The Politics of Murder

Kyle Rittenhouse was 17 years old when he decided to travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin with the intention of using a weapon to “protect businesses” against Black Lives Matter protesters in the most cursed year of our Lord, 2020. Whether or not any businesses were protected by his actions, Rittenhouse did end up using his weapon and killed three people on his quixotic quest to protect the capital of the ownership class. While he was infamously found Not Guilty due to self-defense, those three human beings would still be alive today if Rittenhouse prioritized lives over property and decided to stay home – or even just to travel unarmed. He made the choice to create the opportunity for death to happen, and it did.

For his ethical crimes, if not his legal ones, Rittenhouse was feted by the Republican party with house representatives stumbling over each other to offer him internships, including Matt Gaetz who did so even before the verdict had been established. He received a standing ovation at a Turning Point USA conference. He met with President Trump. He was embraced by the Right for a single act of extreme violence – not in spite of it, because of it.

Daniel Penny was 24 years old when he decided to use a chokehold on a homeless man in distress on a New York City subway train in the still pretty cursed year of our Lord, 2023. Jordan Neely was unarmed, and is quoted as saying, “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” He threw garbage at people, but did not touch anyone. He had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. While intervention was literally being begged for, the kind provided was that of a marine who only had one kind of training. Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely.

Similar to Rittenhouse, Penny’s acquittal by the courts was widely celebrated by the Republican party. Penny had protected a train full of citizens, after all! He was invited to a football game by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for his troubles, his accomplishment identical to that of Rittenhouse – he had killed someone.

Luigi Mangione was 26 years old when he allegedly decided to murder UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in the now-tired-repetition-of-this-bit, 2024. He wrote “delay, deny, depose” on the bullet casings used in the killing in likely reference to how insurance companies obfuscate claims to avoid paying them. More than 26,000 Americans die from not having health insurance each year, and Mangione acted in direct response to this as, per his manifesto, “the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Mangione is loved by the internet in ways that appear to transcend partisanship. Yet, in terms of established politicians, Donald Trump has called for the death penalty. Murder is back to being bad again. Bernie Sanders, the leftest of the left in terms of establishment politicians, condemned the killing and said that the way to make change is through mass movements, not murder. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the Robin to Sanders’s Batman, said the killing wasn’t justified, but that she understands people’s unsympathetic response to it given how health insurance works in America. There has been a broad attempt to connect the Democratic party to this kind of retributive violence, but the connection simply does not exist. No one is going to invite Luigi Mangione to anything.

What’s the difference? It’s not like if Mangione is found Not Guilty that it’s going to change anything. Remember that Matt Gaetz asked Rittenhouse to be an intern before the trial was even over, and that the President is a convicted felon. Trump pardoned all of the January 6th insurrectionists and calls them heroes and patriots. Legal responsibility has nothing to do with it. The difference is ideology.

I think it’s important to acknowledge here that all killings are political. If a gangster kills another gangster over a drug deal gone wrong, that’s political. Society has made the choice to criminalize drugs, therefore drug dealers have no civil recourse to resolve their business disputes. Politics also withheld other opportunities from these young gangsters, and incentivized alternative methods of income due to the meagre offerings of the state. We’ve collectively decided that we prefer to have dead gangsters and their collateral damage in order to make a statement on the morality of drugs: they’re bad (except alcohol, sugar, gambling, etc.). Of course, dead gangsters are political killings in the way that American health insurance kills tens of thousands of people a year; the politics is hidden behind the veil of the status quo. People don’t think about the politics because these deaths have been normalized and neutralized. What’s fascinating is that Republicans brought politics into the limelight in these instances. The difference between Rittenhouse, Penny, and Mangione is that Republicans have openly welcomed murder into their fold, and Democrats have not.

Republicans could have looked at Rittenhouse and Penny and said that, while it’s important to recognize the value of property and the comfort of (*cough* white) citizens, it’s a tragedy what happened, and we deeply regret how these encounters unfolded. Much in the same way that progressive Democrats talked about Mangione, Republicans could have talked about Rittenhouse and Penny. They chose not to. These killings could have remained relatively neutral and normalized, but by dint of actually embracing these killers, Republicans brought overt capital-p Politics into the discussion. Through the way they’ve responded, Republicans have shown that this is their preference. They are building a politics wherein murder is not just acceptable, but actively encouraged. These killers were rewarded for their deeds.

To be completely upfront, this was the extent of what I wanted to write about this topic. As the length of time between my posts suggests, I tend to procrastinate quite heavily when it comes to putting my blog ideas online. In and of themselves, these killers represent rather well the radical extremity of the Republican party in comparison to the milquetoast Democrats when it comes to how far they’re willing to go in implementing their respective social ideologies. However, as I’m sure you’re aware, there has been a bit of a development in this topic since I began mulling it over.

Charlie Kirk was killed in the back-to-being-funny-again year of our Lord, 2025. Who did it and their motives is irrelevant. Everyone unanimously agreed immediately that this was done because of Kirk’s political views; the killer has been mapped on to what society already wanted to talk about by default. For the Right, the killer is “them.” They’re explicit about this, “They killed Charlie Kirk.” I’ve seen it personally on social media, and you can just trawl through any given Republican’s Twitter feed or speech that they’ve given and see the blame being placed on “the Left” or even Democrats. Representative Nancy Mace said that Democrats “own” what happened to Kirk. Representative Bob Onder said that the “Left” is “pure evil” and that there is no longer any middle ground. Conservative influencer with the ear of Donald Trump Laura Loomer said that the government needs to start prosecuting “leftist” organizations. Trump of course never strays from blaming the “Left” for everything, and refuses to even attempt to unify the country after this polarizing killing.

Compare this to the liberal responses, symbolized in the Ezra Klein article in the New York Times that talks about the tragedy of the killing, as politics should be about debate, free speech, and not killing people you disagree with. Don’t celebrate this, you nerds! It’s the exact same response as with Luigi Mangione; this isn’t the way to move politics forward; if you disagree with someone, build a movement – like Charlie Kirk did! He did politics the right way! Like I said, people are just mapping this event on to the beliefs that they already have. The Right blames the “Left” and continues on their merry way cracking down on groups of people they don’t like. Liberals talk about how the progressive wing just doesn’t understand how politics *really* works. This isn’t marking a turning point (pun intended) in American politics, but a continuation of how each party was going to act anyway. Republicans will keep being fascists, and Democrats will keep not understanding how fascism works, preferring instead to be Voltaire, defending to the death the rights of Charlie Kirk to say whatever he wants! Of course, Voltaire never actually said that, and his most famous work is actually about how everything is terrible.

The perseveration on the celebration of Kirk’s death is frustrating. Op-eds keep emphasizing the importance of dialogue and deliberation in response to disagreement, and that celebrating Kirk’s death defiles that sacred tenet of Free Speech. The problem is that this is awfully convenient for the politics of murder that is already in charge and dominating in the United States. Suggesting that sitting around talking while people are having their rights taken away, while a genocide is being enabled, while marginalized groups are being violently persecuted simply for existing, is the height of naive privilege. It’s nice to talk about an ideal society where problems are resolved diplomatically and to philosophize about a marketplace of ideas creating rousing debates that bring us closer to an ultimate truth. This utopia is not our reality. While you certainly can try to talk your way out of someone holding a gun to your head, it’s not that uncontroversial to try to defend yourself through other means. What Charlie Kirk stood for isn’t something that you ‘disagree’ with, it’s something that you fight. Words can be used in that fight, certainly, but the very institutions of deliberation, the American judicial system for one, are being sorely tested in whether or not words will be of any use combating the roaring fascism in control of the country right now. We shall see how effective they are.

Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA which, as noted above, hosted Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed those three people. Kirk was against civil rights and thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was awful and bad for America. He thought that immigrants of colour are “replacing” white Americans and should be treated accordingly. He built a movement on these principles, and helped Donald Trump win the 2024 election. The ethnic cleansing of mass deportations that is on-going is a part of Charlie Kirk’s legacy. Charlie Kirk is a significant contributor to the politics of murder that has become part and parcel of the American Right. His death is being used as an excuse to amplify that kind of politics; the tragedy of Kirk’s death isn’t that he died, it’s whatever comes next.

Was Charlie Kirk being killed a good thing? I don’t care. It happened, and it’ll probably spark a vicious, oppressive backlash that defines the success of any terrorist attack. I’ll finish by quoting Malcolm X on the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

“The chickens have come home to roost.”