A New Era of Political Violence

"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,"

"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 as the videos of Kirk's shooting that have circulated widely on social media; 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 8-mm. film, shot with a Bell and Howell home-movie camera. 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."

Charlie Kirk's assassination combined modern technological immediacy with long-standing traditions of political murder. Assassinations have recurred across generations, but Kirk—despite influence—was not on a scale of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X and likely will be a historical footnote. Social media enabled instantaneous, blood-drenched video circulation, allowing people to experience the shooting unmediated in minutes. Earlier generations relied on imagination, photographs, or delayed, grainy film such as the Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy. The event signals a new age that nevertheless recalls older patterns of politically motivated violence, and such violence transcends simple partisan ownership.

Read at Intelligencer