The Right Wants a Reichstag Fire
The military patrolling in the streets, an assassination, and a movement longing for escalation. America is teetering on the brink
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No one knows what is going to happen next. Charlie Kirk, a well-known rightwing activist and media figure, was killed in what certainly looks like a political assassination. Here is the obvious part: That’s really bad. This is an exceedingly dangerous moment.
While it seems impossible to imagine anything good coming out of this, the spectrum of realistic outcomes is wide. The last time an act of political violence led to an overly confident “This changes everything” chorus from journalists and pundits was when Trump was shot during one of his rallies in Pennsylvania in July 2024. But this did not change everything. In fact, just a week later, Joe Biden declared he was dropping out of the presidential race, Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the Democratic candidate – and everyone talked about that. There was no widespread explosion of political violence after the attack on Trump; there is even an indication that the acceptance of political violence decreased (Opens in a new window) in the wake of the events. Trump ended up winning the election, but not because someone had attempted to assassinate him.
Then again, we are in a very different situation right now. Last July, a Democrat was in the White House and urged peace and reconciliation. Now, the President is the leader of a movement that is convinced to be fighting an evil leftist enemy about to destroy America.
The most plausible expectation is that the Trumpists will use the murder of Charlie Kirk as justification and pretext for a significant escalation of political repression. But as I am writing this, I hesitate. There is a real danger of manifesting bad outcomes by doomsaying (doomfesting?) – by convincing people that escalating violence is inevitable, or that there is nothing left to be done against Trumpian totalitarianism. We really don’t know. And nothing is ever inevitable.
Violent America: Who is to blame?
Political violence has been on the rise in the United States. I know this won’t make anyone on the Right reconsider their reactions, but let us note that political violence overwhelmingly comes from the Right (Opens in a new window). Over the past decade, rightwing violence has sharply gone up, and the far right (Opens in a new window) accounts for most of the general increase – a trend that is observable not just in the United States, but also on the international level (Opens in a new window). According to the Department of Justice and the FBI (Opens in a new window), the general rise in hate crimes around 2020, for instance, was almost entirely due to an increase in racist and antisemitic incidents, in attacks on Muslims and other people of non-Christian faiths, in crimes against people who present as gender non-conforming and against trans people. Violent political extremism committed by white nationalist militant groups (Opens in a new window), specifically, has exploded in recent years. Anyone who comments on the threat of political violence in the United States in the wake of the Kirk murder and doesn’t start there is not actually concerned about political violence.
It is important to note that this isn’t something new or unprecedented in U.S. history: The country has gone through periods that were vastly more violent in the past. And yet, we are undoubtedly on a very dangerous trajectory. Of particular concern is the fact that the acceptance of political violence among Americans who aren’t themselves committing violent acts is also rising. Americans are increasingly likely (Opens in a new window) to regard political violence as a legitimate and necessary response to the situation they face. Once again, this is much more widespread on the Right than on the “Left,” broadly defined. But it is a general trend we observe across the political spectrum.
Who is to blame for this situation? In individual cases, that question can be very difficult to answer. The motivations of individual perpetrators are often muddled and contradictory; it might be impossible to determine exact causalities of how they arrived at their ideas. From a societal perspective, however, there is no doubt that an increasingly aggressive, militant political culture has spread, providing fertile ground for violent expressions and excesses. And no one has contributed more to this distinctly dangerous political culture than the leaders of the American Right.
All strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – have been embracing rightwing vigilante violence in an increasingly aggressive fashion. They have openly encouraged white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence coded as rightwing – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse (Opens in a new window) dogma, or the Daniel Perry (Opens in a new window) dogma, or the Daniel Penny (Opens in a new window) dogma, or the Ashli Babbitt (Opens in a new window) dogma. The fundamental reality of American politics is that anyone who opposes Trump – politicians, judges, election officials, anyone – faces an avalanche of violent threat (Opens in a new window).
There is simply no equivalent to this among leaders of the Democratic Party or the influential circles of the institutionalized Left. It has become dogma on the Right to view the Democratic Party as a fundamentally illegitimate faction that must not be allowed to govern; that a nefarious, radically anti-American “Left” has taken over all the institutions of American life and desires to destroy the nation; that there is no room for restraint or compromise with the “enemy within”; that all measures, regardless of how extreme, are justified and indeed necessary in this struggle for the very survival of “real America.” That is what Donald Trump and the leaders of the Republican Party have been propagating relentlessly. That is how rightwing intellectuals have been portraying the political conflict. And that is also what rightwing media activists like Charlie Kirk have been telling their audience.
Strange valorization
This assessment of Kirk’s role, by the way, would have been entirely uncontroversial in mainstream published opinion until Wednesday. Since the moment Kirk was murdered, however, leading Democrats and influential voices on the center-left have been engaged in a campaign to paint a very different picture of the man who was assassinated. It has been a strange spectacle. How misguided the attempts to valorize Kirk are is evidenced by how much sanitizing they require. In order to make the case that he was an admirable, respectable public figure who strengthened rather than assaulted democratic values through his work requires creating an imaginary “Charlie Kirk” who bears little resemblance with the actual person who was killed this week.
The signature “contribution” of Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded as a teenager, is the “Professor Watchlist,” a website TPUSA runs. It serves to enable a McCarthyist hunt for “leftists” so that they can be publicly disparaged; once a professor is on the list, harassment, intimidation, and threat are guaranteed to follow. Kirk existed in a rightwing media and online eco system that runs on anger and monetizes outrage. And he was very good at his job, constantly telling his audience what new devious plot “the Left” was pursuing to take America away from “real Americans.” In the process, he propagated basically any rightwing conspiracy theory that has emerged over the past few years: the Big Lie about the 2020 election, Covid disinformation, Great Replacement (Opens in a new window)… all combined with a hefty dose of bigoted white grievance (Opens in a new window). How much of what he preached did he actually believe, about the leftist conspiracies and dangerous “woke” domination? It’s unlikely even he knew. In significant ways, Kirk was the face of a New Right that is not “conservative,” certainly not in the colloquial sense, but devoted to permanent radical culture war.
And yet, leading Democrats (Opens in a new window) have been asking us to honor Kirk’s memory and “continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse” while liberal opinion leaders (Opens in a new window) are explaining how Kirk was “practicing politics the right way.” I suspect there is an element of trying to appease the President and his followers – which is quite the indication of how far down the dark path America already is. Some of this is also intended to demonstrate how magnanimously above the partisan fray one is: a performances of faux-high-mindedness. But there is certainly, I am sure, a genuine desire to model good democratic behavior behind this. That impulse I commend and share. I believe, however, that sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s politics and actions is the wrong way to go about this. We should trust ourselves and those we address to be able to hold two thoughts at the same time: That we must forcefully condemn political violence but also acknowledge that it festers and thrives in a deeply unhealthy political culture that Kirk himself helped create. The message should not be that political violence is bad and requires a strong response because it targeted a good guy who was “practicing politics the right way” (which Kirk definitely was not). Political violence is bad because it inherently corrodes the democratic polity, because it makes democracy impossible. Pluralistic democracy depends on people feeling safe enough in the public square to actively express themselves and participate in the political process. If they don’t, because the public square is dominated by intimidation and violent threat, democracy must perish.
American Reichstag Fire
Unfortunately, that is exactly what the movement currently in charge of the American government wants – to curtail democracy and roll back pluralism. And they are itching to escalate the situation.
The reactions from the Right have been as unsurprising as they have been unhinged. The idea that the murder of Charlie Kirk was the “American Reichstag fire (Opens in a new window)” quickly made the rounds in rightwing online circles. On February 27, 1933, just weeks after the Nazis had come to power, the German Reichstag, the seat of parliament, was set on fire. The Nazis used this event as pretext to nullify civil liberties and conduct mass arrests of political opponents – a key step in destroying whatever was left of the formerly democratic Weimar Republic and towards erecting dictatorship. That is also what rightwing radicals envision for America: The Democratic Party should be classified as a “domestic terrorist organization (Opens in a new window)”; all “leftist” organizations should be criminalized, all their members arrested (Opens in a new window); in any case, unwanted foreigners who are “making light” (Opens in a new window) of the assassination ought to be expelled.
There certainly is an element of posturing involved. But these reactions are far too numerous and coming from people with far too much influence to simply discard them as online chatter. In fact, it is a key characteristic of today’s Right that there is no clean line of separation between the more extreme online spaces, the intellectual sphere, and the halls of Republican power. That is one reason why Charlie Kirk was an emblematic, important figure: He existed where media activism, online scene, and institutionalized political power intersected. And in any case, the President himself is all in. Soon after the murder, Donald Trump declared (Opens in a new window) he would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity.” He also says (Opens in a new window) he wants to “beat the hell” out of all those “radical left lunatics.”
War!
The Trumpists are convinced that it is all connected: This assassination is just the latest offensive in an ongoing, comprehensive leftist assault on America, Charlie Kirk – the “America First martyr,” (Opens in a new window) as Steve Bannon declared – a soldier who died in the war against the Left (Opens in a new window).
The Right is at war. War on Chicago (Opens in a new window). Department of War (Opens in a new window). A Civil War against the Left. As is always the case in the Trump era, there is something silly about these proclamations, about the constant need to perform “rah-rah-we-are-going-to-war!” MAGA manliness. But unfortunately, the Trumpists are seeking to bring reality closer in line with rhetoric. Over the summer, they have militarized the political conflict. What was just a horror scenario in the background in January is already reality: Trump is deploying troops domestically, against blue cities and political opponents.
The Trumpists want the escalation. They are convinced it is the only path to defeating the “enemy within” and imposing their vision of “real America” on a society they know does not want to comply. That is one major goal of the militarization of American cities: Create situations that are likely to result in violent escalation sooner or later. This is the context in which Charlie Kirk was murdered. The Trumpists believe they may have found their Reichstag fire moment. And if it is not this one, then how long until something else happens that might serve as pretext? When those who are controlling the levers of state power are itching for violence, how long until mass violence follows?
Over the past few months, I have been thinking about a different moment from the Nazi period, and as imperfect as it may be as a potential analogy, I find it terrifying: The assassination of Ernst vom Rath. On the morning of November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan was the son of Polish Jews who had fled to Germany in 1911. Herschel emigrated to France by himself in 1935, at the age of 14, trying to get away from Nazi repression. In November 1938, he found out that his family had been deported to a border region between Poland and Germany, robbed of almost everything they possessed. The details of the story are contested, but it seems he decided he wanted revenge. Vom Rath died in the afternoon of November 9. In reaction, the Nazi leadership ordered stormtroopers and party loyalists to vandalize and destroy synagogues across the country. What followed was the so-called Reichskristallnacht, a nation-wide pogrom in which the Nazis killed 1,300 people, arrested tens of thousands, and destroyed over 1,400 Jewish synagogues and town halls. The Nazi propaganda presented it as a spontaneous eruption of the anger of the German people. But the regime had long planned this next escalation, and the killing of Ernst vom Rath offered a welcome pretext to radicalize the persecution of German Jews.
As the Trumpist government deploys the National Guard and ICE roams the streets carrying out the Trumpist dream of purging the nation: What if someone decides to fight back as they are being assaulted in broad daylight by masked agents of the state who refuse to identify themselves? Maybe someone whose brother, father, or son was disappeared into a foreign gulag? Or someone whose rights, dignity, and identity are being taken from them simply for who they are?
We don’t know what will happen next. Nothing is ever determined. But if there remain influential people on the Right who believe this has gone too far, who understand and fear where this President and the movement he leads are taking the country, this is the time to step up. America is now teetering on the brink of a dark place from which it is very difficult to come back.
