We Need to Talk

On a micro- and a macro-level, the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination has been revelatory. From the jaw-dropping gall of the Trump administration's flagrant attempts to capitalize on the anger and shock of the moment to target and silence anyone who disagrees with them; to my own experiences of interacting with people in the comments sections of articles, Bluesky, and X. It seems clear that the present moment holds some valuable lessons, if only we can stop, pay attention, and learn new ways to challenge our current circumstances.

To me, the most revelatory discussions center around the work of Ezra Klein in the New York Times. He has generated three pieces in the aftermath of Kirk's killing: (a) an article on the day after the shooting:"Charlie Kirk as pursuing Politics the Right Way" that praised Kirk as a persuasive political operative, (b) a follow-up that focused and emphasized the importance of political argument with people from the other side (including a very recent interview with Ben Shapiro); and (c) a substantive and thoroughly excellent discussion with Governor Spencer Cox from Utah. Governor Cox has been acting as the primary political spokesperson for Charlie Kirk's murder 'on the ground' in Utah and has been one of the few conservative voices calling for calm and trying to calm everyone down.   

The clear, unambiguous point that Ezra Klein has been making has been that we must reinstate political argumentation across the political left and right and re-engage with each other. There is a rising tide of political violence that is symptomatic of a deeper alienation between the two sides and has the potential of being disastrous for America as a country in the very near future.

Personally, I would claim that Trump's election in 2016 and in 2024 are clear evidence of that already - but now, I fear, the worst is yet to come for the unfolding disaster that we are all facing day-by-day in the USA in 2025.   

These articles and podcasts attracted a lot of criticism from progressives, who were clearly frustrated with Ezra Klein's tone. In his first article, published the day after the murder, he was civil, generous, warm even. 

In my own online discussions, it was immediately apparent that this was unacceptable to many people in my circle. The pervading perception was a strongly negative portrayal of Kirk as a polemicist, a pure antagonist for almost every progressive position, and a generally evil person. Any sense of moderation was met with derision, dismissal, and personal attack. In these interactions, it felt like the goal was simply to dismiss my point of view, shut me down, and shut me up.

I feel, that in this moment, Ezra Klein is onto something. Many of the rebuttals and counter-arguments being published name him directly, and the fact that he is attracting such a strong reaction is telling.

Why could that be?

The majority of criticism for his approach seems to be that acknowledging Kirk's effectiveness with his audience in any positive light somehow legitimizes what Kirk was doing (see Notes below). In his articles, Klein seemed quite level-headed, accurate, and critical of some of the actions that Kirk had taken (such as creating a list of academics to persecute, calling for the execution of Joe Biden, etc). He always maintained a tone of civil discussion, never adopting the approach of a moralistic condemnation that could only block off and destroy the possibility of future debate. 

This is the key issue.

Listening to Ezra's Klein's interviews, he gives his subjects a great deal of deference and allows them to speak extensively. He does not attempt to browbeat them into submission. He doesn't try to 'win' the argument through rhetorical tricks, volume, moralistic posturing or even raising his voice. He just lets them talk. 

This is excellent - and very much in-keeping with his apparent mission of having people on the left and right have meaningful and productive arguments with each other. 

When the most objectionable people on his show are required to actually explain their political positions, it becomes very clear just how weak and frankly bizarre many of them are. Not only that, but many of the interactions are incredibly insightful to help all of us understand the other. Just why do right-wingers frame their thoughts in this way? Why do they support Trump even now? What is the real motivation for their thinking? 

Providing such a resource for us all is incredibly valuable. 

Having said that, I find myself reacting with annoyance to his interviews. They feel somewhat anodyne, polite, and shallow. A really good argument really gets into the meat of something and he only ever makes individual counterpoints before moving on. But, he does make the counterpoint in the moment and still manages to keep the conversation going. Would going deeper run the risk becoming so contentious that people would stop participating? This is the fine line Mr Kline navigates expertly in these interviews. I’d like to believe that this is deliberate whilst being backed by a full-throated commitment to the same kinds of viewpoints that I share, but it’s hard to tell.

The other interesting side effect of these discussions, however annoying, is that they spur people to write, to criticize, and further engage. Being annoyed is good in this context. It makes us want to respond and further the conversation.

A moralistic reaction that we shouldn’t talk to ‘these people’ because they are evil kills conversion and blocks any effort to even try to persuade them. Even though we may never succeed in that persuasion, the fact that these discussions are happening in public serves to promote discourse in onlookers. 

In the words of Hal Wyner from season 1 of Netflix’s The Diplomat (an entirely fictional character) “One of the boneheaded truisms of foreign policy is that talking to your enemies legitimizes them.Talk to everyone. Talk to the dictator, and the war criminal. Talk to the poor schmuck three levels down who's so pissed he has to sit in the back of the second car, he may be ready to turn. Talk to terrorists. Talk to everyone. Fail, and fail again. And brush yourself off. And fail again. Because maybe... Maybe…”.

We have to talk. It is essential. It’s the only way we exert our power in this situation. When we do talk, we need to do it well - perhaps through better ways to argue that use modern AI to help find authentic solutions. We have to make the argument for honesty, compassion, and understanding more compelling than the one currently employed by our adversaries- those arguing for lies, cruelty, and blind faith. 

Our future depends on it.

Notes

[1]. Some people who have offered excellent counterpieces to Ezra Klein's wrirting about Charlie Kirk are Marisa Kabas in the Handbasket Direct Email to Ezra Klein, Elizabeth Spiers in the Nation: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning; Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New Yorker Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Causel; Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs: As The Far Right Rises, Don’t Be Ezra Klein. 

[2] There is an accompanying AI-generated song for this post: https://elevenlabs.io/music/songs/iRbagrZIA1HopGylRJhp

American Evil

At around the 6m 50s mark in a podcast from FiveThirtyEight leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election, Nate Silver said the following:

“I’m not sure what words to use but there’s something profoundly evil about the Trump campaign at this point… and the people he attracts to it… and I think that’s the right word to use”

Trump and his cronies are so utterly and obviously machiavellian, incompetent, dishonest, cruel, cowardly and self serving as to almost be the sort of caricature we might see in a bad movie.

And yet he has been elected by a fair democratic process. He has been elected by normal, ‘good people’. By voters with good intentions willing to overlook and justify almost anything to grant themselves permission to support an ideology based only on preserving power and self interest for themselves in some way.

Evangelicals overlook his clear moral failings. Military men overlook his lack of strategic common sense. Conservatives overlook his lack of ideological credentials. Working class people overlook his abusive and obnoxious wealth. Racists and misogynists derive validation from his rhetoric. People are drawn to his charisma, and his sheer brazen bluster, mistaking it for strength and courage.

And there’s the Alt-Right; the idealists, the true-believers (if ever such a motley band of opportunists could ever be called ‘true’). In front of the camera, these guys talk about their right-wing cultural identity and rail against immigration, the establishment, and political correctness with a cute nod and a wink. But behind closed doors, they just love to throw around Nazi salutes, use Nazi expressions like ‘Lügenpresse’, and self-identify as ‘conquerers’. Given that Steve Bannon (‘The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America’) is now the main strategy advisor for the White House and that the motto that best captures his political mindset is “Honey Badger doesn’t give a shit”, its clear that their policies are simply belligerent, crazy, harmful, unfair, and ill-thought-through.

To my mind, if you voted for Trump, you’re in one of three groups. The first group are those people who have been played for a sucker and actually bought into the lies and hyperbola. The second group are people who understand full well what he is doing and are willing to ignore his failings for their self interest. The third group are those who are true believers in his inhuman, post-truth ideology as an appropriate means to an end.

If you’re part of the first and second groups, likely you hold in your heart some version of the ‘deep story’ described beautifully by Arlie Rothschilde in her book ‘Strangers in their own land’. You might feel that you have been left out and forgotten by the progressive elites who let undeserving minorities thrive whilst ignoring the needs of good, patriotic Americans. You may have squared your decision by arguing that Hillary’s policy positions were going to do more harm than those of Trump, Pence, Reibus and Bannon.

Like all the good people who paid money to the Trump University scam, you’re being played.

Chances are, in the style of the current divisive rhetoric that passes for civil discourse, you likely counter serious questions with pithy, off-the-shelf answers that simplify and belittle the conversation. You probably reduce important weighty issues to one-line counter-arguments because it appeals to your sense of patriotism and makes sense in conservative echo-chambers. Its not your fault, you’re being fed propaganda by the newsdesks of Breitbart, Fox, and other misinformationists. At some point though, you’ll notice how the blatant manipulation, lying and bullying impacts us all and realize how this was never what you signed up for.

If you’re in the third group, you are pulling the levers and pressing the buttons of the vast right-wing bullshit machine. You drive so many unethical dealings with so little willingness to ever do the right thing at any level that I now realize that this is a concerted, thought-out strategy.

It is no accident.

This is what I call 'American Evil'.

‘American Evil’ gave us slavery and the need to have a civil war to abolish it. It gave us segregation and Jim Crow in the south before the showmanship of the civil rights movement was able to force things to change. It gives us 30,000+ gun deaths a year through misinformation and the dark arts of political lobbying. It gave us the sub prime mortgage crash with no consequences to the assholes that caused it. This what gave us the utterly absurd SNAFU of the second Gulf War, our disastrous occupation of Iraq and the subsequent rise of ISIS there.

American Evil is the process striving to preserve power through any means necessary. It is the notion of tough expediency and the need to make money above all other things. It doesn’t recognize it’s own failings. It thrives on belief, authority and loyalty. It demands that you stand during the national anthem and it calls you a terrorist if you say your life matters.

A frankly incredible documentary from VICE news (‘A House Divided’) gives rare insight into the toxic, polemic environment that gave rise to the Tea Party, pervasive Republican obstructionism and Trump. In an interview with the legendary conservative pundit, Frank Luntz, the documentary recorded the following extraordinary exchange:

VICE: Washington is now Toxic and it seems to be galvinized into inactivity. 

Frank Luntz: That’s not the way politics used to be. Now they don’t know each other. There’s a segment of the Republican Party that would rather blow everything up than try to fix it; and they believe that they’re acting on principle. But principle is not the be-all-and-end-all. It is a blood sport. It is how much damage can I do to you. How much can I destroy your reputation. How can I hurt you so much so that not only are you destroyed but your dead relatives in the old country can feel it. We fucked up. We killed the goose that laid the golden egg. We fucked it up. Nobody’s listening. Nobody’s learning. It’s all just one big gabfest. 

V: If it’s toxic and it can’t be fixed, where does American politics go from here? 

FL: That’s why I’m telling people I’m going to New Zealand. I’m going to buy fifteen acres somewhere and I’ll sell off fourteen, so if you want to buy an acre, let me know. I’m not kidding. I’m going in December.

V: Wow. 

FL: At some point, the economy just stops functioning. The Greeks did not survive. The Romans did not survive. The French did not survive. The British did not survive. Why should we think the American empire will survive? I don’t know and I, unfortunately, will probably still be alive (I wish I wasn’t) when this whole thing comes tumbling down.

If Frank Lutz is right, there will be consequences for all of this; possibly long lasting impact on our civil rights; our economic prosperity; our effectiveness as a society to solve the problems we face and our reputation throughout the world. Echoing Romans 6:23 (“The wages of sin are death”), our communal future rests in the hands of good people, those people who voted for Trump and have not yet realized the likely consequence of their actions on the country, its citizens and its future.

I pray that those people start to see Donald Trump’s true nature soon. I pray that they realized that the course he is driving us towards is disastrous and horrifying. If you are one of those people, I pray that you turn back to the dignified and powerful promise of what American Freedom actually stands for and join us in the fight against, quite literally, the forces of evil.

The 'Fundamental Virtues'

Flying is one of those interesting contexts when people will usually be happy to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. It can be awkward when you realize that you’re falling into a political discussion with someone whose views are diametrically opposed to yours. I view these situations as an opportunity: a moment in time where it’s genuinely possible to learn something. I was sitting next to an older gentleman on a flight from LA to DC. As we were pulling back from the gate, I noticed the title of the chapter he was reading: “The Battle of Britain” and I immediately saw an opening.

“My granddad flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain”, I said. He looked up, a little baffled and I repeated myself by way of introduction. We started to chat. The book he was reading was a catalog of the seven moments in history. Seven separate events that the authors singled out as signature moments when 'Christian Freedom and Democracy' were preserved from the onrushing invasions of malignant invaders. One chapter was about the Persians at Thermopylae, another about the conversion of the Emperor Augustine, another about Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes, and of course, the Battle of Britain. I had reservations and voiced them. Isn’t that ignoring a whole slice of history? Wasn’t that conveniently forgetting the excesses of the Borgias and the Catholic Church in the days just before the reformation? He fielded my questions with some grace but not much engagement and we left it at that, for the time being.

Simplicity is appealing when we’re talking about virtue and goodness. Complex things, grey areas, pragmatic issues of contradictions lead to all sorts of issues and so it’s expedient to simplify matters to the simple dichotomy of ‘Good Guys’ and ‘Bad Guys’, or more sinisterly ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. Complexity leads to hemming and hawing, to moralistic relativity and the apparent slippery slope of compromise. Having said that, a simplistic view of what is right and wrong invariably leads to the sort of intractable argument that our political dialogue is currently, ridiculously, engaged in: a clash of core values that leads nowhere.

I hold the following boldly stated view: there are three fundamental virtues: (A) Compassion, (B) Integrity and (C) Understanding. These are inviolable, sacrosanct, absolute and, for want of a better word, ‘good’. Their inverse: Cruelty, Dishonesty and Ignorance embody what I consider as ‘evil’. The simplicity of this holds me in a strong grasp and interestingly, involves subtle complex pitfalls when applied to other people. Am I being compassionate or understanding towards others if I insist that they adopt my virtues as their own and judge them negatively if they don’t? This is where the complexity and depth lives of any truly moral person: in the consequences of your deeply held views to others.

In my mind, a Christian who preaches the Bible’s lessons of love and forgiveness only to turn around and say that homosexuality is a sin (and by consequence, any gay man or woman is damned) is a shocking contradiction with real, painful consequences to those people. The act of compassion requires you to ‘dethrone yourself from the center of your world and place another there’, leading inexorably to the golden rule: Do unto others as you have them do unto you. I doubt that any living soul would actually ask for someone else to issue a judgment of eternal damnation on them based on something as arbitrary and unconscious as sexual orientation, but I guess there’s a whole doctrine of sin to worry about. No, I say, let’s keep it simple: focus on Compassion, Integrity and Understanding and everything else will be fine.

My newly found friend and I started, inevitably, to chat about politics. He is a fiscal conservative, a bit more centrist on social issues and a frequent viewer of Fox News. He doesn’t like Hannity, Limbaugh or Coulter, but still feels that the Fox perspective is fair and balanced. He doesn’t believe the liberal media’s biases and positively loathes the demagogues of the left. He despises Barney Frank and Al Gore and argues passionately about Obama’s budgetary foolishness, about the importance of deregulation and the various ways in which the wealthy shouldn’t be penalized for their success. He and I talk about Health Care and the various sins of the left (from his perspective) and the right (from mine).

I suddenly realized that something important was happening: that he and I lived through the same events: the town hall meetings in 2009 where so much appalling propaganda was pumped through the airwaves surrounding the Health Care bill (mainly, in my mind, originating from the right wing, but he asserted from the left as well) and we had completely different experiences of those events. We literally were living in different worlds, with different logics and different narratives. There was no possible agreement or consensus between us largely because neither of us was getting the full picture. For whatever reason, whoever is to blame, there was almost no way of making an impartial, well-informed, fact-based evaluation of the issues since everything had been reduced to a polemic ‘them-against-us’ sort of argument. So many of the talking points we see in the public forum are geared to denigrating and dismissing our adversaries; of scoring points and killing off; of ridiculing and disingenuously undermining the others arguments.

Here was a man who had spent his life in business finances and he was sharing his expertise with me. The least I could do is listen and think carefully about what he was telling me about the tax code. I’ve read in the Economist (a publication with some chops in this area) that the latest wave of regulations in this arena are just too cumbersome and yet, as a good little liberal, I’m offered a moralistic justification for this legislation based on how the ‘banks are bad’. How can I, as a responsible citizen in a democracy, hold the reigns of power and hold my government to account if I have no accurate access to well-informed information? It’s impossible.

I dread the next few months as we all dissolve into the sepid, vile dialogue of a particularly negative presidential campaign where the three evils of aggression, bullshit and ignorance will reign supreme. I enjoyed my conversation with my new right-wing friend. I learned some things and I hope that he heard me when I said to him: “Don’t demonize the people involved in the conversation but listen to what they have to say”.

I walked away from the interaction feeling more far strongly that these fundamental virtues are the only things that really matter. On the whole, I could care less and less about a person’s political views. I do care very deeply why they might feel the way they feel. Are they motivated by compassion, honesty and understanding? If not, do they understand why? I will probably become a little strident concerning these virtues during the coming presidential campaign.

Let us elevate the level of debate, treat our adversaries with consideration and tell the truth. If anyone wants to make the claim that the USA is the greatest democracy in the world, they should be prepared for my comeback: “Show Me”.