A good old-fashioned letter to the editor. It’s been a stressful, emotional week for the country, and I want to be more helpful. In fact, while admittedly difficult, I’ve reflected a bit on the matter and know I can be more helpful.

Probably, the easiest first thing I can do is just be very clear about what I’m trying to accomplish with my writing at the moment: I want a strong cultural taboo against the celebration of political violence, as I believe this will help prevent an escalation of political violence in our country, and I want the center left’s help in reasserting this taboo, because without the center left on board I do not think success is possible. My hope is writers on the center left will receive this piece in the spirit with which it’s intended, and join me.

Unfortunately, after a bit of pushback this weekend, both publicly and privately, it became obvious to me that I am presently not even close to persuading you people.

The first and most eloquent bit of pushback I received was shared via DM:

Hey man - just want to say when things like “the whole left celebrated” are communicated, it honestly makes myself and friends feel like we are being threatened with retaliation.

We are thinking about buying guns as people are claiming they need to get back at us. I’m mostly a centrist tbh but I lean left, so of course I’d be bucketed into this group by some nutcase who wants blood.

Anyways, I really hope leaders like yourself can help keep people thinking rationally. Especially in hard times. We are the powder keg and the sparks are too often flying in ways that don’t even make sense. The perfect cocktail our adversaries wish more and are eager to exploit.

I really respect you. People across the board want safety and security. I’m sorry he was killed. No one I know celebrated it. It’s just really bad.

Then, in an email from a reader:

Hey, Mr. Solana. A few days ago I read your piece in the Atlantic and I was taken by your writing, your humor, your apparent pragmatism, and even handedness. So I signed up for this newsletter.

These are really dangerous times, at least that's how I feel. And having just discovered you I was kind of hoping, while I didn't know what I was hoping I was just interested in reading this newsletter.

I have to say your bit will only fan the flames, inciting people who are looking to thinkers like you for a sense of how to deal with what is going on.

Disappointed.

And finally, while the great majority of comments in my last piece were supportive (this is my house after all), I received more pushback than usual. Of note, a trans acquaintance of mine expressed fear, and — again — “disappointment” in my somehow contributing to this fear by cataloguing the celebrations of Charlie’s murder. This was even before we knew the killer was dating a man in the middle of some kind of gender transition, which has only further heightened America’s conversation on “trans violence.” Fear is, I think, the theme of the day. I agree there is reason to be afraid, though I respectfully and forcefully disagree that my writing has anything to do with it.

I’m worried about escalating violence myself, which I’ve warned about for years. While I’ve been very clear on the issue, I will once again repeat: I do not believe the average Democrat is violent, or wants more violence. The truth is obviously the opposite. I believe there are a minority of people who want violence, and who celebrate violence. But where it seems I differ with many on the center left is I believe this is a large (or, too large) and worrying minority. I also believe celebration of political violence is acutely a problem among younger people on the political left.

Unfortunately, even this morning, in friendly conversation with a couple acquaintances of mine on the center left, there was a strong aversion not only to admitting this problem exists, but to admitting celebration over Charlie’s assassination was widespread. I do not understand this.

As I shared the first batch of anecdotes last week, gathered before even a full day had passed after Charlie’s assassination, I stressed these were not just bots. These were teachers, nurses, government officials celebrating a political assassination.

Since I shared these examples, there have been countless more. They span class, race, and geography: an out of work loser ass actress calling for the murder of Charlie’s family; a FEMA employee caught admitting his colleagues all laughed about the news of Charlie’s death, and saying he deserved it; a small town school board member posting “I remember when we used to be okay shooting Nazis”; a University of Michigan professor writing “violence is a solution.” In the realm of tacit justifications, rather than outright celebrations, there are endless new examples, from Real Housewives to Don Lemon (spiritually the same I guess), hounding random people in the streets, all but begging them to express some hatred of Charlie (the woman Don Lemon interviewed in the clip I linked did a wonderful job of maintaining her humanity, fwiw).

In conversation with more principled center leftists willing to engage here, I’ve been told the reaction is of course heinous, but not statistically relevant. Even 30,000 or 40,000 posts in the context of our total population, they argue, is a small fraction.

A couple days after the assassination, Jonathan Chait argued something similar. He pointed out that prominent Democratic politicians were not celebrating Charlie’s murder, and in the absence of such derangement right wingers had invented a controversy — this horrifying reaction presently under discussion. To prove his position, he highlighted a condemnation of Zohran Mamdani’s, who nobody, as far as I can tell, had accused of celebrating Charlie’s murder.

Jonathan then went on to characterize the heinous, widespread response the rest of us are actually talking about as “scattered,” and tried to argue this was all a matter of scale. The country is very big. Of course there are some bad comments.

This is outrageous obfuscation. First, we all know the average American is consuming content far more than he is creating content. These are many thousands of examples among people who post. Then, reaction to the posts in terms of shares and likes is at least an order of magnitude greater. Come on, we understand how social media works. Certainly Jonathan understands — he has made a career of attacking it. Why obscure this?

The politics of the killer, which so many among both left and right-wing talking heads have lost themselves in discussing, is not even that relevant.

As Professor Geoffrey Miller posted on X, “Charlie Kirk’s assassination revealed a small network of radical Antifa Leftists who wanted one conservative dead. The public reaction to his assassination revealed that millions of ‘mainstream’ Leftists want all conservatives dead.”

That is what we are discussing.

And for a science enjoyer like Jonathan, we don’t even need to look at the anecdotal evidence that sentiment in favor of violence is real. We don’t need to talk about the scale of the commentary, or reaction to that commentary. We can just look at available data.

Polling, both before and after Charlie’s assassination, indicates an alarmingly high acceptance of political violence, especially among young Democrats. I touched on this a few days before Charlie was murdered in Abundant Delusion, a piece of my own:

Polling before the 2024 election indicated a growing trend of Americans expressing support for political violence, with the right wing in the lead. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, and two attempted assassinations, a stunning survey from City Journal found that “38 percent of respondents, and 55 percent of those left of center, said assassinating President Trump would be at least somewhat justified; 31 percent of respondents, and 48 percent of those left of center, said the same about” Elon Musk. Another recent survey shows that even more Americans — including one in three attendees at a handful of anti-Trump protests — believe we “may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Directly following Charlie’s murder, YouGov released a new poll. Yes, most Americans believe political violence is a problem, which is very good news. However, 16% of liberals thought a “feeling of joy” about the death of their political opponents was usually or always acceptable. Only 4% of conservatives, and 7% of moderates agreed. Worse, among the “very liberal,” 25% believed political violence could sometimes be justified.

I can understand some initial partisan impulse to downplay political violence directly following a political murder, and in most cases I doubt this is done with truly malevolent intent. Polling seems to indicate both sides have a problem with this, for what it’s worth, as the numbers tend to dance around a little depending on who was just murdered.

But in terms of the more narrow and grisly question of whether political violence is “ever justified,” YouGov found younger and more liberal people were (while still a minority) more likely to say yes — in an earlier poll, immediately following the assassination of Democratic politician Melissa Hortman and her husband. In other words, this is not some situational noise. Most available evidence indicates this is a real trend on the young left.

It is curious, to first be told there are no widespread celebrations of violence, and then, after sharing examples and polling data, to be accused of targeting the people responsible, of “fanning the flames,” or of, essentially, joining the craziest wing of the left in wokeness. But here we are.

Over the weekend, Thomas Chatterton Williams pointed out, and decried, the right wing’s embrace of “cancel culture” in the Atlantic. The piece said nothing about Charlie, and mostly argued honestly about a trend on the right the likes of which Chris Rufo would probably not even deny were it not obviously published this weekend in response to the broad “cancellation” of assassination celebrants. Thomas denied this, and later that weekend seemed to agree that celebrating an assassination was an ethical breach worthy of firing (great). But he seems to have forgotten he himself admitted his initial feelings in an exchange with Mollie Hemingway on X:

My hope is Thomas agrees with the version of Thomas that agrees with me — “cancellations” are mostly bad, “cancellations” in the case of public school teachers actually celebrating an assassination are not only good but essential to maintaining our democracy.

If maintaining a strong taboo against the celebration of political violence is “cancel culture,” okay, I don’t care, call me a cancel culture guy. Because if we fail to course correct here, this troubling lust for violence we’re observing on the young left will be mirrored throughout our culture. To prevent that mirroring, we need strong institutional guardrails policing the sentiment. Unfortunately, provided outlets like the New York Times are at least still aspirationally centrist, we have received something like the opposite of that to date.

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.

Or, kind of:

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.

Andrew Sullivan summed it up well:

For the president of a debating society to cheer the murder of someone for debating is quite simply disqualifying - as well as morally grotesque.

The president of the Oxford Union must resign immediately or the institution will be permanently and mortally wounded. If necessary, the Chancellor, a former Union president, should make that clear.

As a former president and secretary of the Union, I’m ashamed and appalled.

Resign. Now.

But I will happily take it a step further than Andrew. If lil Georgie won’t resign, he must obviously be fired from his position, as his views make the performance of his position impossible. I feel similarly about people working for our government, healthcare workers, and teachers. These are people we have entrusted with the public’s protection and care. A violation of that trust totally undermines the job.

There is an expectation that I won’t be treated differently in a hospital if I’m a Republican, which is why a New Jersey surgeon coming out in favor of Charlie’s assassination, in front of a patient, can’t happen. Similarly, there is an expectation among mothers that their sons who liked Charlie are not being educated by a woman who would literally be happy if they died, which is why this surreal string of teachers across the country expressing bloodlust over Charlie’s murder has been so controversial.

“America became greater today,” wrote a teacher in South Carolina following Charlie’s assassination. “Yes, I’m happy such evilness is gone from this world,” wrote a teacher in Michigan. In a lengthy post discussing the killing, a teacher in New York characterized Charlie as a modern Goebbels who was “interrupted by a bullet to the neck,” concluded “Good riddance to bad garbage,” and shared a picture of himself in a shirt that read “IS HE DEAD YET?” In at least three Massachusetts school districts teachers are under review for such sentiments, including one Framingham teacher who shared a video of herself twirling happily and singing “God Bless America” as news of Charlie Kirk’s death scrolled behind her, focusing the camera on the word “death.”

All of these people should be fired.

Now, we’re also looking at a lot of overreaction at the moment. A teacher in Miamisburg, Ohio, was caught in a recording, which she did not share publicly herself, explaining to a student that Charlie was a “terrible person,” but violence is never justified. To my ear, it’s not even clear she thinks Charlie is “terrible” herself, or if she is only answering the question from a student who felt this way. The center left is furious over this attempted cancellation. In one typical post, Jesse Singal expressed dismay over the overreach. I agree with him. I agree with all of you. This is wrong.

At the moment, I see a lot of people on the right focused on the most egregious examples of celebration, while folks on the left are almost exclusively focused on examples of overreach, distortion, mistakes in “cancellation.” Probably we can all do better here. Probably what we all need to be doing right now, or at least all of us creating media, is focusing on some bit of both in service of firmly establishing the bounds of this taboo in such a way as we don’t have to argue over this anymore. But also, more importantly, so we might express some shared sense of humanity with each other. We need to find common ground.

The bar for firing a teacher is not “I disagree with Charlie’s beliefs.” The bar for firing a teacher is “Charlie’s death is good,” or “deserved,” or some version of “I am glad this happened.” Or sparks “joy,” as Taylor Lorenz said of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

This brings me to our media. Without some very clear and public apology, with a description of how she once approached the topic incorrectly, and how she intends to now move forward, Taylor Lorenz should never write for a mainstream outlet again (where she somehow keeps getting jobs). The wildly popular streamer Destiny, who just said “you need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events, so they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature,” should never appear on mainstream television again. It doesn’t matter that everyone yelled at him on air, why was he invited onto Piers Morgan in the first place? And editors at the New York Times should not be writing op-eds for Hasan fucking Piker.

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.

-SOLANA