The US Inches Closer to Dictatorship

In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, some are calling for civil war. Radical empathy might be a way out.

Things Are Unraveling

Several months before the 2020 election, I reached out to two acquaintances of mine, Drs. Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of New York University, who coauthored The Dictator’s Handbook. They gave me both good and bad news: Trump will try to become a dictator, but he won’t succeed. American democracy will survive the autocratic assault of Trump 2.0. However, the reason he’ll fail is that his policies will inflict so much pain on the population that mass civil unrest, protests, etc. will ultimately be his downfall. Things will get so bad, Smith and de Mesquita suggested, that even most of Trump’s supporters will turn against him.

I’m not so convinced. I often use the term “cautiously pessimistic” to describe my outlook, which perfectly captures how I now feel about our country right now, especially following the brutal, horrific, unjustifiable assassination of Charlie Kirk — described by The Nation as “an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct.”¹ Kirk was a bad guy, but no one should be murdered for expressing their views, however morally repugnant one finds them.

How risky is discussing this topic right now? Charlie Kirk once wrote: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.” Yet Pam Bondi just declared that

there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society … We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation is compiling a list of people who’ve failed to show sufficient sadness for Kirk’s passing in hopes of intimidating them. Some people have already been fired from their jobs for exercising their First Amendment rights, and one person was even arrested for mocking Kirk's murder. Very frightening times.

Incendiary accusations from the right started immediately after Kirk was shot: the shooter is a trans person (not true), or is dating a trans person (unverified, but seems likely), and was radicalized by his time at a university (he was only a university student for a single semester and, apparently, all of his classes would have been virtual). “The Left” is wholly responsible for this incident, the right insists, given its protracted history of hateful rhetoric: calling Republicans “fascists,” “Nazis,” and “Hitler.”

These people seem to have forgotten that Trump himself repeatedly called Kamala Harris a “fascist,” and that JD Vance himself once described Trump as “America’s Hitler.” Even RFK Jr. compared Trump to Hitler before launching the MAHA movement that now poses a dire threat to public health. Almost comically, some MAGA supporters have likened Kirk’s murder to the Reichstag fire of 1933, which played a pivotal role in establishing Nazi Germany:

From here.

Musk and others are tired of leftists calling them “Nazis.”

Nancy Mace — before we even knew who the shooter was — claimed that the shooter is a “tranny,” and tweeted that it’s “time to bring back the death penalty.” After authorities revealed that he’s a white dude from a conservative Christian family that supports Trump, she pivoted 180 degrees and said: “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”

Someone named Joey Mannarino, with 641,000 followers on X, posted this:

Dinesh D’Souza, meanwhile, wrote on X: “I’d like to know the names of the professors who radicalized this young man. I wonder if they too could be charged with abetting this political assassination.”

A random MAGA guy went viral on social media for exhorting Trump to start a “civil war” against “evil Left Nazis,” so that MAGA folks can go “door to door, street by street, and clean this country.” He says that this will start a revolution that will “echo” around the world.

Elon Musk, who has 226 million followers on X, furiously posted that “The left is the party of violence and hate,” “The Left is the party of murder,” “They are the ones poisoning the minds of our children,” and “Either we fight back or they will kill us,” a line he repeated — while wearing a “What Would Orwell Think?” shirt — to an audience of far-right people in the UK (video below).

Such rhetoric is unprecedented in recent US history (certainly within my lifetime, and I lived through the Bush Jr. years). It feels like we may be reaching a socio-political tipping point: the death of Kirk — especially if it turns out that the shooter was on the political left — could be just the pretext MAGA folks need to “justify” an autocratic takeover. Indeed, an opportunity like this doesn’t come around too often in history, and my guess is that they’re well aware of this fact and will exploit the situation in every way possible. Sadly, there is no opposition party in the US right now to resist the tsunami of political repression that’s coming. Believe them when they say they want to erase the political left from American society.

To further drive-home the point, here’s a collage of examples put together by Max Burns, a contributor to MSNBC and Rolling Stone. Take a moment to peruse these comments:

Contrast this with statements from leading figures on the political left:

From here.

The very-unfunny irony is that MAGA’s claims about “the Left” inciting violence are outrageously absurd. There are a lot of data on this, and in every case the conclusion is the same: people on the right (you know, the folks who own most of the guns) are overwhelmingly responsible for deaths linked to political extremism and domestic terrorism:

From here.

From here.

From here.

When someone asked Grok about such stats, Grok said the following (below) — leading Musk to write in response: “My apologies, we are fixing this cringe idiocy by Grok.” In other words, Musk is literally adjusting Grok’s answers, which many people unwittingly trust on X, to conform to his fact-challenged ideological stance. This is so flagrantly dangerous: Musk is manipulating the information that Grok provides. People will be fooled. Beliefs will be distorted. We live in an age of epistemological collapse.

From here.

In fact, many of the same accounts now decrying any celebration of Kirk’s murder have made horrifically violent claims in the past. Here are just a few examples that I came across:

From here.

From here.

From here.

Back in July of 2024, I published an article for Truthdig in which I listed instances of Trump (and his followers) fantasizing about violence: assassinating political opponents, imprisoning perceived enemies, shooting leftwing protestors, etc. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2016, Trump notoriously suggested that someone should assassinate Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he said. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” More recently, Trump boosted a post on Truth Social calling for a televised military tribunal for Liz Cheney. During a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, involving white nationalists, resulting in the death of one person after a neo-Nazi plowed his car through a crowd, Trump claimed that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

After Nancy Pelosi’s husband was brutally attacked by someone wielding a hammer, Trump joked to a crowd of followers: “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco. How’s her husband doing — anybody know? And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house, which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” The crowd can be heard laughing. On a different occasion, he said, “We had no terror during my administration. The only terror we had was Nancy Pelosi, who’s a crazed lunatic. She’s a lunatic. She is a crazed lunatic. What the hell was going on with her husband? Let’s not ask. … By the way, she’s got a wall around her house, obviously in that case it didn’t work very well,” he said while chuckling. Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. posted an image of underwear, which Pelosi’s husband was wearing (with no pants) at the time of the attack, along with a hammer. “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready,” Trump Jr. wrote.

Trump did not hold back from such comments even when his targets were in the highest ranks of the military. In 2023, Trump suggested that Mark Milley, the joint chiefs chairman, should be executed for engaging in “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” Milley’s alleged crime? Making a phone call — which was “explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials” — to “reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

After George Floyd was murdered by police, Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase that “has a racist history going back to police brutality against Black Americans in the 1960s.” According to the former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” about people protesting police brutality. He also said, in June 2020, that “if a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

What Now?

Where do we go from here? The fact is that, as Taylor Lorenz points out in an excellent video, political violence only becomes a “problem” when it’s directed at the elite. When the elite inflict political violence on the people, it doesn’t even register as such.

Right now, Trump — a twice-impeached convicted felon — is rounding up immigrants and throwing them into concentration camps. He ordered a federal take-over of Washington DC, and is threatening to do the same in Chicago. This is a form of political violence. So was the 2021 insurrection that Trump incited, as well as US’s ongoing financial and military support of a literal genocide in Gaza. The murder of Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota Democratic leader, and her husband Mark, is also (obviously) political violence — though no flags were flown at half-mast following that horrendous incident, unlike in the case of Kirk.

From here.

What’s the solution? If I only knew. I am rather heartened by the response of far-Left commentator Hasan Piker, who explicitly encouraged “radical empathy” in the wake of Kirk’s murder. I agree.

Perhaps we’re heading toward a second civil war; maybe there’s not much we can do to stop it at this point. But I also suspect that people — including those on the right — may tire of the incessant hate directed at each other. Radical empathy may be the only escape hatch from this burning house, and right now it’s really only the left that’s promoting it.

Musk, of course, famously declared earlier this year that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Trump is nothing if not unempathetic — heck, the day after Kirk’s murder, he was literally dancing in his chair at a sports event, and when a reporter asked him about the loss of Kirk, he immediately changed the topic to trucks and White House construction. (See for yourself. It’s pretty shocking.) And — surprise — Kirk himself proclaimed that “I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.”

Kirk adds that he prefers the term “sympathy.” But surely we need both. That’s not to say that folks on the left should be empathetic toward fascist ideologies. We absolutely should not! My thought, instead, is that we should lead by example, because what might just change the hearts and minds of MAGA fascists is convincing them that they, too, should feel empathy for other human beings.

I leave you with two videos, one from the Texas pastor, James Talarico, and the other — for a chuckle — of Trump saying that “smart people don’t like me.” Sigh.

Thanks so much for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!

1. I cannot stress enough how upsetting I found Kirk’s murder to be. Political violence has no place in our society — it is fundamentally antithetical to the institution of democracy. I have nothing favorable to say about Kirk’s views, which I found to be vile. But I am deeply saddened by his passing. No one should be shot and killed for expressing their opinions.