryo is essentially part of the mother’s body. So the mother has a right to make the decision, therefore, abortion is morally permissible and ought to be allowed by law. You can disagree with that, I do, but it makes sense. It’s internally coherent. But then take a second person who basically appeals to the golden rule and says, I couldn’t have willed that my mother had aborted me, so therefore I can’t support a general right to abortion.
On the other hand, the golden rule doesn’t automatically prove that I need to see that abortion should be outlawed, just that I wouldn’t want it to happen to me, so therefore I shouldn’t want it to happen to somebody else. But then the third person says, well, murder is wrong. It’s the taken of an innocent life. An embryo is about as innocent as you’re going to possibly get, and therefore this is infanticide and i’s murder, and therefore it’s not only morally wrong but should be legally prohibited. Now, the point there is not to resolve the abortion debate. The point there is to show that each of these people is making internally consistent moral claims, but they end up in three very different positions. Now, Magir spends the rest of the book kind of figuring out how do we get here? And his basic argument is, in the old days, once upon a time, we had a shared moral framework, which he identifies with Aristotle and the thinkers that come after him and tell the enlightenment.
And then you have beginning with Renee Descartes, the overthrow of the Aristotelian framework, that you have this virtue morality and whatever you say about it, it was a shared moral foundation and it had been built upon and challenged and so on in some ways, particularly by Christians. But it was a generally accepted framework. We had a means by which we could resolve problems when they arose, but beginning with Descartes, as that starts to be challenged, we hold on to some vestiges of that moral system. We continue to use the language of it, but we no longer believe in it, at least not in a culturally wide kind of perspective. And so we have all these different moral systems that are making contradictory claims while using the same language. And so this gets back and tiredness suggests that we’re at this point where we need to choose Nietzsche or Aristotle.
In other words, we need to go back to traditional morality or we need to just take a Nietzsche view that all morality is really just a cover for will to power. I win by imposing my own will on other people. And I think that you have in the Kirk assassination, those two worldviews side by side, someone arguing. Kirk is an evangelical Christian who was committed to traditional moral values, and he was faced off against someone who decided to achieve will to power by murdering someone who he thought he could get away with murdering. And so far has, that’s the contrast that Nietzsche verse Aristotle. But that is ultimately the contrast of Christ verse chaos. And for this, I would turn to Pope Saint John Paul II in his evangelian Vita JP two says, when we’re trying to understand the roots of this fight between the culture of life and the culture of death, we ultimately have to dig into the tragedy being experienced by modern man, namely the eclipse of the sense of God and of man.
That is we’re losing sight of who God is, but in the same time, we are losing sight of who we are as humans. And that makes sense if who we are is ultimately understood in relation to God. One of the reasons murder is wrong is because your neighbor is made in the image of God. They’re created by God. Their life belongs to God and to them, and therefore it’s wrong of you to take their life. If they’re merely organic byproducts, mindless evolution, it’s not clear where their human rights are coming from. No other part of creation that is just organically and accidentally brought into being has any great set of rights. No one complains, for example, when you use antibacterial soap that you’re killing a lot of living creatures, although you are similarly when you call an exterminator. Similarly, when you eat meat, these things impose your will upon lower creatures in a way that is frankly violent and not particularly morally complex or problematic.
Mediating a bit more so. But nevertheless, the basic framework, most people are okay with all three of those. If murder is just a fourth in that series, if human beings are in the basic category of animals or of lower life forms, then it is hard to see where the human rights are coming from. So we lose sight in losing sight of God, we lose sight of man as well. And so John Paul II suggests this becomes a sort of sad and vicious cycle when the sense of God is lost. There is also a tendency to lose the sense of man of his dignity and his life. And this leads to as he warns violations of the moral law, especially in this serious matter of respect for human life and his dignity, that in turn further darkens us in our capacity to discern God’s living and saving presence to this.
I would suggest the best way out of the cycle is just to fight back against it, to recognize that God exists to recognize that you have a dignity and so does your neighbor. And so even does your neighbor who’s making a fool of himself in supporting mocking valorizing in the face of the Kirk murders. So I don’t know. Those were the things I wanted to share, I hope is helpful for somebody. I’m interested in your own take on the subject, or particularly if you’ve seen very good or effective reactions that you think will help people work through the complicated set of emotions that come up in a situation like this. I know Megyn Kelly had Father Mike Schmitz on her show, and he was, I thought, fantastic, and speaking to the legitimate place for anger, but anger that leads to a healthy reaction. So I’d check that out if you want something else to see. Otherwise, please do me a favor, keep the repose of the soul of Charlie Kirk in your prayers as well as his family. I will actually link to a video that I did earlier tonight explaining why it is we pray for those who have died. So if you’ve got theological questions about that, I’ll answer that in another space. Alright, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.