2025-09-13 07:32:38
Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Kirk had been shot. At that point, there was hardly any information about the incident—let alone details about the shooter or a motive. Yet there was plenty of blame to go around: Elon Musk posted on X that “the Left is the party of murder,” even before Kirk’s shocking death had been confirmed. Others blamed the shooting on the media, NGOs, and billionaire Democrat fundraisers.
This is the algorithmic internet at work. It abhors an information vacuum and, in the absence of facts or credible information, gaps are quickly filled with rage bait, conspiracy theorizing, doomerism, and vitriol.
If one thing has united the discourse in the past 48 hours, it has been a desire for certainty—a drive to know exactly why Kirk was killed. He was a political figure, of course, which makes his horrific death inherently an act of political violence. But understanding Kirk’s assassination through politics alone may not be enough. After the alleged assassin was apprehended, late last night, the online meaning-making machine went back into overdrive. This morning, I watched as people dredged up what appeared to be his mother’s Facebook page, posting photos from 2017 of a person who looks like the alleged shooter supposedly dressed up like Donald Trump for Halloween. Other photos from the same Facebook page appear to show children at a county fair, and one is wearing an NRA hat. “They were a pro-gun family,” one account that posts on both X and Bluesky wrote, alongside a screenshot of the Facebook post, implying that the killer may have been a Republican. None of this seems to have been verified before it was posted.
Another account claimed that it had found a donation from the shooter to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. A separate post from a journalist claimed to debunk this. On 4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board, anonymous posters feuded over the killer’s ideology. “So… not trans, huh? And a white person? Male? Interesting. Who’d have thought it?” one wrote. Another poster suggested, with no evidence, that the shooter may have been a Groyper, the term for followers of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who had publicly feuded with Kirk. Others, of course, speculated about what the assassination might have to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Many of the right-wing accounts who’d been clamoring for civil war just hours earlier seemed not to know what to make of the news—Representative Nancy Mace, who’d previously speculated that the shooter was transgender, posted on X that the shooter was a “lost individual” and she offered to pray for him. As of this writing, the public still knows very little about the shooter—there are no charges, just speculation.
Watching all this play out, you can feel a jockeying of sorts; interested parties are trying to label or disavow the shooter, or otherwise pin a label onto him. This, too, is the algorithmic internet at work: a justification machine where facts and news aren’t so much presented and reported as they are cataloged and then rearranged to fit preset narratives.
[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]
What we know of the killer’s ideology, beyond what can be interpreted from his alleged mother’s Facebook posts, comes from the crime scene. The details offered by Utah’s governor at a press conference this morning suggest that the situation may be complex in the way that many highly visible shootings now are. According to Utah’s governor, the fired bullet casing found on the scene had been inscribed with the phrase “Notices bulges OwO whats this?”—a niche online reference to flirting within the furry community that is now mostly just used trollishly. Unfired cases were also inscribed with hyper-online references, including a series of arrows that, as the gaming publication Polygon pointed out, match the input required to drop a bomb in a popular game called Helldivers 2. Another bullet casing was engraved with the trollish phrase “If you read this you are gay lmao.” The bullet casings are less of a sign of a political affiliation and much more a signal that the shooter was very online. One old Facebook post that’s made the rounds purportedly shows the alleged shooter dressed up in 2018 as an obscure meme that gained popularity in the 2010s on 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter.
This dynamic—a young shooter who seems to have no barriers between fringe online life and the real world—has become an alarming meme unto itself. Just last week, I wrote about the mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis; the shooter there was also extremely online and apparently affiliated with a number of groups that defy normal political ideologies. These groups are better thought of as fandoms—a hybrid threat network of disaffected people that can include Columbine obsessives, neo-Nazis, child groomers, and trolls. They perform for one another through acts of violence and cheer their community on to commit murder. Though these groups might adopt far-right aesthetics, the truth is that their ideology is defined by a selfish kind of nihilism. To them, murder is the ultimate act of trolling, and they want to be remembered for it.
[Read: The mass shooters are performing for one another]
From the little we know, Kirk’s assassin seems to differ some from this profile. He appeared to have intentionally carried out a targeted assassination rather than attempting a mass shooting—both are horrific, but they are different. And he did not take his life in the hopes of becoming a “saint” online, as many mass shooters do. But the bullet casings suggest a desire to reach an audience—and to troll the media and law enforcement tasked with trying to find a motive.
This leaves the broader discourse around Kirk’s assassination in an awkward position, deprived of the certainty that so many crave. The killer’s motive is not clear yet, nor is the full political and cultural impact of Kirk’s death. And yet, as this and so many other shootings have demonstrated, none of this matters to individuals who are using the tragedy to get attention for themselves online.
I get the sense that, for many, the most unnerving outcome might be if the shooter does not fall neatly into an ideological framework. Perhaps this is part of why the unknowns will not stop interested parties from trying to categorize him. They will not stop the Trump administration from suggesting, as the White House adviser Stephen Miller did on X yesterday, that there is a sickness among the administration’s ideological enemies that must be purged from the country. The unknowns will not stop those who see the assassination as an overt act of left-versus-right violence from feeling like the country is on the brink of a civil war. The livestreams, vigilante investigators, extremists sending death threats, and conspiracist threads will continue their work. And Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, will continue to sell $35 memorial T-shirts with an illustration of Kirk and a Bible verse on them.
The shooters who fall into this mold implicitly understand these internet dynamics. They seek an audience, but they are also acting out to get the world—especially the online world—to respond. “If you read this you are gay lmao” is a trolly, nihilistic thing to inscribe on a bullet casing, but the point is for people to see it, for people like me to write it down so that people like you can read it and feel something, be it shock, outrage, confusion, or sadness. The shooters may not have a coherent ideology, or even be particularly politically motivated per se, but they seem to know the ecosystem they are dropping their horrific acts of violence into.
For some shooters, online communities—with all their irony-poisoning, shitposting, and feuding—are more real, or at least more meaningful, than physical ones. With their senseless violence, these killers are bringing a part of that networked, online chaos to tangible, life-and-death reality. They know that their violence will be flattened, picked apart, argued over, and, crucially, amplified by the justification machine. In this way, they will get what they’re after. The violence will continue.
There are many overlapping problems at work here: a gun-violence and firearm epidemic; worsening political polarization; social and cultural issues such as loneliness, alienation, and a growing distrust of elites; and disdain for one’s fellow citizens. There is so much anger right now, plenty of it justified. A young father was murdered on a college campus. Few public or private spaces seem to be safe from the specter of a mass shooter. Institutions that once functioned for the benefit of the public are now sclerotic, having been partly dismantled, or seem indifferent to suffering. The economy operates like a casino, and there’s a feeling that traditional pathways to prosperity are gone. People are being rounded up off the streets without due process. The list goes on.
Every minute of every day, all of these thoughts and feelings are uploaded into platforms that are owned by billionaires or massive technology companies and built for viral advertising and the collection of individual data. The internet is not a monolith. For every community of mass-shooter fandoms, there is another that is silly, joyous, productive, or totally harmless. But it is hard not to notice that, in the aggregate, something poisonous is in the architecture of its platforms and the way that our technologies demand not just our attention, but our most heightened emotions. This is not an environment for good-faith politics. These platforms are governed by algorithms that tend to prioritize engagement above all else, amplifying the loudest, most shameless users because these voices will draw in other voices. This attention is worth good money, both to posters who can harness it, as well as the tech companies. Kirk knew this and was quite successful at playing this game, using social media to spread invective, troll his political opponents, polarize his audience, and grow his movement.
The public has no understanding of how the algorithms really work—they’re company secrets—so participants are constantly shadowboxing the machine, turning conversation into a constant A/B test to see what catches on. Even many of the people who broadly understand this situation feel compelled to have conversations in these spaces—the very same outlets that help incubate and perpetuate unthinkable violence.
When Kirk’s death was announced, I felt sick—primarily because the act itself was so cowardly and brutal and autoplaying on my timelines with every refresh. But I also knew this could only accelerate the kind of physical violence and hateful rhetoric that got us here. And I knew what would happen next: Kirk’s death would set off a chain of the highest-stakes conversations—about gun violence, mental illness, political polarization, online snuff films, fascism, free speech, the right to assemble, the Second Amendment, transgender rights, Nazis, the Civil War, the very state of our democracy, and more. And the dialogue would happen on platforms that goad each of us into being the worst versions of ourselves; that prioritize in-group performance over listening; that reward outrage and outrageousness; that collapse context; that exist to privilege conflict over resolution. To continue to conduct our discourse in these spaces suggests, however tacitly, a desire for them not to resolve.
2025-09-13 07:31:00
Before the president of the United States announced on this morning’s broadcast of Fox & Friends that the man who’d assassinated Charlie Kirk was finally in custody—“I think, with a high degree of certainty, we have him”—he had already told the American people who was to blame.
Within hours of Kirk’s killing, when law enforcement had not released so much as a photograph of the suspected shooter, Donald Trump addressed the nation, accusing the “radical left.” His assertion fanned breathless speculation on social media that the shooter was some kind of operative, an agent of organized political violence, or maybe even a point man in an elaborate conspiracy involving antifa, Israeli intelligence, or operatives working for Kirk’s rivals in the MAGA sphere. Apparently inaccurate press reporting, attributed to federal law-enforcement officials, suggested that the shooter had carved messages espousing “transgender” ideology onto a bullet casing.
[Read: Leading Democrats Are Condemning Charlie Kirk’s Murder]
Not many of the people speculating the loudest online predicted that the killer was a young man from a deeply pro-Trump corner of Utah, raised by registered Republicans. But that’s the picture of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson that began to emerge today, when Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced that Robinson was in custody and would be charged.
“I was praying that, if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us,” Cox said of his fellow Utahns. The governor, who has made it his political mission to lower the rhetorical temperature in his state and the country, seemed at times to be talking directly to the president and to those of Kirk’s supporters who have portrayed his assassination as the first shot in a war with the left.
“There is one person responsible for what happened here,” Cox said, his voice quavering slightly, “and that person is now in custody.”
Robinson’s arrest prompted Trump’s opponents to excoriate the president and others for rushing to judgment. Former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, an ardent Never Trumper, asked his followers on X to send him any instances of politicians or other leaders “blaming the left, or declaring some war, or anything before we knew who the shooter was.” Political point-scoring is inevitable and, for some, deeply satisfying. But the truth is, much remains unknown and unclear about why Robinson, a young man with no history of criminal activity, allegedly sought out Kirk and killed him on Wednesday with a long-range-rifle shot to the neck.
Robinson “had become more political in recent years,” Cox said, citing a statement from a family member to law enforcement. At a recent family dinner, Robinson had mentioned that Kirk would be visiting Utah Valley University, and had discussed with another family member “why they didn’t like him and the viewpoints he had,” Cox said.
Even in reliably red Utah, support for Trump and his allies is hardly universal. The state’s Republican voters tend to prefer the gentler political stylings of their former senator Mitt Romney or the current governor, whose quixotic effort to find political common ground has often put him on a collision course with the president. Washington County, where Robinson and his family live, is a fast-growing area where unreserved support for Trump is expressed in MAGA flags that fly alongside the Stars and Stripes.
Authorities haven’t said what they think compelled Robinson to pick up a rifle and drive more than 250 miles to Kirk’s event. Robinson’s parents may eventually provide more answers. By outward appearances, they were close with their son. His mother’s Facebook page was filled with family photos from trips and holidays. She gushed about Tyler’s 4.0 high-school GPA. “His options are endless,” she wrote in one post.
Robinson confessed to his parents after he drove home from the university campus, two federal law-enforcement officials told us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation. His parents then called their family pastor, who happens to be a court security officer with the U.S. Marshals Service. He called a deputy marshal, who came to the family home and, after realizing that Robinson was indeed the alleged shooter, contacted federal law enforcement, the officials said.
Federal investigators will surely scour Robinson’s communications and online presence looking for explanations. Investigators spoke with Robinson’s roommate, who showed them messages Robinson had allegedly sent about retrieving a rifle from a “drop point” and “leaving the rifle in a bush,” Cox said. Investigators later found a rifle in the woods near the crime scene wrapped in a towel, as Robinson had said it would be in his messages to his roommate. Robinson had sent the messages on the social platform Discord. FBI investigators will likely question his online network of friends; bonds forged on the internet can be stronger than those in real life.
Robinson also mentioned in his messages that he had engraved bullet casings, Cox said. One was scrawled with the words Hey fascist! Catch! Another was marked with a series of arrows—one pointing up, another to the right, and then three pointing down, an image that some have taken to refer to a gaming maneuver that summons a powerful weapon in the hugely popular Helldivers 2, an online shooter game.
On Discord this afternoon, fans and players of the game worried that Kirk’s murder, and Robinson’s invocation of Helldivers 2, could smear players and turn the right’s anger toward them. Many players condemned Kirk’s murder and encouraged their friends to stop talking about the news and get back to the game.
Cox seemed to want everyone to take that advice. Recalling Kirk’s own words, he urged Americans to put down their phones, get offline, and remember that the internet “is not real life.” Cox compared the public trauma of Kirk’s killing to that of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. The nation had been at a turning point then, he said: “This is our moment. Do we escalate, or do we find an off-ramp?”
[Read: Utah’s Governor Almost Seemed Like He Was Speaking to Trump]
During Trump’s interview with Fox & Friends, a co-host pointed to acts of political violence on the left and the right and asked, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” Trump replied that “radicals on the right” are concerned about crime and illegal immigration, painting them as zealous but restrained responders to civil disorder. “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he continued, “and they are vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”
Robinson’s political views will probably become clearer with time. But in the hours after he was first identified, in the absence of evidence that he was quite the exemplar of the radical left that Trump had predicted, the president seemed more interested in changing the subject.
On the White House lawn this afternoon, reporters asked the president how he was holding up after the death of his close friend. “I think very good,” he said. “And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.”
He took no further questions.
McKay Coppins and Marc Novicoff contributed reporting.
2025-09-13 06:02:00
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Updated at 7:23 p.m. ET on September 12, 2025
One small relief in an awful week is that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was the man leading the official response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In any other state, local politicians might have either become targets for President Donald Trump or leapt to inflame the situation. But the Beehive State’s governor is perhaps the most consistent voice of calm and conciliation in the GOP.
Cox’s impulse to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” was on display this morning in a press conference, where, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and local leaders, he announced the arrest of Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Kirk’s killing, on Wednesday.
“This is certainly about the tragic death, political assassination of Charlie Kirk. But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual,” Cox said. “It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times.”
This kind of language was once common among mainstream politicians responding to a tragedy; now Cox is a notable and praiseworthy outlier in his own party. Trump’s response has been mercurial. At times, the president has seemed to call for a calm, measured reaction to the shooting. “He was an advocate of nonviolence,” Trump said of Kirk on Thursday. “That’s the way I’d like to see people respond.” In the next breath, however, he cast blame and demanded forceful reprisal. During Cox’s remarks this morning, the governor seemed almost to be trying to speak to Trump—or at least to those who might be swayed by his rhetoric.
“We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump said yesterday.
“To my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” Cox lamented. “It feels like rage is the only option.”
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” Trump said in a brief speech Wednesday night, “including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
And here’s Cox today: “There is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable.”
This morning on Fox & Friends, Trump told the hosts, “I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime.” He added: “The radicals on the left are the problem. And they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”
Later that morning, Cox said, “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now, not by pretending differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.”
“Social media is a cancer on our society right now, and I would encourage—again, I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community,” Cox said. This advice might be particularly valuable to Trump, who has his own social-media network, which he uses to blast out invective at all hours of the day.
But if Cox and Trump represent two rival impulses within the Republican coalition, Trump is undoubtedly winning. “Democrats own what happened today,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on Wednesday. “Y’all caused this,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told Democrats on the House floor. “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” the influential Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”
Other influential figures on the right have been equally or more strident. “The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk declared on X before a suspect had even been identified. Andrew Tate, the misogynist who has been charged with sex trafficking in two countries (which he denies); Alex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster; and Libs of TikTok influencer Chaya Raichik all invoked “civil war.”
(Notwithstanding accusations of stoking violence, prominent Democrats have consistently condemned Kirk’s assassination. That’s a vivid contrast to the mockery from many on the right—including Donald Trump Jr.—after a man attacked the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the muted reactions, disinformation, and silence that followed the assassination of the Democratic Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, this summer.)
No other politician can really hope to compete with a president’s influence (though California Governor Gavin Newsom is certainly willing to try), and that is especially true of Trump, who is so omnipresent that a few days’ absence from the spotlight led to rumors of his death. Even Cox has partly succumbed to Trump’s gravitational pull. Although for a long time he distanced himself from the president—one of the most notable Republicans to neither endorse Trump nor leave the GOP—he eventually got behind him in the last election. As he told my colleague McKay Coppins, in a somewhat-pained interview, he understood Trump’s character but thought that public criticism was useless. Instead, he hoped that Trump might at least modulate his tone if given sufficient positive reinforcement.
Cox was right to call for conciliation and peace today, but by now, he must surely know that his hopes for Trump were in vain. Other Americans can still benefit from Cox’s reminder.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
The suspect in Charlie Kirk’s shooting has been identified as 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said at a news conference this morning. Robinson confessed to a family member before turning himself in to the police, Cox said.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University
By Rose Horowitch
At the close of the fall semester, professors across the country will grade their students. Based on recent trends, those grades will be higher than ever. Around the same time, students will hand grades right back to their professors in the form of teacher evaluations. Those grades, too, will likely be higher than ever.
These two facts are very much related. American colleges, especially the most selective ones, are confronting the dual problems of rampant grade inflation and declining rigor. At Harvard, as I wrote recently, the percentage of A grades has more than doubled over the past 40 years, but students are doing less work than they used to. Teacher evaluations are a big part of how higher education got to this point. The scores factor into academics’ pay, hiring, and chance to get tenure. But maximizing teacher ratings is very different from providing quality instruction. In fact, those aims are largely opposed. Faculty are incentivized to lighten students’ workloads and give them better grades, lest they be punished themselves. “To some extent, we are all afraid of our students,” one Harvard history professor told me.
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Explore. Yvonne Kim explains the fandom fueling Netflix’s most popular movie ever, KPop Demon Hunters.
Watch. Forty years after Spinal Tap, history’s most hapless band turns it up to 11 one last time, James Parker writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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2025-09-13 04:54:00
From the moment an assassin shot Charlie Kirk, my social-media feed began filling up with people decrying the attack. The sentiment of horror—both at the murder itself and at what it portended for American political culture—was overwhelming and cross-ideological.
From the pro–Donald Trump conservatives in my timeline, however, I detected another sort of response. Although most expressed genuine grief at the tragedy befalling a figure many of them admired or knew, some others seemed preoccupied with proving that “the left” was celebrating the attack.
The challenge, for this cohort, is that Democratic Party leaders were united in condemnation of the attack on Kirk and political violence generally. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a gleeful pugilist who has made a brand out of aping the president’s disordered egomaniacal communication style, wrote, “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.” Zohran Mamdani, a New York City mayoral candidate so left-wing that many Democratic leaders refuse to endorse him, wrote, “I’m horrified by the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah. Political violence has no place in our country.”
And so, in the absence of evidence of any serious strain of liberal support for the Charlie Kirk murder, some influential voices on the right willed one into existence. They hunted the internet for expressions of support for Kirk’s murder, or even insufficient remorse, a search that yielded almost exclusively random private citizens.
Andy Ngo, a right-wing journalist with 1.7 million followers on X, produced offensive posts from such figures as the owner of an animal hospital in Oklahoma, a wealth manager in Pennsylvania, and grade-school teachers in Oregon and Idaho. The conservative Washington Free Beacon published one story about a post by a University of Michigan professor, and another about posts by a former Columbia-encampment organizer who notoriously endorsed the murder of Zionists and has long since been expelled from the school. An entire website, titled Charlie’s Murderers, was established to collect alleged pro-murder sentiment; as Wired reported, some of the posts it displayed had in fact been written before Kirk’s killing.
Some conservatives treated the anonymity of these scattered pro-violence posters as evidence of the breadth of their views. “The number of people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death who work as teachers, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and other ‘helping professions’ is immensely disturbing,” the right-wing activist Chris Rufo posted on X. “We have a serious problem in this country.”
No question, some social-media posts about Kirk are genuinely grotesque. That anyone would celebrate Kirk’s death is sad. But in a nation of more than 300 million people, there is no offensive opinion you can’t find if you go looking for it. If support for Kirk’s assassination were a significant current of thought on the American left, right-wing journalists would call out the prominent people expressing glee. Because that’s not happening, they have to publish articles about random individuals.
[Adrienne LaFrance: Strawberries in winter]
Indeed, the fact that attention is being focused on such examples—and not on actual Democratic Party officeholders or major voices on the left—shows that the party has a healthy culture of marginalizing illiberal and violent sentiments. Thus the outpouring of condemnations, and thus too the bitterness that divides radical-left activists from the Democratic Party. This divide reflects a major structural difference between the two parties: The far left reviles the Democrats and their leaders, whereas right-wing activists worship Donald Trump.
Yet the Republican Party’s fanatical devotion to Trump requires an insistence that it is responding to a greater and more insidious form of fanaticism on the left. Positing a totalitarian and violent left-wing threat is necessary to justify Trump’s own behavior.
Many mainstream Republicans and legacy conservative outlets have behaved more responsibly, acknowledging that violent tendencies exist on the right and left alike. “The time for unity, the time for peace, it is now,” said Alabama Senator Katie Britt. “At some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox pleaded this morning.
But a far more intemperate mood is equally if not more prevalent. “The left wants us dead,” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted to his 3.8 million followers. “Face the facts, and act accordingly.” On the House floor, Representative Bob Onder, of Missouri, declared, “There is no longer any middle ground. Some on the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people, but their ideology is pure evil.” In a New York Post op-ed, the writer Batya Ungar-Sargon accused Democrats, whose political leaders unequivocally denounced Kirk’s assassination, of nonetheless “doubling down on the rhetoric that led to it.” Her evidence? They had condemned violence without admitting that “the vast majority of the political violence in this country is coming from their side.” (All of these comments, it should be said, came before any information whatsoever was known about the suspect.)
Yesterday, I wrote an article about Trump’s disturbing response to Kirk’s killing. I noted that, rather than calling for unity and calm, the president delivered an address in which he defined political violence as an exclusively left-wing problem, attributed it to the entire political opposition, and threatened the use of state power to suppress it. Even though the first sentence of my article described the murder as a “horrifying, cold-blooded assassination,” right-wing accounts began circulating screenshots of the headline as if it showed that I was celebrating Kirk’s death or calling for more violence. “This is absolutely vile. People like @jonathanchait are contributing to the vitriol and political violence that are ravaging our country,” Senator Marsha Blackburn posted.
These sorts of reactions might be forgivable if they were merely overheated expressions of an impulse to delegitimize political violence. But the purpose of this rhetoric is not to vilify political violence. It is to equate political violence with everyone perceived as being to the left of the Republican Party, so as to simultaneously delegitimize opposition to Trump while excusing even the most illiberal and violent forms of right-wing activity.
That was the unmistakable message of Trump’s Oval Office remarks Wednesday evening. But, in case anyone missed it, he made the point even clearer during a Fox & Friends appearance this morning. After one of the hosts posited, “We have radicals on the right as well,” and suggested that this was part of the challenge facing the country, Trump disputed the premise. “The radicals on the right are often radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said. “They don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.’ The radicals on the left are the problem.”
First by omission, and now by commission, Trump is coming within a whisker of doing the exact thing that some of his allies are accusing “the left” of doing: justifying violence against his enemies. Much of the right is focusing on pro-violence statements by pet-hospital owners in Oklahoma while ignoring them by the world’s most powerful person. That is not blindness. It is a choice.
2025-09-12 23:33:00
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
A panic attack can feel like the end of the world. In his new novel, Pan, Michael Clune writes that during such an episode, “your consciousness gets so strong it actually leaps out of your mind entirely. It starts vibrating your body. It shakes meat and bone.” My colleague Scott Stossel reviewed the book this week, writing that anxiety can make “rays of sunlight come through my eyes and get in my chest, and I feel like I’m gagging on them.” Your stomach might feel like it’s falling through the floor; your vision might blur; you might appear glassy, paralyzed by fear. Or, as in Lee Lai’s new graphic novel, Cannon, a panic attack might look like a menacing bunch of magpies piling up on furniture.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
In Clune’s Pan, a teenage boy in the 1990s Chicago suburbs begins having debilitating panic attacks and seeks to make some kind of sense of them, researching the Greek god Pan, from whom the word panic is derived. Lai’s Cannon is very different stylistically, but it also attempts to communicate what panic feels like and how one might start learning to live with it. Its protagonist, Lucy, is a line cook in 2017 Montreal who manages her anxiety by running and biking while listening to soothing self-help tapes that remind her to focus on her breathing. Her best friend, Trish, calls her “Luce Cannon” (Cannon for short) as a joke: She’s known to be steady, reliable, and contemplative. But underneath her chill facade, Cannon’s about to blow her lid. She’s taking care of her ill-tempered grandfather almost single-handedly, she’s trying to ward off her jerk boss’s innuendos without losing her job, and she believes that Trish takes her friendship (and her time) for granted.
The comic focuses on Cannon, but readers don’t get to access her internal monologue. Mostly, we have to guess her state of mind based on her body language, her actions, and her words. The biggest hint we get is the birds: Magpies hop on her bike, shed feathers in her apartment, and hop around her grandfather’s kitchen. None of the characters, save Cannon, seems to see them. But they’re harbingers of an event that’s depicted in the book’s first panels: Cannon and Trish sit in the ruins of a darkened, wrecked restaurant, birds perched calmly around them. After this flash-forward, the narrative goes back three months, and we watch Cannon get closer and closer to that pivotal moment; all the while, the flock of magpies grows.
Despite its knotty subject, Cannon is a joy to read. Its art manages to be both spare and full of emotion; its dialogue feels lived-in. And it’s a cathartic, unexpectedly gleeful story about anxiety. For years, Cannon bottles up all her fears. But as the early scene in the restaurant shows, that’s not sustainable. When she explodes, she’s on the verge of a panic attack. Instead of turning her worries inward, however, she transmutes them into rage, smashing dishware and overturning tables. The birds triumphantly swoop around with her, diving and flapping across the pages. Afterward, the magpies aren’t gone—there’s still plenty of stress on her plate—but Cannon finds it a bit easier to breathe.
Panic Attacks and the Meaning of Life
By Scott Stossel
A new novel keenly describes the symptoms—and more important, the existential stakes—of extreme anxiety.
Room Temperature, by Nicholson Baker
Baker is best known for his experimental debut novel, The Mezzanine, which takes place largely during a single ride up an escalator. In this, Baker’s second novel, the author brings the same level of detail to a—only slightly—longer stretch of activity: a father feeding his newborn daughter. Giving the baby a bottle constitutes the surface-level action of the novel while the narration acts like a boomerang, flying past and returning to meditations on the narrator's bond with his wife, Patty. Their partnership is generous and kind. They make up quickly after fighting; they playfully tease each other; they comfort each other—such as when the narrator reassures Patty after she’s criticized for her terrible spelling. Baker perfectly captures the intimacy of everyday love. A late chapter in the book detailing the couple’s euphemism for defecating—big jobs—and how the phrase takes its place in their personal lexicon is unexpectedly moving, a testament to how the most mundane parts of a shared life can be the most profound. Room Temperature is a book in which not much happens, and everything happens—a fitting description for an excellent marriage. — Isle McElroy
From our list: Seven books that explore how marriage really works
📚 Replaceable You, by Mary Roach
📚 Boy From the North Country, by Sam Sussman
📚 The Wilderness, by Angela Flournoy
Are Humans Watching Animals Too Closely?
By Ross Andersen
We are not great respecters of boundaries, human beings. Dogs may not have known this about us when they first edged up to our campfires, more than 10,000 years ago. They could not have anticipated the degree to which we would dictate the most intimate parts of their lives, up to and including their sexual partners. Even after these dramatic interventions, which we have used to cultivate in dogs a preference for captivity, we still have to exercise a lot of coercion in order to get them to play along. We have to remove them from their mother while they are still young. We have to keep them behind locked doors and gates, and on leashes.
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2025-09-12 23:00:00
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