The War on Terror Template For The Post-Charlie Kirk Crackdown

Edited by Sam Thielman

I SPOKE AT THE Baltimore Book Festival on Saturday. Before I got on stage, I took a quick look around the sightlines above, just to see if it would be possible for someone in the distance to have a clear shot at me. Obviously nothing happened, and I recognize the paranoia of the impulse. But this was an outdoor political discussion at a time when a whole lot of right-wingers are posting revenge fantasies after someone so online as to make their motivations esoteric to me murdered Charlie Kirk. 

About Kirk himself, Elizabeth Spiers summed him up best. About the political climate we may have entered, Jack Crosbie wrote the best. I would simply add that political violence—by which, for the sake of this discussion, I mean direct and person-to-person violence, as opposed to structural violence or social violence, neither of which I mean to diminish—is not controllable. Having reported from places where political speech (or speech interpreted as political) could be and was met by violence, I can say that it's not something anyone wishes to live through. 

I sometimes hear frustrated people describe violence as a magic solution to cut through and reorder entrenched and seemingly unmovable structural forces. It isn't. It's usually defined by horror and miscalculation. Edgelording militancy is usually the domain of those for whom violence is an abstraction or a media event. People I've cared about have been killed in wars. What lingers, aside from the desolation, is the bitter futility of the grand projects for which they died. 

Speaking of horror and miscalculation, it's been hard to avoid the War on Terror templates on display in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination. Certainly not since the still-unsolved Anthrax mailings has the FBI looked as incompetent. But the most conspicuous recurrence is the substitution of anything like an effort to understand and address what actually motivated the horrific event with the excitable opportunity for a fanatical right-wing administration to advance a preexisting agenda unsuited to a pre-crisis atmosphere. Stop me if you've heard that one before. 

I don't know what motivated Kirk's killer and neither do you. Speculations abound, and as discussed above, I haven't had my brain sufficiently poisoned by the internet to understand the reported references at issue. A healthy and rigorous culture amongst both law enforcement and media would, following a thorough investigation, dive deeply into such reasons and root-cause issues. But much like after 9/11, we don't have that culture, in part because 9/11 politics worked so well for so long. Instead we have this: 

On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.

Domestic terrorism. Not one of the "leftist nongovernmental organizations"—likely the big liberal foundations, since Trump has threatened George Soros in the last few days—in the administration's crosshairs actually funds anything like domestic terrorism. Long before the Kirk slaying, a similarly designed effort sought to reclassify nonprofits within the liberal fundraising infrastructure, as well as the left-wing institutions that support Palestine, as domestic terrorists. That failed, but that was before there was a shooting of a conservative celebrity to exploit. This is their Saddam Hussein-era Iraq, and they really want to invade. One of the things they want most of all, as they wanted after Oklahoma City and as they wanted after 9/11, is to define their enemies as terrorists so their violence can only be seen as counter-terrorism. Counterterrorist violence enjoys legitimacy by default. 

We're at a low ebb in this country's history of lawfulness. Appeals to the absurdity of this effort can win internet arguments (even that might be too optimistic) and little more. Terrorism has always been defined according to the prerogatives of those wielding power, and this is about to be a prime example. FOREVER WARS friend Sam Seder grew exasperated with CNN's interview with Utah Governor Spencer Cox for insufficiently pressing for specifics about the killer's alleged left-wing ideology given that the right-wing narrative about him is coalescing more rapidly than actual information about the killer is available. I get where Sam is coming from. But the implications of this emerging pretext are going to guide events more than any Utah or FBI investigation will. 

After Pat Robertson died in 2023, I wrote this, about Robertson's fantastical attributions of blame for 9/11:

It's irrelevant that they offered no material explanation for how gays and liberals were the real culprits for 9/11. What mattered instead was the signal they sent, that there didn't need to be a material explanation for the attacks—there just needed to be a pre-existing enemy, here at home, whose works bore a culpability for the 9/11 atrocity that was realer than the truth. Not only was there no need to reassess, as Sontag suggested, America's military and economic relationship with oppressive Arab and Muslim governments, Robertson and company saw in the War on Terror a new front for a culture war, which for them meant a religious war. This tendency on the right, as documented in my book REIGN OF TERROR, would inform the entire War on Terror, even as many of its advocates grew disenchanted with the actual wars that resulted.

The reason to address the root causes of terrorism is because that's how you can actually save lives from terrorism. The reason to avoid addressing those root causes is because, in the first instance, they implicate your agenda; and in the second instance, because root causes get in the way of fulfilling the ambitions of your agenda. In 2025 as in 2001, the goal remains wielding permanent political, economic and social power. In the intervening years of the War on Terror, its normalized violence became ever more available as an option for those dreaming of such enduring dominance. 

Something I tried to say in Baltimore was that the point of abolishing the War on Terror was to avoid reaching the precipice that we find ourselves at right now. There will be no abolition while Trump is in office, only the next form that the War on Terror takes. On display are, and will, be the wages of the unwillingness of the political class to abolish the War on Terror. 

SILVERIO VILLEGAS-GONZALEZ, slain by ICE in the Chicago area on Friday, was relegated to immediate obscurity by the Kirk execution. 

SHORTLY BEFORE we published this edition, news broke that U.S. Southern Command killed three more Venezuelans on the second illegal strike on a boat that Trump is saying, as if it licenses these executions, was smuggling drugs. We said the last time that it wouldn't be the last time. 

AND REALLY SHORTLY BEFORE we published this edition, the White House released an executive order designed to enable a military occupation of Memphis, Tennessee: 

The Secretary of War shall request that the Governor of Tennessee, under section 502 of title 32, United States Code, make available National Guard units of Tennessee to support public safety and law enforcement operations in Memphis, in such numbers and for such duration as the Governor may deem necessary and appropriate to assist with the activities of the Task Force.