'Some Hate Can't Be Negotiated Out'

A Political Assassination Laid Bare

‘Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together’

Y’all, I just don’t know. I’m trying really damn hard to keep a cool head about all this, but look at this from Andy Ngo. It’s a federal transcript of communications between Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson and his furry tranny lover:

So the tranny poker confessed. “Remember how I was engraving bullets?” So furry had some sense that something was up, right? Oh, it’s so, so tender, according to ABC News’s Matt Gutman.

Walter Kirn’s read on this is exactly right:

Sure enough, look at Montel Williams on CNN, saying that poor sweet Tyler was simply trying to “defend his lover,” not attack an ideology. This is the play now.

Like I said, trying to keep a cool head, but … what world do these freaks live in?! Tyler Robinson blew a hole in Charlie Kirk’s throat because he despised what Charlie Kirk said, and this ABC News reporter has a sentimental boner about how sweet their gay-lover chit-chat is?!

THIS IS WHAT TYLER ROBINSON DID TO CHARLIE KIRK!

Matt Gutman is a disgusting man. How dare he sentimentalize those freaks?! And look at this:

I am seriously, seriously shaken up about the country. People don’t even know what reality is! These left-wing people will believe whatever they need to believe to maintain their narrative. Do I need to remind you that one of the signs that a country is ready to receive a totalitarian dictatorship is a refusal to believe in Truth, only “truth” as what satisfies you emotionally?

These people who are turning to their AI lovers for emotional gratification, while knowing full well that these things aren’t real — it’s a sign, y’all. It’s a sign of ever-growing detachment from reality. They prefer the “truth” of the way the Machine makes them feel to actual reality.

Check this out: Philosopher Kathleen Stock, a liberal, gender-critical feminist and a lesbian, is one of the bravest women in public life. She resigned from her university position in 2021 following a hysterical campaign by transgendered students and their allies against her. Prof. Stock wrote this below on Twitter yesterday. I urge you to follow her, and to remember that not everybody on the Left are the enemies of truth and justice:

In 2018 I self-published the first of a number of circumspect, polite essays suggesting we should question whether transwomen were really women, pointing to wider harms of a positive answer. There were a number of deranged responses from fellow philosophers in my field, but one sticks in my mind.

A trans-identified male philosophy grad student called Leon - who had not yet changed his name to Leona, even, though I think he did later – self-published an essay about me which contained the following paragraph: "I haven’t witnessed it myself, but I am totally sure some trans women have in response to the Stock article talked about how precisely they would like to violently kill and dismember Stock. This is just something that happens in conversations about TERF’s. (And by the way, trans women: for the love of the Lord God almighty, cut that shit out! Not because it’ll give the TERF’s less justification to treat us like scum—you can’t get less than zero—but because that’s not an okay way to treat our fellow human beings.)"

This essay was widely retweeted and posted on Facebook by professional academic colleagues across the discipline, including many more senior to me. I found the content highly disturbing - even though there was a kind of disclaimer involved, the fact was that a man I had never met or even heard of, had used a graphic image of me being violently killed and dismembered, in response to an extremely careful, even somewhat deferential essay. And colleagues were sharing the barely coherent rant, laced with violent imagery, approvingly. This is just not how the philosophical discipline is supposed to work.

I went onto Facebook, where I still had lots of philosophy mutuals at the time, and I made some mild protest and statement of concern about the imagery. Of course my post didn't stop any of them sympathising with him over me, this graduate student they had never met over me who many of them knew personally.

But I remember one philosopher in particular - a feminist philosopher, someone who specialises in "implicit bias", and someone with which I had recently co-examined a phd thesis in person, been for dinner after, etc. She chided me angrily, in full view of other colleagues, for my post expressing concern about this essay - something like "she (sic) told them NOT to discuss your violent death and dismemberment, didn't she??". In other words, she acted as if I had somehow unfairly maligned this poor person *even more for criticising the essay on facebook.

Since then (and faced with many other such crazy-making cases) I have had to come to terms with the fact that there are many, many professional academics who will never back down from their basic quasi-religious belief that me and a few other philosophers must be the bad guys for criticising the presuppositions of transactivism- because they have to hang on to their own self-identification as the good guys, and they need the foil. It is not enough to disagree with us, - that is normal in academia - they have to conjure up poisonous caricatures of who we are.

Only this week a paper was published in a supposedly quality feminist journal (Hypatia) which accused Holly Lawford-Smith's work of propping up Neo-Nazi beliefs. An editor passed that for publication. Referees passed that. There is an astonishing casualness about the way that academics will excuse such inflammatory language, and turn the responsibilty back on the target, with an implied "well, if you didn't say such things...". Of course, they can never really point to what we did actually say, in any depth or with suitable context - for who has the time? They all just rely on the testimony of other earlier caricatures, and so the lie spreads.

When I heard about Charlie Kirk I was in Berlin, at a conference about non-medicalised approaches to gender dysphoria - you know, aimed not at stopping puberty or giving teenagers life-altering hormones, or cutting their body parts off, but trying to give them effective therapy instead - a good aim, right? Or at least a well-intentioned one, even if you disagree with it. Transactivists had vowed to find the conference and disrupt, and had put up a social media account called "know your enemy", and my face was the first on the list.

They spent the weekend posting people outside every major hotel to find us. I had a security guard meet me at the airport and take me back there, I barely left the hotel.

That is the real consequence of academics' stupid, unthinking, defensive attempts to portray themselves as heroes and make out we are evil villains. And if the story eventually ends with something very bad, god forbid, I know for a fact there will be philosophers who will imply it was deserved, and dig out mangled half-truths or lies to back it up; and there will be hundreds of others who will say nothing in disagreement.

As James Lindsay says, this is primarily a fight between Chaos and Civilization. I disagree with Kathleen Stock on some important things, but I have no doubt that she is on the side of Civilization — and therefore, I am on her side.

We must not allow ourselves to be gaslit by Both-Sidesism!

Kristen Ziccarelli and Joshua Treviño write about this here. Excerpt:

The examples of the Left’s frequent recourse to terror, mayhem, and death abound. There is formally extralegal violence, which includes the murder of Kirk, the transgender killers of small children, the deliberate creation of insecure common spaces in which assaults and deaths occur, the murders of Jews in public, shooters targeting conservative organizations, and the various attempts to kill conservative presidents, Supreme Court justices, and congressmen. There is also regime-sanctioned mass violence—most significantly the Black Lives Matter insurrection during the summer of 2020. Additionally, there are varieties of formal and networked repression, from government-imposed pandemic restrictions and iniquitous racial/ethnic preferentialism to societally enforced cancel culture and speech codes.

It is worth noting that this is not especially incisive or contrarian analysis: everyone knows it. Everyone knows that the Left is the violent faction in American public life today. Everyone knows that shop windows were boarded up in November 2020 out of fear of the Left’s reaction to the election, not the Right’s. Everyone knows there is no threat to public order in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk as there was after the death of George Floyd. Everyone knows that a gathering of pro-Palestinians carries with it a high potential for violence, but a gathering of pro-Israel partisans does not. Everyone knows there is a national network of street fighters on the Left, not on the Right. Everyone knows that colleges have to worry about security for conservative events, not leftist ones.

Everyone knows.

Charlie Kirk knew it. In an X post from April 7, he wrote, “Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump.” And it must have occurred to him that a similar proportion of the Left felt the same about him.

They go on to point out that it’s much worse in Britain, where “repression of dissenting speech against the leftist consensus has reached Iron Curtain levels, complete with writers arrested at airports and housewives jailed for years for expressing politically incorrect sentiments.” And elsewhere in the Anglosphere.

How are we to live with these people? How are we to live with people who would happily see so many of us with our throats blown out by a 30.06 rifle bullet, and a network TV report gushing about how tender was our assassin’s affection for his tranny lover?

How are we to live with this Oberlin undergraduate in a clip gathered by Wes Yang. She says Kirk deserved to die, and that we should live in a culture where some people are afraid to speak. This student at an ultraliberal college where annual tuition is $67,366 speaks of the Maoist revolution in China as a great thing, because it suppressed the Bad People (capitalists and other enemies of the revolution). Of her — and really, you should listen to the clip just to pick up on the confidence of this young woman — Yang says:

What I found striking about this clip, by an Oberlin undergrad that conservatives are now trying to cancel (and whom I have no interest in trying to cancel) is the bland self-assuredness and casual comfort with which her open advocacy for bringing back political assassinations because some people holding certain views should fear for their lives is delivered. This person is not an edgelord, extremist, or provocateur. She is speaking out of a presumed consensus. Ezra Klein is embattled and defiant in his defense of his grief over Charlie Kirk's murder. This Oberlin undergraduate is none of those things. She speaks as if she has never doubted that the future belongs to her.

A Manhattan judge dropped terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione, who murdered a health care executive. He said that what Mangione does not fit the legal definition of “terrorism” — a distinction that makes no sense to me, given that Mangione chose a health care executive for explicitly political reasons. The NYPD is now warning business leaders that they face higher risk of being shot, in the wake of the Kirk killing. And look at these ecstatic Zoomer kids celebrating the ruling.

It’s insane. The world has gone mad. I used to think that David Betz was right about the prospect of civil war in Britain, France, and Europe, but not America. Now I’m not so sure.

Paul Kingsnorth for years has been pushing me to “stop fighting the culture war”. He has his principled reasons, but they all seem abstract to me, and utterly unpersuasive, in the world the Left has brought into existence. The thing is, though I don’t see our current situation as a “both sides” thing — though it could easily come to that — I will fight the culture war against right-wing nihilists too. I’m persuaded by James Lindsay’s claim that this is a fight between Civilization and Chaos.

The thing to keep in mind is that one can have Chaos within the structures of Civilization — and we do. I had dinner last night with Iain McGilchrist, and mentioned to him that the last time I was in Bucharest, some of my Romanian friends said that there are people in Romania who openly long for the days of the Ceauşescu dictatorship, which was one of the worst in the communist world. Why on earth? I asked. Mostly because of gender ideology, they said. These people would rather live under hideous oppression than in a world that says men can be women and women can be men. The profound chaos of that idea is scarier to them even than dictatorship.

Anyway, we might not be interested in “fighting the culture war,” but culture warriors are certainly interested in us. One of you sent me this excellent Substack essay by the liberal commentator Mike Solana, who is desperately trying to wake up his own side to the likely downstream effects of their celebration of Kirk’s murder. Excerpts:

Over the weekend, the New York Times not only softball interviewed Hasan Piker, an influencer who has argued for about a year that the assassin Luigi Mangione should be freed, healthcare insurance executives are complicit in mass murder, and that killing Brian Thompson — wrong, he is always quick to caveat, murder is wrong! — was an act of self-defense. They also published an op-ed of Hasan’s, either written or heavily neutered by a Times editor, on the subject of political violence.

While Hasan, or whoever wrote this piece for Hasan, did make sure to formally condemn the violence, the piece itself was a totally surreal sort of one-sided conversation with Charlie, who he was meant to formally debate before, again, Charlie was murdered. Here, Hasan explains, is what Hasan would have told this man, who can no longer respond, were he able to respond, about all of his bad opinions, such as his bad opinions about guns and Gaza, which themselves are very violent.

What?

On what planet is this helpful?

Hasan is entitled, legally speaking, to be an evil person. But for the New York Times to frame the man as in some way legitimate, normal, reasonable? To actually ask someone who has contributed so prolifically to our budding leftist assassination culture what he thinks about this most recent political assassination? Is difficult to comprehend.

For a great deal of the despicable commentary we’ve seen in recent days, there is absolutely a case for “cancellation,” and in this the left should not denounce the right. It should join the right.

Forgive me for pointing across the Atlantic, but this is an especially helpful example: The Oxford Union president-elect George Abaraonye posted messages celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination, including “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f***ing go” in a WhatsApp group, and “Charlie Kirk got shot loool” on Instagram.

This is the figurehead of an organization that exists to debate ideas. Abaraonye has himself debated Charlie. A gruesome detail, in that I personally can’t imagine shaking hands with someone, becoming acquainted and chatting casually with them in the context of our political differences, and then celebrating their murder. But whatever, we know he’s a piece of shit. The question is should this piece of shit lose his job? I think yes, certainly. I think obviously.

More:

Most people, at most times, are looking for cues from other people on how to think and behave. In this way, our media institutions, our reality television stars, our writers, our musicians, our influencers do actually shape public opinion. We can’t tolerate anyone who shapes it in favor of political violence. Period.

If the morality of this is somehow not obvious to you, or if you still aren’t convinced this is a meaningful problem, allow me to make one final practical point. In failing to police such behaviors, while concurrently policing conservative overreaction to such behaviors, perception on the right — and I am not accusing you of this, I am just explaining reality — is that you, best case, do not care if they die. You do not care if their friends die. You do not care if their beloved family members die. Worst case, you actually want them to die. My intention in pointing this out is not to appeal to your empathy here, but to your sense of self-preservation.

If this perception of left-wing callousness is not addressed, which can by the way easily be addressed by way of strong maintenance of the taboo against violence, it will change the right. And the version of the right that presently only lives in your most uncharitable arguments online will begin to manifest in reality. The young right will begin to mirror the young left, and become more accepting of violence. Further violence will follow. When that violence follows, there will be fewer platitudes denouncing violence, and more justifications. We should all be afraid of a future like that.

I am not even sure, at this point, we can alter course. I am only asking that you see we are presently on this course, see the role you are even now, if inadvertently, playing in our society’s lurch toward hell, and help.

Charlie Kirk’s murder was undeniably a political assassination. We know this because the self-confessed killer said, “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” I didn’t feel good about JD Vance going on TV and saying people should call employers of those celebrating Kirk’s death, but I’ve changed my mind. Solana is right: if we don’t assert a strong-as-steel taboo against political violence — and that assertion has to be words and actions both — then we will have no defense against civil war.

Looking back to the young Oberlin woman sympathetically quoting Mao in her defense of murdering Charlie Kirk, let’s read this new essay by war scholars David Betz and Michael Rainsborough. Excerpts:

We are neither spiritualists nor psychologists and cannot claim to have a greater window into the minds of these lost souls than anyone else. What we can offer, though, is decades of engagement with the study of strategic conduct: the motives and means of those who resort to violence in pursuit of political ends. And it is here that we wish to advance a thesis that goes further than viewing the collapse of empathy as an unfortunate by-product of social confusion.

What we are witnessing is not a mishap. Whatever the spiritual degradation and cultural dispossession of these young minds, they are, nevertheless, instruments of history. The way they have been psychologically programmed is no quirk of fate; it has been done with intent. They have been conditioned for a purpose.

To explain this means walking backward into history. We could begin with the French Revolution, but for simplicity’s sake let us start a decade before 1975; in 1966, when Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution in China, mobilising youth against their elders, students against teachers, children against parents. He did not stumble into chaos; he conjured it — because chaos was useful.

In Wild Swans, Jung Chang’s memoir of her family’s turmoil during the Cultural Revolution, she recounts that Mao ruled by getting people to despise one another. He understood the ugliest human instincts — envy and resentment — and knew how to weaponise them. “By nourishing the worst in people, Mao created a moral wasteland, a land of hatred.”

What Jung Chang described was not an incidental consequence of revolutionary excess but the very heart of its method: hatred deliberately sown, division systematically engineered, cruelty unleashed as a political instrument.

More:

With the supposed ‘end of history’, liberal triumphalism licensed universities and institutions to reinvent themselves as moral tribunals. Politics was recast as ethics, and ethics as indictment.

‘Diversity’, ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ became less articles of faith than a set of tactics — no longer instruments of compromise but of humiliation, tools by which resentment was stoked and sustained. Generations of students have since been trained to denounce rather than to reason, to persecute rather than to persuade. This is Mao’s Red Guards reconstituted for a digital age: armies of accusation, armed less with AK-47s than with hashtags and HR manuals.

Those who dismiss the ‘culture wars’ as a distraction misunderstand the nature of conflict in our time. The sociologist James Davison Hunter, who coined the phrase three decades ago, cautioned that when disputes cease to be arguments within a shared reality and instead become clashes over what reality itself is, rapprochement is no longer possible. At that point, the logic of civic debate and constitutional politics gives way to the logic of force.

To see all this as a tragic misfortune is deeply mistaken. What has emerged is not spontaneous disorder but a carefully tended culture of antipathy — fertilised by theory, irrigated by resentful passions and sustained by bureaucracies whose survival depends on perpetual conflict.

Want to leave you with one more essay to read today, to make some sense of this madness. It’s not about Charlie Kirk, but about postmodernism and its roots. Author Joseph Zeller concludes:

The decline of the West was not caused by sabotage. It was conviction slowly unwound in the face of horror. We not only forgot how to fight, but why: why to preserve, why to hope, why to carry forward what our ancestors built. Rebuilding will not begin with ideology. It will begin with meaning, by recovering the ability to believe in something beyond critique. To restore coherence, we must first confront the silence left by collapse. The loss of faith was not imposed on us; it was our own. And the real danger lies not in what others did to the West, but in what the West forgot to defend.

I’ve said enough today; I’ll stop. I’ve been making these Charlie Kirk posts available to all, not just subscribers, because I believe the symbolic importance of his killing — a political assassination against a free speech advocate, by a young man radicalized by queerness and the fever swamps of the online world — is impossible to overstate. We need to think, and think hard, about what to do next. But what we cannot do is continue to sit here and hope that this evil will burn itself out.

Please share this post, if you like. It’s free to all. I’m flying to the US tomorrow for conferences, so publication this week might be irregular.