The New Age of the Assassin

Life in the 2020s

The young man is seated, clenching a microphone. Beneath a tent promising the American Comeback, he completes, calmly enough, a sentence about gang violence. The bullet, too fast to be seen, splits open his neck, and dark blood rushes out of him. The man slumps, crumples, and the screams erupt before the video ends.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was, at once, horrifically modern and yoked to tradition. For as long as there has been a politics here, there have been assassinations, and virtually every generation since the nation’s founding has had to look on as a great leader or famed political figure was, without warning, shot dead. Kirk, for all his dynamism and influence, was never a force on the scale of Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, and since he was not an American president—merely the appendage of one—he will be no more than a historical footnote a half century from now. But Americans of the past decades, if coming of age in far more violent and terrorized eras, did not have to reckon with such a blood-drenched visual spectacle; technology did not permit them, minutes after the deed, to consume all of it in full, to drown in unmediated horror. Imaginations, or grainy photographs and film, had to suffice. John F. Kennedy’s brains were blown out in the Zapruder film, but it was not broadcast publicly until 1975, 12 years after Lee Harvey Oswald aimed and fired in Dallas. And even then, this was 8mm film, shot with a Bell & Howell home movie camera. For Robert F. Kennedy, Americans had to content themselves with a haunting photograph of the senator bleeding out on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Kirk’s death was everywhere, all at once, and his death could be experienced like it had happened right in front of you, on that sun-blasted day in Utah.

We have entered, indisputably, a new age. It’s an old one, too, because it harkens back to how the restless, mentally unstable, and politically ambitious used to settle their scores. We do not yet know who killed the 31-year-old Kirk or why; given the Turning Point USA founder’s stature, though, and positioning in the broader culture, we can assume the assassin was thinking, in some sense, symbolically. This is not about left vs. right, or Republican vs. Democrat—if Republicans, as the party of the gun, will always have more blood on their hands, they have no monopoly on political violence. The radical left and the radical right, throughout American history, have sought to bend and break the system through bloodshed, and many others, operating more enigmatically, have plotted with a politics never so easily defined. Oswald was emblematic of this American tendency; he was a Communist, or a tool of the right-wing CIA, or a patsy of the mafia, or a shadow figure wholly alone, inserting himself, irreversibly, into the slipstream of history. If, in the nineteenth century, some assassins hoped that their bullets would lead to immediate revolution—the anarchists repeatedly targeted political leaders, and were surprised to learn killing an American president would not lead to the collapse of America—they didn’t, over time, need to formulate such tidy rationales for the actions they took. The motives could be obscure. The anxieties of a nation could be projected upon them.

With Thomas Crooks’ attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of the UnitedHealth CEO, and now the slaying of Kirk, we have a triptych of violence to be overlaid over other recent politicized killings, including the fatal shooting of two young employees at the Israeli Embassy and, in June, the home invasion and murder of Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Some have argued this portends a civil war, or a certain kind of volatility that will, in due time, unravel America’s functioning political machinery. This seems less likely, if only because America, in the 2020s, is still more stable—far wealthier, and more durable—than it was at the dawn of the 1860s. We also inhabit, as Neil Postman once called it, the peek-a-boo world. We are resilient, and we forget. Assassinations alone cannot alter the status quo. Kirk, certainly, wasn’t famous enough to halt society for too long; we’ll notice him, lament the death, and hustle onward. He is hurt by the fact that he was so overtly partisan—the American left can deplore the bloodshed, offer grace, but not genuinely mourn—and not well-known to those middle-aged and older. Politicians in both parties have begged for an end to the violence while conservatives, led by Trump, have already blamed the left for Kirk’s death, even if the motive is not known. Trump has, somewhat vaguely, promised retribution. Of the two political tribes in America today, one is more willing to comfort the other when it comes to politicized assaults and murders, though it’s unclear, after Kirk, how much longer that will be true. Prominent Democrats offered their condolences to Kirk and his family. Several months ago, Republicans had far less to say about Hortman, the slain Democratic legislator from Minnesota. Kirk himself, in 2022, mocked Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, after he was brutally assaulted in his home. The American right won’t bother to reflect on this, even as they plead, temporarily at least, for peace.

The violence is not going to stop. Or, at the very minimum, this sort of targeted violence that is aimed at those who hold power or are representative of an elite that must be, in the febrile and diseased mind of the killer, brought to justice. As assassination attempts surge anew, the mass shooting, as a reality of American life, begins to fade. There are still such shootings, as seen at a Minnesota Catholic school last month, but they were, to a disconcerting degree, far more common in the 2010s and early 2020s. All one needs to do is recite the place names: Sandy Hook, Aurora, Isla Vista, Charleston, Las Vegas, Parkland, and Uvalde. There have been so many that an American can begin to conflate them and the killers themselves, over time, lose notoriety. Columbine, in 1999, inaugurated this heinous era, and there was a long, dark period when alienated young men could dream of the infamy bestowed upon Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Or, in 2007, Cho Seung-Hui. Other mass murderers, like James Holmes, Adam Lanza, and Eliot Rodger—best remembered for his incel manifesto—became, for a brief period, pop culture figures, and the media wrestled with its role in publicizing the identities of these men and the sinister screeds they left behind. Mass shootings proliferated with the wide availability of firearms, assault rifles in particular, and the realization, on the part of the killers, that slaughtering unarmed people who are not famous is far less challenging than plotting the death of an American president. Ronald Reagan was wounded and not killed. Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts within 17 days in 1975.

The mimetic theory of desire, pioneered by French historian and philosopher René Girard, posits that humans look to others, rather than themselves, to determine what it is they want to do. They long for what others long for, and sculpt themselves accordingly. Violence itself may follow a similar current. One mass shooting begets another, which begets another. Would-be killers aim to imitate their dark idols. Now the assassination has come back into vogue, and there may be more men—they are usually men—stewing in the shadows, waiting for their opportunity. Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who was set to debate Kirk later this month, reacted with great sadness and horror to the assassination of his right-wing rival, even as many of his own followers did not feel much sympathy for a conservative who had vilified the LGBTQ community, the immigrant community, and many other marginalized groups. “The reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome,” Piker said. He understood, right away, he might be a target too. These are times in which we now live.