The Deep State’s sharpest critics are the Deep State
Donald Trump will speak at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday in Phoenix. One need not be clairvoyant to predict a sotto voce suggestion that Kirk’s fans respond to his murder peacefully. Everything else in Trump’s speech will urge the opposite. Dear Leader will make clear to all on whom they should vent their anger with his blessings. That is, collectively on whomever Trump blames, facts being such troublesome things.
We’ve seen this movie before. I expect Stop the Steal on steroids (emphasis mine):
Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
(It is a running joke in our house whenever we hear the quote below replayed to shout CAPITOL! when Trump does.)
You know what happened next. You know that he knew that many of his supporters on January 6 came armed to his Stop the Steal rally. Telling his supporters to protest peacefully was Trump covering his ass.
Trump has already gotten away with inciting a riot and failing at an autogolpe. He’s emboldened to incite violence again.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) on Monday renewed her call for a “national divorce” over Kirk’s murder by the son of a deeply Republican family. A “peaceful” divorce, naturally. The woman who auctioned off a .50 caliber sniper rifle and blew up a Prius to illustrate her promise to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda” is not terribly savvy. But like Trump, she’s savvy enough to rhetorically cover her ass too.
The Deep State (remember them?) considered this “plausible deniability” during the Watergate investigation and the Iran Contra Affair. Trump and Greene took notes (although as an infant and pre-teen, Greene took hers in crayon).
Malcolm Ferguson writes in The New Republic:
There’s been a concerted effort on the right to cast Kirk’s shooting as some coordinated leftist attack. Some like Elon Musk are even calling it the work of a transgender terrorist cell. Multiple figures both in and out of government have called for “war” against this anonymous idea they have of the left, when in reality the suspect’s politics are enigmatic at best. Still, they are using Kirk’s assassination to further their own far-right agendas. MTG is doing the exact same, as she is literally calling for a civil dissolution of the United States over this, all while evoking the name of Jesus.
Is Greene quietly humming “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” or “Dixie”?
Professor Barbara Walter, “one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terror,” writes at Politico:
Political violence is not random. Research shows it becomes far more likely under four conditions: when democracy is declining rapidly, when societies are divided by race, religion or ethnicity, when political leaders tolerate or encourage violence, and when citizens have easy access to guns. The United States checks all four boxes and none of them are getting better. Violence also tends to spike around elections, which means the coming contests in 2026 and 2028 are poised to be flashpoints.
Clionadh Raleigh, CEO of nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, believes Kirk’s murder is not indicative of any “vast domestic terror movement.” That exists only in the fetid imagination of Trump’s pet psychopath and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller. Rather, it is indicative of “a continuation of the trend toward lone-actor violence,” Raleigh explains:
The U.S. has a concentration of serious violence in individual attacks without a partisan motivation or trend. The perpetrators and victims of school shootings, racially motivated assaults, and targeted killings of political leaders, corporate executives, and public officials are not partisan or even coherently political. Because the murders are not motivated by a shared political agenda, they are a manifestation of the U.S.’s unique vulnerability to individualized violence in a polarized, heavily armed society.
So, no civil war. Right?
Dalya Berkowitz, a senior research analyst in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace observes that reactionary conservatives commit violence against people; reactionary liberals typically attack property:
We could be headed for a cycle of tit-for-tat violence in the U.S. that we haven’t seen, at least in decades. Historically, violence against people most often comes from the far right, while violence against property more often comes from the far left. If we begin to see attacks against people from the left as well (as has yet to be determined in Kirk’s case), I worry that this violence will spiral, and we will not reestablish a norm of nonviolence in the United States for decades to come.
The rhetoric justifying these actions is destructive to our democracy. Research on political leaders’ incendiary rhetoric suggests it may direct violence against targeted groups. And social media posts glorifying these attacks threaten to normalize them. This kind of rhetoric helps violent people justify their actions.
Expect Trump on Sunday to blame a spectral network of “leftist” groups for Kirk’s murder by a lone gunman whose motivations remain unclear. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
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