I’ve written several times over the last few days not only about the scourge of political violence which we must not only denounce but be genuinely against in every way. Notwithstanding my own personal inclination to say little of the dead for a respectful period, I want to note a particular dynamic that the right is creating in the reign of firing terror it’s unleashed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. On X over the last few days, countless numbers of high-profile right-wing accounts’ feeds are made up almost entirely of screen grabs of random people’s reactions to Kirk’s murder and demands that they be fired from their jobs. In many cases the demands are heeded and then that fact is triumphantly posted as well.

I was thinking about this post this morning and then I saw someone reference it on Bluesky. It’s from July 2016 (“This Is Not the Natural State of Things“) and notes that not only is the world of the last 80 years not permanent or unchangeable. It’s not even the natural state of things. The world we all grew up in, from the late 1940s to some point in the last decade, was the product of very conscious and deliberate decisions made largely in the United States but also in the capitals of Europe. For all its many imperfections and discontents it was a period of prosperity and security essentially unrivaled in history.

Fire poured out of my eyes when I sat down at my computer and saw a Semafor email with the subject line “National Reckoning.” They cooled when I opened the email and saw the top item was a PPRI poll from March 2025. (“National reckoning” turns out to be from an Atlantic article about Kirk’s close relationship with the Trump family which was quoted in the email.) The poll contains the worrisome news that only 53% of Americans “completely disagree” with the statement that “political violence is sometimes necessary.” The story comes into clearer focus when the result is broken down by people’s view of Donald Trump. Only 39% of Trump supporters (those with a favorable view of him) believe this while 66% of his opponents do.

In other words, people who hold a favorable view of Donald Trump are overwhelmingly more likely to believe that political violence has a legitimate role in our society. The number of Trump supporters who believe this is 27% higher than that of his opponents. This is of course the least surprising thing imaginable to anyone who has lived in the United States or on earth for the last decade. But we live in a media ecosystem of ideational bullshit. So it yet comes as a breath of fresh air, a sublime encounter with reality.

I wanted to share two-and-a-half follow-on thoughts about the murder of Charlie Kirk and everything that is coming in its wake.

We are now seeing an escalating campaign of valorization of Kirk, one that a lot of non-partisan media and certainly everyone in the conservative movement is contributing to. Quite a few of his opponents are getting carried along with this. At the same time, you have the more extreme members of the right calling for violent and/or legal retribution against the “left” based on essentially nothing. As usual, the call is led by none other than the president of the United States. Yesterday we noted that political violence and terrorism is the antithesis of civic or liberal democracy. Because of that, civic democrats have the greatest interest in opposing it. But the gist of the matter is that we oppose civic violence targeting anyone regardless of belief, regardless of the qualities of the person. It applies to everyone. We don’t need to elevate someone or pretend they were something they weren’t to express our opposition to political assassination. And we shouldn’t. Kirk was a hyper-aggressive partisan who advocated a lot of deeply retrograde beliefs. That is just a fact. Let’s not pretend otherwise. His murder is at the same time deeply wrong and a disaster for the country.

Kate and Josh discuss the great shutdown debate and the Roberts Court’s signaling on pocket rescissions.

I don’t have much to share on the death of Charlie Kirk beyond what I suspect is obvious. We want a society where political participation and activism, even things we disagree with or find despicable, can take place without the threat of violence. This isn’t just a general belief that we don’t want people to be hurt or die by violence. It’s the basis of the society and political order we want to live in and which at this very moment is under a graver threat than at any time in our lifetimes.

Right-wing violence, both of an organized paramilitary sort and by radicalized loners, has become such a scourge in recent years that on the extremes you hear voices for things like armed versions of Antifa and the like as some sort of counter. My point is not to equate the two. It is to note that when elections, speech and non-violent political activism give way to paramilitary and political violence the forces of civic democracy have already mostly lost the battle. Fascists do civil violence better than civic democrats. It’s a foundational element of their political philosophy. It’s the verdict of logic and history.

Kate Riga and I just finished recording this week’s edition of the podcast. We’ll add a link when it’s published. We devoted most of the episode to the coming budget showdown, what should happen and what’s going to happen (not necessarily or perhaps likely the same things). There was one point we discussed that I wanted to share with you here.

We have a whole debate about what Democrats should to with this continuing resolution. A lot of that debate centers on what even Democrats would be trying to achieve — make a point, get specific policy concessions. But there’s an entirely different question that informs a lot of it for me. What kind of Democratic leadership you have right now is the best indication of the type you’ll have in divided government in 2027-28 if Democrats win control of one or both houses of Congress in the midterms. It’s the best indication of what kind of governance we’d see in a Democratic trifecta in 2029, if such a thing came to pass.

As we’ve been discussing for a week there’s a big argument among Democrats about the looming shutdown fight. Senate Democrats seem set on making it a negotiation about Obamacare subsidies, the biggest part of the BBB cuts that kick in before 2026. Meanwhile, you have a growing chorus of people who aren’t Senate Democrats saying this is wrong. It’s not time for small-bore policy revisions. You’ve got to do something dramatic to rein in Trump’s increasingly dictatorial rule. I also see Lakshya Jain and Matt Yglesias saying that yes, maybe it’s time for a confrontation. But if you’re going to have a confrontation, you need to make that stand on the issue where your issue advantage is the greatest. And that’s on the health care subsidies. And at least on the first part of that I absolutely agree. Tariffs are actually pretty salient too. But let’s set that aside for a moment. Because there’s an unspoken part of this equation that makes all the difference.

So let’s get that clear and on the table.

I was very pleased to see that Ezra Klein has joined the ranks of those who think that Democrats need to gird themselves for a fight in the budget showdown coming at the end of this month. I have various disagreements with Klein, some rooted in policy and others more attitudinal, temperamental. But his influence within the Democratic elite is unrivaled. His words really matter. They matter enough to make me think Senate Dems may actually shift in time to make a difference here. His essential point is irrefutable. None of the arguments for standing down from back in March, which were at least arguable then, hold up anymore. (It’s this column at the Times that I’m talking about in case you haven’t read it or read about it.)

There are a couple of follow-up points I’d like to make about this. One is the idea that the Democrats are making a decision to “shut the government down.” In a sense this is a semantic point. But some semantic points are extremely important, and this is one of them. You really need to get this right. If Democrats do what a growing number of outside observers say they should and indeed must, they’re not making a decision to shut the government down. In fact, they would very much like to avoid that. Sometimes when there’s a shutdown standoff a lot of Republicans really do want to shut the government down in and of itself because they’re hostile to most of the things government does. None of that applies to Democrats. They’d much prefer that Trump agreed to their demands and the threat of a shutdown never materializes.

Everyone is rightly shocked, disgusted, outraged by Trump’s Truth Social meme threatening to turn Chicago into a war zone. But where’s the National Guard exactly? Trump said he was doing this a couple weeks ago. He said they were “going in” right away a week later. Maybe he’ll do it tomorrow. I’m certainly not promising he won’t. But where are they?