← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Charlie Kirk's Killing and America's Age of "Salad-Bar Extremism"
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A
As the 21st century was getting underway, Hollywood released a series of films that were daring, entertaining, and absolutely unmissable. Films like 25th Hour, Bring It On, Zodiac, and no country for Old Men. They arrived during the George W. Bush era, a chaotic time in America. Think 9, 11, Katrina, the mortgage crisis. After the Bush years, the country would never be the same, and neither would Hollywood. I'm Brian Raft, and in my new limited series, Mission Accomplished, we're gonna dive into some of the biggest movies of the Bush years and look at what they said about the state of the nation. We'll go behind the scenes with filmmakers and experts and relive some of your favorite movies from the early 2000s, from Donnie Darko to Michael Clayton, from Anchorman to Iron Man. So slip on your sketchers, dig out your old Nokia, and join me for mission accomplished. Starting August 12th on the Big Picture feat. A rich life isn't a straight line to a destination on the horizon. Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn with detours, new possibilities, and even another passenger or three. And with 100 years of navigating ups.
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And downs, you can count on Edward.
- [01:23]
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Jones to help guide you through it all. Because life is a winding path made rich by the people you walk it with. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones member Esther this episode was.
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Brought to you by ServiceNow. We're for people doing the fulfilling work they actually want to do. That's why this was written and read by a real person and not AI. You know what people don't want to do? Boring busywork. Now, with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business, it, HR and more. So your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Tap the banner to get started or visit servicenow.com AIED agents today. Charlie Kirk and political violence in America. Like most people, I learned that Charlie Kirk had been shot while at work on my computer. First I read the rumors. Then I saw the videos. The horrible, unforgettable videos. And then confirmation. Charlie Kirk, shot in the neck, dead at 31. My reaction to his killing, his assassination, was more emotional than I was prepared for. When I came home, my wife noticed that I was walking around as if in a daze, completely lost in my thoughts. I didn't know Charlie Kirk, and from what I could gather, his politics were very close to the exact opposite of my own. But his politics weren't on my mind when I witnessed his murder in that uncanny way that one witnesses murders these days in videos and images sandwiched between non sequitur memes on news feeds. What I found myself thinking about instead were his final moments. Here he was in Utah, surrounded by young college students whom he had inspired. His wife in the audience, engaged in a back and forth with critics over his views, when, from 200 yards away, a bullet entered his neck. That he died in the middle of a debate, that he was assassinated mid sentence, mid conversation, before his family and fans, was incredibly haunting to me on several levels. At the highest level, the ability to disagree in public without fear of violence, much less execution, has to be a bedrock principle of liberal democracy. You cannot have anything like a decent moral society where public disagreement is subjected to the fear of physical violence. At a personal level, having conversations, even hard political conversations, is my job. Just a week ago, I spoke on a Stage in Washington, D.C. about the subject of political disagreement. My wife was in the second row in the audience. And it scared me to think that for the thousands of miles that separated my views from Charlie Kirk's views and my politics from his politics, he and I were engaged at some level in a similar kind of work, arguing, persuading, building popularity for a set of ideas. And it really, really frightened me to think that we are becoming a country in which that kind of work is endangered by a climate of fear and a phenomenon of rising political violence. But what terrified me as well was the social media reaction to his murder. I saw posts celebrating or jeering Kirk's death, often from the left. I saw many posts calling for outright war and a total crackdown on left wing politics from the right, including, it has to be said, from prominent conservative figures in media and politics, and even the President. Now, social media being what it is, a machine for amplifying the worst of humanity, I'm sure that the vast majority of left and right Americans both find murder abhorrent and do not want America conducting a political crackdown akin to Nazi Germany post Reichstag fire. But even knowing this, even telling myself over and over that I knew it, I still found myself gazing into my phone and worrying that things were about to veer into a very dark place. Within two days, a suspect was apprehended. As of this recording, we don't know much about his motives. The bullets were reportedly engraved with allusions to gaming memes and message board jokes. If he's anything like recent assassins and political terrorists, his politics will not fit neatly into any well understood category of ideology. Killing another person is an extreme act. Political terrorism is an extreme act, and the minds of political assassins tend to be extreme as well. But while the killer's politics might be esoteric, this act of violence, unfortunately has plenty of company. In the last few years, we've seen the assassination of Kirk, the assassination of Brian Thompson, the healthcare executive, the assassination of Minnesota House speaker and her husband, the shooting of a Minnesota state senator and his wife, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, whose bullet tore through a piece of his ear, the attack on Nancy Pelosi's home and her husband, a plot to kidnap and kill the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. And then January 6th, when assailants called for the lynching of Vice President Mike pence. As the Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance writes, this is coming to seem like an age of assassinations, and it would not be the first. 60 years ago, the 1960s saw an extraordinary number of high profile killings. JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. 60 years before that, an anarchist killed President William McKinley, shooting him twice in the stomach while shaking his hand in Buffalo. And a few years later, a dynamite attack on the Los Angeles Times killed 21 people. Soon after that, in a plot to kill John D. Rockefeller, anarchists prematurely exploded a bomb in a New York city tenement, killing four people. Violence continued to swell into the late 1910s, until it exploded in the year 1919 and 1920 in a set of coordinated attacks that killed dozens of people. We have been here before. We are never very far from these whirlpools of political violence. It is terrifyingly easy to slip back into them, and it can be anguishing to get ourselves out of them. Today's guest is Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of the Atlantic, who has written tens of thousands of words on the subject of political violence, including cover stories for the magazine. Today we talk about media coverage of political violence before getting into the hardest. How can America survive a period of mass delusion and deep division without seeing the permanent dissolution of the ties that bind us? And how have previous cultures and previous eras managed to endure sustained political violence and yet emerged with democracy and their humanity intact? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Adrian LaFrance. Welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks for having me.
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B
Before we get started on your work on the history of political violence in America, I was interested in your human reaction to the Charlie Kirk murder. Where were you? What did you see? What happened next?
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A
I was in the Atlantic's newsroom in Washington, D.C. when we saw the early reports coming out of Utah that he had maybe been shot, and, of course, was shocking. Various editors, you know, quickly asked one another to keep an eye on it, to see, you know, is this real? You never know. You see something on the Internet, you're not sure what's going on. So we. We knew something might have happened. And then, of course, it unfolded the way it did, and just totally horrific. Just really, you know, every person in the newsroom was shocked and really just disturbed. It's terrible news.
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B
Terrible news. And this sort of uncanny way that terrible news breaks these days, where you see these images on Twitter, on whatever social media platform, and it's always interspersed with other news that's irrelevant and news is coming in that's false or that's real. One thing that I've been thinking about for the last few days is that reporting on breaking news like this is very tricky for several reasons. One is that initial reports are almost always wrong. And in this case, in fact, the initial Wall Street Journal report that the bullets were engraved with pro trans political statements turned out to be totally false. But it's also tricky because I think there's a tension between describing catastrophe and feeding catastrophic thinking. Right now, today, at this very moment that you and I are talking, there are outlets saying that we are witnessing the beginning of a political violence cascade that will destroy democracy. That's one take. And then the deck of your essay goes in a totally opposite direction. You say, quote, americans do not want civil war. Anyone who is declaring it should stop. End quote. And I wonder, as a journalist and leader of a newsroom, how do you feel about this tension between describing reality when it is catastrophic and. But also encouraging people to be less catastrophic in their thinking?
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A
It's such an important question, and it's something that I think journalists are dealing with and working their way through. And not just journalists, just citizen people, humans. You're trying to figure out what's going on in your life. Even it doesn't have to be a horrible breaking news story. But in journalism, I mean, I think something we hear often is like, why does the news have to be so negative? And I get it. Because it can be bleak, especially in times when people are so divided, especially when horrible things happen. But, you know, part of the role of journalism in society is to shine a light on things that are not working, things that are a problem, things we want to fix. And so, you know, to me, the work of journalism is actually, like, at its core, a really optimistic way of moving through the world. Because you believe it matters to tell People the truth. And so, but on the other side of that, you have people scrolling on their phones and seeing horrible headlines, horrible things happening. And so yeah, you have this tension and then trying to sort of understand. You talked about catastrophizing. I mean, I think in trying to understand the world around us in real time, in an extraordinarily chaotic real time news environment, especially, you know, journalists have this desire to think a few steps ahead or attempt to understand things and tell people what could happen, how bad could it get. And you know, predicting the future is always dangerous business, which is why the reporting is so important. Talking to people, people who have expertise and whatnot. But so I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I think there are a couple of different tensions in journalism that make it seem dramatic and negative. Also just the fight for attention. Reporters are trying to get people to read work and that can sometimes.
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B
In.
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A
The age of clickbait or algorithms or whatever else, the incentives are not toward restraint always. And that's something that journalists are thinking about all the time too. So anyway, I've thrown a lot at you and you know all of this better than anyone, but those are some of the ways that I think about it.
- [13:36]
B
Well, you mentioned the fact that there's this instinct in journalism to explain and sometimes I think that's a credit to journalists and sometimes it's a danger. Right. One challenge I think, to covering these events is that journalists believe some of us do that it's our job to provide context and narrative for the most important stories in the world. And sometimes that's a wonderful instinct because the world needs narrative in order to make sense of the sort of pointillist events that happen on a day to day basis. But some stories don't fit into easy narratives. And so the attempt to sort of dress something up in a narrative actually does a disservice to the audience. And I think that's especially true perhaps of modern assassination attempts. Like there's this instinct to say we can explain what this means and how these shooters instincts fit into live debates about ideology, left versus right. But then you dig into the history of these recent assassination attempts. The arsonist who attacked Governor Josh Shapiro's home was a radical pro Palestinian who tried to get his family to vote for Trump. Luigi Mangione was an alt center self help reader who went off the deep end and suddenly decided to execute a healthcare executive. The Kirk assassin, for what we can tell very, very early on in our understanding of this character seems to have been like A nihilistic gamer's son of conservative Mormon parents who assassinated a Republican. We keep wanting to put these killers into neat little boxes, and every time we try to do it, the box explodes. They don't fit. And there's this related term that I learned from reading your work, that the FBI now talks about what they call salad bar extremism. Lone wolf attacks where the assailant has views that aren't easily mapped onto a left right spectrum. They're sort of grabbed ad hoc from the salad bar reviews that people find on the Internet. So unpack that for us. What is salad bar extremism, and how might it help us understand some of what we're seeing in the news today?
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A
Most people are not as ideologically pure as the way they are described, either on the Internet or even in various legacy news articles. You know, I think this, to start with the box, the sort of box checking exercise of like trying to figure out who someone is in order to map them, their motivations onto why something terrible happened. You know, there is. There was a moment, pre Internet, where if you were in any newsroom, those same conversations were probably happening. You're thinking back to every mass shooting you've covered. Unfortunately, there have been many. And you're thinking, okay, sometimes we see this, sometimes we see this profile, sometimes there's this element. Post 9 11, you saw this all the time. There'd be an explosion. And the first question is, is it terrorism? And so, you know, we're hardwired to try to understand what's happening in real time based on what we've experienced and in an earlier era, hopefully. I mean, there's always been irresponsible journalism out there. But in an earlier era, much of the speculation was done pre publication behind closed doors in a newsroom, and the public didn't see it. Now everyone's doing it in real time, together, all at once, without any of, you know, some of the ethical guidelines. Not to say that, you know, that's a net negative, although, like, the Internet's great, but it adds tremendous complexity. And so, and then to your question about salad bar extremism, and I love this term too, because it's memorable and it gets at the point that trying to categorize what someone believes does not, usually in sort of clean ideological terms, usually doesn't work out whether it's someone who's committed a terrible crime or just like a regular person. And so this term is, you know, it's often used to describe how many of the lone wolf attacks we see, whether this is in the category of political violence or just random violent attacks. If you try to discern, someone might leave a horrific anti Semitic manifesto, and that's certainly a clue. But then you look at their voting record and it's for some reason surprising. And so especially in an age where radicalization is happening, disaggregated geographically, it can move across borders, communities, ideologies. It's not, it would be very shallow to only talk about political violence or even any kind of violence as purely related to one political category. That's just not how it works.
- [18:11]
B
In your conversations with folks from the FBI who talk about salad bar extremism, is it their sense that modern political violence is more salad bar than it used to be? Like another way to ask that question would be, did political violence used to be more ideologically legible? Right. That that political violence happened and the intent of it and the forces behind it were easily read into, ah, this is anarchists. These are socialists, these are far right white supremacists. But the today salad bar extremism seems to speak to this idea that the FBI can't easily place or map or read the clear motives of a lot of these killers because their motives are just so random.
- [19:03]
A
I think, yes, up to a point. I mean, the big thing that is different is that political violence often, and I don't want to be overly sweeping here, but if you look throughout history, often political violence was organized by groups and still sometimes is. But if you have a group who's organizing around the idea of being anti government, you know, anarchists who are motivated because they're in terrible working conditions and they need, there's no other way to get attention to their plight and they have decided to resort to violence. Like there are still, it's like, seems like a contradiction in terms, but there is still an organizational effort for people who fit that category, say in like the early 20th century, whereas today there are, you know, at least speaking with law enforcement, there is a much greater concern about people who can be easily radicalized in many directions, take inspiration from other violent acts which get tremendous attention online. They seek notoriety. They don't need an organized group or the sort of the, the, you know, the work that goes into organizing a group of people around a decision to be violent. They can easily carry it out themselves and enact tremendous damage. And so it's not that there weren't occasionally sort of lone wolf attacks in the past either. There certainly were, but that is one prominent sort of one pronounced shift in how people worry about how violence is Playing out today.
- [20:36]
B
You've written that political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was a decade ago by several measures. There's a 2022 UC Davis poll in your essay that found one in five Americans believes that political violence would be, quote, at least sometimes justified. Another recent poll by the Argument, found that college students increasingly say that violence is justifiable to stop bad speech. Why do you think we've seen this sea change in attitudes toward political violence?
- [21:10]
A
I mean, I think that it comes in cycles. And I think one thing that's important to point out and others routinely point out is that, you know, our nation was founded in violent revolution. And, you know, you look back at the history of racial lynchings, and, I mean, every decade you can find examples of extraordinary, terrible political violence. But there are periods in history, and certainly in American history, where it gets worse than others. And so if the question is about, like, why, why is it worse now, or why are people more tolerant of it now? I mean, I think those two things go together. And so we have a lot of the conditions throughout society that make us vulnerable to violence. And then you layer, you know, like, highly visible wealth disparity, increase in dehumanizing language, pervasive sense of aggrievement across the political spectrum, and I can go on and on. And then you layer on top of that, just the informational environment where it's so, like, it rewards just emotional snap reactions and anger. It's just these. You know, the infrastructure of the social web is designed around incentivizing, reacting angrily, and people do. And humans lack restraint, and it's just. And so you stew all of that together and. And then add Donald Trump into the mix, and everybody's nuts.
- [22:38]
B
Can I add two more possibilities, please? One is. I mean, these are very much in my wheelhouse. And so I'm, of course, violating the rule that every single time a journalist sees a surprising phenomenon, they say, oh, that surprising phenomenon is actually the result of everything that I've been saying for the last two years. So I understand that I am contributing, ironically, to that trend. But the last cover story I wrote for the Atlantic, the Antisocial Century. Michael Bang Peterson is a Danish political scientist who's done work on an idea that he calls need for chaos. He says there's a certain share of the electorate that has violent, chaotic drive that sees politics as a kind of dark entertainment, and they just want to watch the world burn. And when he decomposed the data and looked at who was most likely to feel this quote need for chaos. Top of the list were men who self described as socially isolated. So I think that social isolation and the lack of a life script for young men is absolutely contributing to some of this. The other thing that I see is social media, which you alluded to, seems to allow people to cosplay as revolutionaries, ironically, from the comfort of air conditioned rooms where they are engaging in nothing remotely revolutionary. There were a number of accounts, and this speaks right back to the essay that you published, a number of accounts that posted in the aftermath of Kirk's assassination that were at war. America's at war. This is civil war. And as you said in your essay this week, no, Americans don't actually want war. They want to eat strawberries in February, they want to have beers after work, they want to watch their kids kick around a soccer ball. But this empty talk about war and violence and the need to destroy the opposition, it's empty until it isn't empty, if you know what I mean. It's empty until it inspires one person, three people, a handful of extremists with a psychological condition that can be activated by online extremism that find salvation at the end of a rifle. And I wonder, just turning it back to you, whether you think that some combination of isolation and this effect of extremism in our social media platforms, the way they rile up, the way they seem algorithmically engaged to rile us up, might feed real violence in some kind of sporadic way.
- [24:58]
A
I mean, absolutely, I worry about that a lot. And it's interesting to me because one of the things that I am most concerned with is free speech, free press. These are things that I hold incredibly dear. I think, you know, many Americans are right there with me on that. And, and I think often you'll see where I'm going with this in a minute. Often people conflate the idea that, oh, if you think that hate speech is bad on the Internet, or if you, if you think that people declaring war on the Internet is bad, then you don't like free speech. It's like, no, I want to protect free speech, therefore I want society to remain, you know, I don't want it to devolve into violence and war. And so, so to me, this, like what you were saying about people declaring war. Absolutely. It can inspire one person to do, or three people or whatever to do tremendous damage. And I think one other thing I would point out is that, and I make this point in the essay I wrote for the Atlantic yesterday is that there is a difference between targeted political violence as we saw this week. And a huge portion of the American people deciding to amass armies and attempt to fight each other in a sustained way. Both are atrocious. We should tolerate neither. And anyone who wants freedom and peace should exercise restraint. So that's, that's the argument I'm making. But. But, yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, the social web is. Makes things, it makes things worse, but it's the way people are acting on the social web as well.
- [26:34]
B
Two years ago, you wrote a cover story for the Atlantic entitled the New Anarchy, the subtitle of which was, quote, america faces a type of extremist violence it does not know how to stop. End quote. And Adrian, I will make a confession here to you. When I first read this essay, I thought to myself, adrienne might be like a little bit over her skis here. I'm not entirely sure I buy that we're in an age of extremist violence. It seems to me like we're in an age of really random, like I said, sporadic, even stochastic, like, truly just like random one off, lone wolf, loon, wolf violence of just once in a while the crazy person does something. But that's not a trend. That's just there's 320 million Americans and once in a while they're going to do some crazy, crazy shit. I have changed my mind. I think you saw something here that I did not see because I did not know where to look and you knew where to look. So let's start with the basics. What is the new anarchy and what describes this phenomenon that you were trying to put your finger on?
- [27:41]
A
I've been interested in political violence and violence generally forever because I'm a journalist. And when things go badly, you have to run toward it and try to explain to people what's going to happen and understand it for yourself. And, you know, particularly after January 6th, it for me posed this huge question of how do we move forward without that happening again or worse? And so I had this question of what do we do? What is the blueprint for our country that can. Originally, that cover story, actually my vision of it and my pitch for it was I'm maybe overly ambitious. This is where I got ahead of my skis. But I wanted to figure out, okay, where in history, whether in the United States or elsewhere, has there been a period where it seems like it's getting bad, but you're able to pull back from the brink before it gets much worse? And I reported, I did a ton of reporting. I talked to scores of people I looked all over the world for examples and everything I found and everyone I talked to, it was not reassuring, put it that way. And one of the examples I'll give you is I had this thought, and I write about this in that story, that, well, I was thinking about Oklahoma City and the bombing in the 90s and how it seemed like that there was this moment of extremist militia violence and really high levels of distrust in some cases for very good reason of federal law enforcement thinking about, like, Waco and Ruby Ridge, et cetera, and all this tangled sort of similar kind of extremism as it seemed we were seeing around the time of January 6th. And so my question was like, okay, well, it seems like we got out of that, so what did we do right then? And then I started talking to people and it was like, well, no, we didn't really do anything right. It just kind of went underground and now it's just reemerged. And so everywhere I turned, it seemed like I came to the conclusion that we were not only farther along than I initially thought in what could be a very long, perhaps generation or longer long cycle of violence, but also that in looking at other points in history that often you don't actually break out of a terrible cycle of political violence until it gets really very bad. And obviously that's something that I wish to avoid, and I think most people do. The difficult question is you don't know at any given moment where you are in a cycle until you have the benefit of history. So I think to answer your question more directly, I think what I saw was that even one shooting of a member of Congress, or anyone for that matter, even one act of political violence is too much. And I wanted to know what it would take for the rest of America to feel the same way.
- [30:41]
B
This episode is brought to you by Zendesk, introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone with an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months. Zendesk AI agents resolve 30% of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more@zendesk.com I think when most Americans look back to a period of history that was defined by political violence, they think about the 1960s, where you saw this spate of high profile political assassinations. JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. RFK. And that's just the tip of the Iceberg. Just an extraordinary period. I mean, several attempted assassinations of Gerald Ford. A period of really extraordinary high profile political violence. In your essay the New Anarchy, you take us back to a period of American history that I did not know as much about, which are the years leading up to the late 19 teens, where political violence in America, maybe somewhat like today, although I don't want to make any kind of prediction, was simmering, simmering, simmering. You had assassinations here, assassinations there, until finally this enormous explosion of anarchist violence in 1919 and 1920. Tell me about the main characters of this period of history. Who was Luigi Galliani and what were the Palmer Raids?
- [32:26]
A
Right. So I was drawn to this era in part because I think it's under discussed relative to how, you know, remarkable that period of violence was. I also was drawn to it because it offers a very clear example of how a society that grows more violent or tolerant of violence, or individuals who grow more tolerant, more drawn to violence, really risk everyone's civil liberties. And so, okay, so Luigi Galliani is an anarchist who, you know, along with several other Italian immigrants, is furious about the really horrific working conditions for factory workers in various settings. I mean, at one point he's working at a granite factory in Barrie, Vermont. And if you, I mean, it's just, you can't overstate the degree to which these were terrible conditions. And, and so, and I, and I point this out because I think one of the questions I am really drawn to, and that is probably the most complicated question, is when and whether violence is, is in fact ever justified. And so to me, Luigi Galliani and those who are alongside him has all the reason in the world to be furious, to distrust people in positions of power and decide to resort to violence. And so there's the waves of bombing. It's not just him. He's to me, an interesting character, a hugely charismatic guy, just someone who had a following. But in any case, so you enter this period of dynamite bombings and, you know, just, just assassination attempts, as you point out, and actual assassinations and, and just real, real violence. And the, the reaction, the crackdown as it came was in the form, among other things, of the Palmer raids in 1919. There is an explosion at the home of the Attorney General, Mitch Mitchell Palmer, that very nearly kills his family. Just like really extraordinary stroke of luck that they lived. Side note there his next door neighbors were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. And so perhaps a near miss for them as well. And the response to that, I mean, obviously was a very personal attack. But this comes amid A real, just string of really terrible violence. And so what Palmer decides to do is to, to turn away from any sort of constitutional order and just a really aggressive immigration crackdown. He wants to rid America of anarchists. And so on one level, yeah, your house is getting blown up, you're seeing people being attacked all around you. Of course you don't want those crimes to continue. But the way he goes about pursuing justice is to deport people without, and specifically focused on Italians and whole classes of people and takes a blanket approach without regard for the Constitution, to ridding society of anyone who might be suspected of being an anarchist. And so you see, just, it's of course now remembered as a stain on the civil liberties and something not to be repeated. But I think one of the key reasons I worry so much about political violence today is you can see very easily how when things get bad, the state has justification to do things that are against core American values.
- [36:18]
B
And this is a piece where, unfortunately, I felt like we were near a deja vu in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, when it was widely assumed that his assassin was a typical standard antifa leftist. There were calls from several prominent conservatives and Republicans to investigate the entire left funding NGO apparatus and basically indict all of them for some kind of fraud or pull them all before Congress in order to shut down this entire sort of political column. After the incredibly tragic shooting at a church where the assailant, the suspect was a trans person or someone identifying, you know, born biological male, identifying as a woman, I saw many conservative commentators saying we essentially need to shut down trans treatment for everyone. We need to erase this identity because it's a scourge on American health and on American safety. And it's just. It scared me to think that we were seeing this replay again. Just a century ago, we saw the Palmer Raids where you have a real tragedy and you have a response to that tragedy flowing out of an instinct to constrict civil liberties and to curtail constitutional rights in order to purchase the feeling of, and the fact of safety. And so I wonder, just before we move to thinking more positively about this, thinking about how violent eras end, I wonder whether this is something you think about a lot, the legacy of the Palmer Raids and the clear lesson that sometimes in American history, and certainly in world history, you know, the Reichstag fire being sort of the iconic example, a dramatically violent event leads to crackdowns on civil liberties that tip a nation into something like disaster.
- [38:19]
A
I mean, absolutely, you know, no matter what, the state has a monopoly on violence. And so, you know, it's. There is disproportionate power for citizens and what we have to protect us are our constitutional rights, we hope. And so, yeah, I mean, I worry a lot about any situation where things get so bad that someone in a position of power might say, those freedoms you have, maybe you shouldn't have them until we can calm things down. That worries me a lot. And the other thing I'll say, just because I think it's important, given the whole conversation, that there's such an impulse right now for people to have a sort of ideological gotcha moment. And so you see, and it's understandable, you have this extremely high profile figure on the right who's killed in a horrific crime. And I understand the impulse for people to blame their political enemies. I do understand that. On the other hand, you have people saying there is a huge problem with right wing extremism in this country, which there is, and let's talk about that. And so I understand the impulse for people to want to get it right and tally who's worse. And so like it's a human impulse to do that, but it is not helping anyone and is in fact, I think, really harming all of us. And sometimes people say, you know, you know, let's get it right, let's talk about who's more to blame. It's certainly people should, we should understand that and people should study it. And you know, I don't at all want to both sides, any of this, but to me, this crisis of violence in our society has reached a point where the more important thing is for everyone to reject political violence, period, full stop. And you know, once things are calm, somebody can write a great thesis about how we got here. But, but yeah, just the impulse to war ideologically, I think is just so dangerous.
- [40:31]
B
I also think that people war ideologically because the ideological war is the easy one to fight. It's easy when there's a catastrophe for someone on the right to say, well, this just goes to show, as I've always said, that the left is terrible. Just as it's easy for someone on the left to maybe look at maybe an assailant who's a far right conservative and say, this just goes to show how terrible the far right is. And it's tough because like we said at the beginning, in an era of salad bar extremism, the causes that are easy to pay attention to, which is this fight over who's better, left or right, is sometimes completely orthogonal to the actual motivations and Facts of the assassin's life.
- [41:13]
A
It's so, just so shallow and reductionist. Like, it's just, you're not going to get at the truth just by blaming an entire party. Like that's not what's. Anyway, you, yeah, this is, this is.
- [41:26]
B
Somewhat borne out by just the fact that, you know, how many, how many far leftists are there in America? Tens of millions. How many people on the far right are there in America? Tens of millions. How many people actually assassinate political figures? Dozens. Right. I mean, you're talking about just an incredibly specifically small number of people that can do an incredible amount of damage. One of my favorite interviews you did for this was with the author of the book the Delusions of Crowds, William Bernstein, and he has this comment that is really interesting and weirdly optimistic too. You ask him what ends violent eras? Is it exhaustion? Is it defeat of one side? And his answer was incredibly interesting. He said sometimes violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm. What is a containable cataclysm and how does it bring periods of political violence to a close?
- [42:24]
A
So it's not exactly a hopeful way of thinking about it. But I, you know, it stuck with me too. His argument was, and this goes to sort of the question of like how, how much worse is it going to get? The way he put it to me, I mean, this is quite dark, but the way he put it to me, and I'll quote from, from what he told me in my, in my story for the Atlantic, the New Anarchy, he says, I almost hesitate to say this, but, and I'll paraphrase a little bit, but basically what if they actually had hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6th? He says, I think that would have ended it. So his point is, you know, you could prevent all out civil war if something is so horrific that it shakes citizens to their senses and such that they say this is not how we want to live, this is not who we are. And so, you know, I had the thought this week that the assassination of Charlie Kirk is, you know, amounts to what he was describing to me. You know, just a horrific assassination, very high profile, beloved figure among, among those who knew him. And, and yet I am not, I am not confident that this means our cataclysm is contained. Just looking at the reaction to it.
- [43:49]
B
Well, I think it cuts both ways. I think many people are completely stunned by Kirk's assassination and in being stunned might change the way they talk online, might change the way they engage with politics, but then Again, these kind of violent events are often participated in by just a few random people who can in some cases in a weird way be inspired by the very cataclysms that might contain other people's speech, if that makes sense. It's just very, very messy to predict how an event like this is going to shape the near future. Political violence. My guess, my hope is that certain Republican and conservative figures, after accusing the left of killing Charlie Kirk, might, in the aftermath of recognizing that the actual assassin is not a clear cut member of the far left, maybe pull back a little bit of their rhetoric. That's possible. It's also possible that as with the failed assassination of Donald Trump two weeks from now, we're right back to status quo, anti assassination attempt, right? That in a weird way the whole thing washes out and it changes almost nothing about American conversation and communication because things are always happening so much in this day and age that nothing can really have a deep impression. I find it very difficult to predict exactly how this is going to shake out. I want to close actually by making this personal and a little bit pragmatic even. I wonder what you think we can do. We as in average people, I feel like political violence is a little bit akin to a lightning strike where it feels random, it's rare, but also lightning emerges from a local weather system and we all make the weather, so to speak. The political and the media climate is co created by all of us. What do you think from your analysis of history, from speaking to scores of experts, what can we, not just journalists, but ordinary people with access to a social media account do that you think would reduce the likelihood and rates of political violence?
- [46:11]
A
So I've thought about this so much, Derek and I, I mean I'm an American and I'm an optimist. I really believe in the power of, of the individual, of the American individual. And I believe that if enough and that most Americans are good, most American people are good and want peace and want a better society for themselves and their children and grandchildren and friends and on and on. And so I really believe if enough people choose restraint and to listen to one another and yet disagree passionately with one another but peacefully, I believe that people can make day to day, moment to moment choices that make things better. I know that sounds, especially this week, hopelessly optimistic and one thing I've thought about to make it just slightly more concrete is just this thought exercise of what if people decide there are single issue voters in all kinds of things, right? Some people vote primarily with their pocketbooks Some people vote for the one thing they care about most, whether it's keeping their second amendment rights or abortion rights or whatever it is. And I have thought, what if people decided that they wanted their single issue to be leadership that rejects political violence, period, full stop? What would that look like? What kind of leaders would we elect as a result? And, I mean, it's at the very least, I think, an interesting thought exercise for people like, if this is not the world you want to live in, what is the leadership we need such that it doesn't happen? Maybe the lightning strike, it happens now and again, unfortunately. But to really change this direction we seem to be in. And so that's one thing I think about, is just the power of the people comes through how we vote. It comes through how we spend our time and attention. It comes through how we treat other people and speak to one another. And those are things that all of us can control every single moment of every day. So I still believe we can get this country back to a place that feels better.
- [48:20]
B
Well, I appreciate your effort. I don't know that I'm optimistic in precisely the way that you're optimistic. I think that one of the challenges of social media that was really borne out this week is that in an era where people are more likely to interact with other people through a screen and to therefore see their social media avatar more than they see the actual face and body and gesticulations of their neighbors and their interlocutors in political discourse, we see a version of other people that's frankly a disgusting, grotesque funhouse mirror of who other people really are. I know I have to think that many of the folks essentially calling for civil war or just saber rattling about the prospect of civil war in America, I know that they love brunch and champagne and. And kids kicking soccer balls and strawberries in winter, as you put it in your piece, all the things that you can only have in a world or in a country that is not at war with itself. And so we represent this version, this version of dramatic in group versus out group high arousal negativity through our social media platforms when once we close our computer screens and put our phones away, we're moms and dads and brothers and sisters. Many of these people, I think the most heinous social media accounts are deep down, fundamentally, sometimes quite normal people behind the scenes. But it's very, very hard, I think, to get a clear sense of we the people, as you were alluding to, very, very hard to get a clean sense of we the people when this is how we see other people. We see them at their worst on screens rather than see them at their best across. Across the dinner table.
- [50:15]
A
Well, totally. And this goes to your brilliant work on social isolation. Everyone should read the COVID story you wrote, as you mentioned earlier. And to me, I mean, it's like first of all, yes, log off, touch grass, but also find ways to have real connection socially through what? I mean, this could be a whole nother. You've talked about this so much, but the decline of sort of third party spaces and secular or non political spaces. But find ways to get to know people who you don't agree with politically. Like I just. There are way too many people who don't have that in their lives and I think we'd all be better for it if we did.
- [50:53]
B
Agent LaFrance, thank you very much.
- [50:55]
A
Thanks, Derek.
- [50:57]
B
Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Beraldi and we are back to our twice a week schedule. We'll talk to you soon.