Let's Talk About Political Violence

A few words from Jessica & Kylie

It’s been a scary 24 hours, and I know we’re all worried about the impact Charlie Kirk’s murder will have on our already-volatile political landscape. It doesn’t help that conservatives are already calling for retribution: Elon Musk tweeted, “our choice is to fight or die.” Misogynist influencer Andrew Tate called for “civil war,” while pundit Matt Walsh said, “We’re up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell.” Fox News host Jesse Watters even threatened on air that they “are going to avenge Charlie’s death.”

It’s a lot. That’s why we wanted to check in with you all, and start a conversation. Both Kylie and I shared a few words below, and are heading over right now to a live chat that we’ll keep open until the end of the day:

Please join us if you want to commiserate, rage, share ideas—or just be worried together. Live chats are feature for paying members, so if you haven’t upgraded your subscription yet and want to join, click here.

Abortion, Every Day’s daily report will return tomorrow. Thanks to all of you for being here and fighting alongside us. -Jessica

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By Jessica Valenti

Years ago, I wrote about the issue I had with ‘man-hater’ being used as a slur. It struck me as ridiculous that in a world where women were regularly abused, raped, and killed by men, the mere act of not liking them for it was the true offense. That’s what I’m finding hardest about the national conversation around Kirk’s death: conservatives are policing people’s reactions as if we don’t live in a country where political violence is the norm.

After all, when a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that’s political violence. It’s political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives.

We live with this kind of violence, we experience it, every single day. We just don’t call it ‘political’. To conservatives, it’s not even violence.

That selective empathy, I think, so many Americans are having a difficult time with the Republican demand that we loudly perform horror and outrage over Kirk’s death—as horrible and outrageous as it was.

Conservatives’ insistence that we remember Kirk’s humanity comes in the same breath that they refuse to recognize our own. And they’re more interested in our loud condemnations than they are our actual lives.

As I wrote yesterday, no one wants this. It’s a nightmare, all of it. But let’s not pretend that the nation’s reactions to Kirk’s death are more important or dangerous than the policies he supported—or that the real issue is whether or not we have something nice to say.

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By Kylie Cheung

Hours after Charlie Kirk’s death was confirmed, the perpetrator—and their politics—remained unknown. But that didn’t stop Donald Trump from sharing a bizarre video from the Oval Office blaming ‘the left’ for inciting political violence by calling Nazis, well, Nazis. This language, Trump suggested, puts a target on conservatives’ backs. Meanwhile, Kirk himself has equated abortion with the Holocaust; anti-abortion leaders and some of the most powerful government officials in the nation constantly smear abortion providers and patients as murderers. Consequently, violence targeting abortion clinics has surged in recent years. Just earlier this summer, a Minnesota politician and leader on reproductive rights was assassinated over her politics.

In the coming days, the right will relentlessly impress upon us that Kirk’s death is some extreme aberration of mounting political violence, all thanks to so-called left-wing extremists.

But Kirk’s death is only aberrant in so far as most political violence in this country and around the world victimizes women, people of color, queer and trans people, immigrants, children, and certainly Palestinians in Gaza, subjected to daily, live-streamed U.S.-funded atrocities. This violence is overwhelmingly inflicted not by leftist social media users, but the government—which is currently, largely run by far-right zealots.

The Trump administration has sicced the National Guard on liberal cities that Trump dislikes; ICE is disappearing people in the streets, sometimes merely for their political beliefs; and, most relevant to our work at AED, women and children are being tortured and killed by abortion bans and jailed for miscarriages. As much as the right obsessively reminds us that Kirk was a father survived by young daughters, he adamantly expressed his wish that should his toddler daughters ever be impregnated by rape, that they be forced to birth their rapists’ babies. Schoolchildren in the U.S. and Palestinian children in Gaza are routinely victimized by horrific, bone-chilling gun violence.

Political violence is all around us—and time and again, Kirk wielded his massive influence over our government to push for it. As IfNotNow’s Max Berger put it, referencing Kirk’s support for Jan. 6 rioters, “If you hate political violence, you should hate Charlie Kirk.” Kirk has justified Hiroshima and the genocide in Gaza; he’s argued in defense of everything from segregation to unregulated access to guns, enabling frequent school shootings like the one that ultimately claimed his life.

But we’re now implicitly being told by most of our leaders and the president that Kirk’s murder is the only political violence that matters. Some of the same right-wing voices that recently called for Greta Thunberg to be bombed for trying to deliver aid into Gaza are now condemning social media users for not expressing appropriate amounts of grief for a man who wanted us to lose our most basic rights. It’s not enough that their policies are killing us—they need us to celebrate them as heroes, too.

So, let’s let recent events be a reminder: Right-wing figureheads aren’t the only people we should recognize as victims of political violence. Poverty is political violence. A sexual abuser and alleged child sex trafficker skirting accountability and becoming the president of the U.S. is political violence.

Abortion bans that reduce women and pregnant people to second-class citizens and, in some cases, kill us, are political violence.

Abusers and fascist political movements share many of the same strategies: They paint their victims as the real oppressors to justify further victimizing them. By doing so, they attempt to erase the suffering that they themselves are inflicting. This strategy is the very crux of conservative grievance politics and their war on the most vulnerable populations. When we feed into narratives that uniquely condemn Kirk’s murder but not, say, the abortion bans he championed as political violence, we’re playing right into the right’s hands.