To Kill A Democracy

Listening today to Gavin Newsom’s March 2025 interview with Charlie Kirk filled me with grief.

At times when we most need open, vigorous, and respectful debate, so, too, does the temptation to demonize and quash dissent prove greatest.

I have watched with rising horror a growing casual relationship with political othering, oppression, and violence, one rooted in ancient tribalist instincts yet fueled by modern toxic algorithms, digital vampires feeding on engagement-bait within an increasingly secular world where viciously partisan politics have backfilled a void left by religion.

Some 25 years ago, as an undergraduate, I experienced first-hand the illiberal left’s predilections for cancel culture while writing for a publication self-described as “The Journal of Conservative Thought at Tufts University”.

“Wait, wut — ‘conservative’?”, people who know me today might ask. Allow me to explain by quoting then Editor Emeritus from his departing essay during the year that we graduated…

“I am not a conservative … [but] … thanks to fanatical activists the only sanctuary for moderate guys like me [at Tufts] is a conservative magazine.”

I myself often found the takes of fellow contributors cringey, and yet, within an ecosystem dominated by far-left thinking, this publication offered the only “Big Tent” home for a naive libertarian kid clumsily learning to reason, write, and philosophize.

Dissenters relentlessly pursued the destruction of the publication — activists would steal magazines by the armful, the student senate regularly sought defunding, and we even had an editor physically assaulted (albeit by a small gang of militant vegans who claimed they employed only “non-violent blocking techniques” in subduing him (how embarrassing)).

Sadly, my time with that journal appears to have proved the end of its “Big Tent” era as, mirroring broader societal trends, it consolidated around increasingly far-right thinking, doubtless in reaction to continued existential threats.

And yet I was appalled earlier this year upon hearing that masked ICE agents had grabbed graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk off the street after the government, unbeknownst to her, revoked her visa — seemingly on suspicions of Hamas affiliation, the public evidence for which was limited to co-authorship of a 2024 Tufts Daily op-ed advocating for Palestinians in Gaza — leading to her 45-day ordeal in a Louisiana processing facility before being allowed to return to her studies.

This would sadly prove just one story in an alarmingly escalating trend. Fast-forward to the present day and we find ourselves grappling with the September 10th assassination of Charlie Kirk on the Utah Valley University campus in the midst of an open debate that ought to have been a celebration of democratic values and traditions.

Within hours, we saw Elon Musk shamelessly tweeting that “The Left is the party of murder”, disgracing himself in a fashion now all too familiar.

And, yes, naturally the left-leaning anti-gun lobby would seize on the moment with their “guns are bad, mmmmmmkay” rhetoric, as if that were the real issue at hand, not a fundamental breakdown of civil society. I’m honestly flummoxed by a group of people who on the one hand are lamenting the rise of an authoritarian government and on the other hand seemingly advocating for that same government to have a monopoly on force.

Then we find Trump meticulously cherry-picking all the violent transgressions of the left against the right while studiously omitting any examples of the converse. What a missed opportunity to unite a people instead of stoking further divide…

Why not take the moment to call out not just the “Congressional Baseball Shooting” of 2017 but also the 2025 shootings of Minnesota state legislators while enjoining everyone to lower the temperature?

Perhaps referencing the latter would inconveniently bubble up memories of Utah’s own Senator Mike Lee facing criticism for making light of that atrocity and spreading conspiracy theories about it (now purged from Twitter).

Are we to memory-hole Donald Trump Jr.’s foul mockery of Paul Pelosi’s violent 2022 assault (also now conveniently deleted) but not the later attempts on his father’s life in 2024?

Crass condonement, aggressive intimidation, government weaponization, physical assault, and outright murder differ in form and intensity yet all contribute to a similar effect — the chilling of speech, the rupture of peoples, the debasement of our values, and the ruin of our reputation.

A study of history tells us that zealous and/or cynical actors of all political persuasions — left, right, whatever — stand ready and willing to silence those with whom they disagree, or even those who are mildly inconvenient, given the power to do so coupled with a bit of sociopathy, narcissism, and hubris.

We should take stock of the statistics in play in this most recent tragedy — we are a country of hundreds of millions of people and the assassin may well have acted alone.

Yet we should also consider the Overton Window and related probability distributions — the more extreme the discourse we normalize, the more of the population’s tails live at or past the threshold required for extremist behavior.

We must guard against the cascading potential of moments such as this — take a hard look at your own thoughts, remonstrate with your fellow citizens, and scrutinize the self-serving behavior of those in power who would stoke divisions.

We are in a Cold Civil War, edging toward a hot one, and your individual choices matter.

If something can’t go on forever, then it won’t, but how this chapter ends still hangs in the balance.

I was no fan of Charlie Kirk, but in a democracy the correct counter to disagreeable speech is always more speech, and we forget that at our peril.