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.
Second point.
We’ve been seeing over the last eight months what amounts to the dismantlement of the FBI. It was fitting that the details of this lawsuit came out yesterday, the same day as the Kirk shooting, which showed in much more graphic detail just how bad it’s been. The top echelon of the organization has effectively been purged based on totally arbitrary grounds tied to anything that could be deemed offensive personally to Donald Trump. The former top official in the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office, which is heading up the investigation into Kirk’s death, was recently fired, per Reuters. So we have the question: what’s the impact of all this? Does it show up in how the organization does its work? Or is it resilient enough to absorb these blows and fall back on several decades of post-Hoover professionalization?
The verdict of the last 24 hours is pretty bad. You have Patel personally screwing up news about a potential suspect in custody, the kind of thing that might be a career-killer for any other agent in normal times. We’re so rightly shocked by the murder itself and so accustomed to the daily cavalcade of Trump administration nonsense that we’re inured to just how crazy a goof this was. When the Bureau first posted pictures of the new person of interest, I’m told, the email to contact with information was broken. No single goof tells us the state of the Bureau, but everything that has happened over the last 24 hours suggests the FBI is wrecked about as badly as you’d have imagined. The lawsuit fleshes out the backstory — the last 24 hours illustrates the results. We’re likely to see many more examples.
Conceivably the biggest example is that there’s still no suspect in custody. But this gets to one thing that still has me wondering about this. For the work of your stereotypical outraged partisan, this looks like a pretty well-thought out and executed killing and one for which the assailant was not planning to be caught. There are conflicting reports about the distance from which Kirk was shot. Most reports say it was roughly 200 yards — two football fields — though some place the distance 50 or 75 yards closer. The fact that the shooter killed Kirk with a single shot at that distance and then escaped undetected suggests this killing was well planned and carried out by an experienced marksman. If that is the case it makes me wonder whether the motive here is as straightforward as many of us imagine. But I’ve seen a number of firearms experts say that modern technology — better scopes and so forth — make it quite possible for someone with rudimentary firearms skills to do something like this. So perhaps this wasn’t as hard to pull off as some suggest and I would have thought. Remember that the same at first seemed to be the case with Luigi Mangione, who murdered the United Health Care CEO — a calm and methodical shooting in broad daylight after which he escaped capture in one of the most surveilled locations on the planet. But Mangione wasn’t some trained killer. He was just some guy with no particular experience with this at all.
So who knows?
But let’s keep an eye on these details of the crime and just how much the gutting of the FBI and its new leadership of flunkies and sycophants affects the investigation.