There Is No ‘They.’ Only ‘We.’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 12, 2025

 

Charlie Kirk was murdered. His assassination was evil, indefensible, and injurious to the country. It was also a heinous crime against a wife, two small children, and lord knows how many other family members and friends.

 

That’s it. I don’t have a “but” to add to that.

 

As I wrote last year, you often hear a lot of “buts” after an event like this. When Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was murdered, there were a lot of statements along the lines of “murder is wrong, but people need to understand how bad insurance companies are.” 

 

(It’s depressing how I had to look up the name of the innocent victim, but knew the suspect’s name by heart).

 

Not everybody who said that kind of thing thought they were condoning or somehow justifying murder, but some did and more came across as if they were. And that is grotesque. 

 

When it comes to murder—not self-defense or combat in war—there is nothing one can say after the “but” that can mitigate the wrongness of murder.

 

Murder is axiomatically unjustifiable.

 

It’s literally the word we use to describe an unjustified and unjustifiable taking of a human life. Under the law, if the justification is persuasive then it’s not murder but something else, and we use other words to describe it (negligent homicide, self-defense, manslaughter, etc.).

 

Think of it this way. The fights over euthanasia and abortion are emotionally fraught and sometimes exceedingly complex, but it tells you something that at the surface level it boils down to a fight over terminology. Everyone agrees euthanasia is the taking of a life. Many abortion rights supporters will concede that abortion ends a life, if not necessarily granting it is a full human person. But in both cases the disagreement revolves around whether you can call it murder. If you agree that it is murder, then you lose the argument because murder is definitionally wrong.

 

This has been the case since Viking days. The Norse did a lot of killing, but they still needed a word (morð) to describe killing that was morally or legally forbidden.  From Etymonline:

 

In Old Norse, custom distinguished morð “secret slaughter” from vig “slaying.” The former involved concealment, or slaying a man by night or when asleep, and was a heinous crime. The latter was not a disgrace, if the killer acknowledged his deed, but he was subject to vengeance or demand for compensation.

 

What counts as murder has expanded a lot since those days. Even the societies that still tolerate “honor killings”—fathers lawfully killing their wives or daughters, for instance— still have the concept of murder. They just don’t apply it correctly. (Yes, I am judging societies that allow this sort of thing.) The prohibition against murder is what the sociologist Donald Brown called a “human universal.”

 

It exists in every culture and society.

 

The reason I dwell on this is that while all murder should be condemned, murdering people for what they say (or believe) is different because it is much more dangerous.

 

Consider the arguments about how to think about the taking of a human life. Abortion and euthanasia revolve around questions of medical science and more abstract notions of morality, human dignity, and the role of the state. Self-defense, negligent homicide, and all the other considerations that kick in under criminal and civil law are based on specific facts, specific judgments of individual actions, etc. We adjudicate the circumstances from the ground up.

 

When you fail to condemn a murder because you don’t like what the victim said or believed, you are suggesting at some fundamental level that some speech or ideas should be punishable by death. That is atavistic. That is literally barbaric in that it is a throwback to a time when the powerful could kill the powerless simply because they gave offense. Every person who surrenders, even at the margins, to the idea that one can justify murdering people for expressing their beliefs is not a sophisticated modern advocate of some edgy new way of thinking. They are, all of them, reactionaries at the most metaphysical level, rejecting the core convictions of not just “modernity” but of Judeo-Christian civilization itself.

 

I get that few people fail to condemn outright murder, but this point applies to more than murder. Perhaps the dumbest and most sinister idea to gain traction in the last few decades is the idea that speech can be violence but violence can be speech. I’m willing to stipulate that the proponents of this claim are correct on the neuroscience insofar that it’s true that “words hurt.”  That’s a good argument for condemning ugly, cruel, or bigoted speech. It’s a terrible argument for claiming that speech is “violence.” Why? Because speech isn’t violence.

 

In the U.K. we now have cases where speech about violence is punished more severely than actual violence. FIRE reports that in the last five years, support among college students for using violence to stop speech has grown nearly 80 percent, from 1 in 5 (already insanely high) to 1 in 3. Attitudes among younger Americans about celebrating the deaths of political figures aren’t great either.

 

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the whole point of politics generally, and constitutional liberal democracy in particular, is to rule out the use of violence to settle disagreements about ideas.

 

This assassination was awful, evil, and utterly indefensible, but if any good could possibly come out of it, it would be that people actually took to heart Charlie Kirk’s oft-quoted observation that, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” When people stop talking, “that’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.”

 

Essayist Claire Berlinski’s response yesterday was on point. “To be honest, I didn’t know much about him,” she wrote. “I knew who he was, of course, and the cultural role he occupied, but I don’t think I’d paid much attention to him until last night, when I saw the news. … I can only say that ‘Je suis Charlie’ in the sense that he was my fellow citizen, and, like me, in the business of selling his ideas about politics. But that’s enough.”

 

She added: “I didn’t know the twelve journalists who were murdered at Charlie Hebdo, either. But j’étais Charlie then, and je suis Charlie now. I am for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I am against murder.”

 

That’s exactly right. Je suis Charlie.

 

Words matter.  

 

I could leave it there, but I don’t want to because something else needs to be said. Just because speech is not violence and violence is not speech doesn’t mean there isn’t a relationship between the two. Popular support for free speech in America has been declining, and that’s bad. The good news is that as a matter of law, the United States has the strongest free speech protections of any country in the world. (A few have arguably equally strong laws on the books, but they are enforced less robustly and most of them have carveouts for restrictions on “hate speech.”)

 

But even in America, we recognize that words and violence can be complementary, which is why incitement to violence is a crime, even if the bar for incitement is very, very, high. But just because that bar for criminal speech is very high doesn’t mean any speech that fails to cross that bar is just fine. People have the legal right to do all sorts of terrible and indefensible things, including say bad things. I wouldn’t have it any other way, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t exercise our free speech (and other rights) to condemn irresponsible or gross speech. A cashier who hurls racial epithets at customers should not be arrested and prosecuted for hate speech. He certainly should be fired. Where to draw lines in politics, or civil society generally,  about irresponsible speech can be hard and messy, but that doesn’t mean lines should not be drawn.

 

I’ve found so much of the cacophony that passes for discourse about Kirk’s assassination repugnant. Trying to draw lines between or around the defensible and indefensible speech over the last few days is so daunting that you end up with a giant knotted scribble or inkblot.

 

The easiest stuff to condemn is the celebration of his murder. If you celebrate murder, you’re sacrificing your humanity. Period. And I have no problem with shining a spotlight on the fools and ghouls who have done that—when accurate.

 

But when people shine that spotlight on the fools and ghouls in an effort to falsely accuse vast swaths of other people of sharing those sentiments, you are slandering them. Worse, you are in the business of giving people permission to commit more violence. Perhaps not legally but, again, that is the highest bar—not the only bar.

 

“We have to have steely resolve,” Steve Bannon declared on War Room, his unironically named podcast. “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”

 

“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us. What are we gonna do about it?” Fox News host Jesse Watters insisted Wednesday night. “Everybody’s accountable … the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now. … This is a turning point and we know which direction we’re going.”

 

Shame on these people. If these statements were made in Kinyarwanda—the dominant language of the Hutus—they’d have fit right in on RTLM, the radio network that laid the rhetorical groundwork for the Rwandan genocide.

 

I watched a lot of coverage of the Kirk assassination, though I stopped following on Twitter because I found the conversation so grotesque at times I feared I’d lose my temper. Every Democratic politician I saw condemned this murder. As far as I could tell, pretty much every progressive pundit and TV host did as well. Matthew Dowd lost his gig at MSNBC for comments that crossed a line far short of condoning Kirk’s murder.

 

The demonic “they” that Bannon, Watters, et al are conjuring does not exist. Before you come back at me with specific examples of the cherry-picked ghouls and fools I referred to before, let me stipulate—again—those people should not only be ashamed, but shamed. But this monolithic edifice of “politicians, the media, and all these rats”—as Watters put it—do not exist.

 

There is no war.

 

The most dangerous thing about this rhetoric is not the wholesale slander and dehumanization—though that is deplorable—it is the claim that “they” are already at war with “us.” That’s what conjures comparisons to Rwanda. The Hutus seeded the airwaves with claims that the Tutsis were the ones waging war on the Hutus and that turning machetes on them wasn’t an act of aggression, but one of self-defense against the “fifth columnists,” the “snakes,” “rats,” and inyenzi (cockroaches).

 

Did “they” assassinate former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband three months ago? I understand that Sen. Mike Lee would have us believe that’s what happened. But Lee’s Twitter-poisoning makes him an unreliable source. Did “they” send a deranged madman to Nancy Pelosi’s home with a hammer in 2022? Or to Josh Shapiro’s home with a jerrican of gasoline earlier this year? “They” didn’t order a deranged and disordered man to shoot children at a Minneapolis church. “They” didn’t send someone to kill Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, no matter how many times Trump world insinuates otherwise.

 

The worst one can plausibly say is that some of the extreme speech of the left or the right unintentionally inspired—to one extent or another—some individual actors, many of whom are mentally ill, to commit evil acts. The lesson of that possibility is to stop using extreme language. The lesson is not to claim the other side deliberately orchestrated the violence while “my” side is innocent of any such intent.

 

Indeed, it’s amazing to me how some of the people peddling the idea that “they” are orchestrating all of this political violence are the same people who take deep offense at any suggestion that Trump orchestrated the violence of January 6. We don’t need to argue about the incitement standard under Brandenburg v. Ohio to acknowledge that there’s a lot more connective tissue between Trump’s rhetoric on that day than there is connecting Democrats or “the media” to Charlie Kirk’s murder.

 

There is no “they,” at least not in the way Bannon and Watters et al want you to believe.

 

But there is an “us” and a “we.” And if we are going to assign culpability to an ominous pronoun, then that is where we should look. We are responsible. Left and right, Democrats and Republicans. The terminally online and the politically disaffected all have some portion of blame, if not necessarily equal portions.

 

We are not responsible in a legal sense or even in a logical sense. But we, all of us, are responsible for this corruption of our shared spaces, because standing up to it is so much harder than slouching as it unfolds in front of us.

 

The main driver of bipartisan culpability is selective outrage. Right-wing partisans make jokes about a madman with a hammer bludgeoning Nancy Pelosi’s elderly husband, but they are righteously outraged at any violence or even insult to one of their people. They demand zero tolerance for political violence, but do not object to blanket pardons for goons who stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf.

 

Left-wing partisans rant about the “stochastic terrorism” that is generated by right-wing rhetoric, but celebrate shouting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!” and “Globalize the intifada!” They fret about the curtain of fascism descending on America because of the Proud Boys and their ilk, but cheer Antifa as the heirs of the boys who stormed Normandy.

 

Riots the left likes are mostly peaceful “resistance,” riots the right likes are “days of love” and patriotism. Riots either side doesn’t like are “terrorism.” We cut people on our side slack for their rhetorical excesses as glorious free speech while we condemn the other side’s rhetoric as dangerous and unacceptable. 

 

Not everyone does this. Most of us just roll our eyes and turn from the carnival stalls of cable news and the cesspools of social media to watch sports or reruns of Yellowstone or This Old House. But we tolerate it. For reasons no less lamentable for being understandable, we accept this crap as the new normal. The best of us may not lack conviction, but we squander it, too weary to contend with the ratings-and-click whores who pour their passionate intensity into every screen and speaker.

 

So things fall apart. The center does not hold because we refuse to hold it. The falcon cannot hear the falconer above the din of his own indulgence. Anarchy is not loosed upon the world in a single cataclysm but in the daily acceptance that there’s nothing to be done, because if something does need to be done someone else will surely do it. But there is no someone else. There is only we—no one but us.

 

We are not yet at the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, but every day we grow more accustomed to its approach.