In my last post, 59 of 100, I started to process some of my ideas about the Freedom of Speech, but I was trying to pack way too much into one blog post and if I was organized and had lots of time I would create some general categories that I wanted to explore about the relationship between Patriarchal Misogyny and the need for controlling who gets to speak and where, even within the illusion of respecting the right of anyone to speak freely. Then I would write that series of blog posts with clear theses and my evidence all collected for each section and then maybe more than 2 people would read each of those posts…but I don’t have that kind of writing time right now, and the purpose of this blog is to push myself to explore my ideas out loud, to share them with anyone who wants to read them, but to also be able to go back and read them myself later. So this post isn’t going to be that organized, carefully considered thing, it is going to be stream of consciousness deep diving into a topic that probably feels external and academic to a lot of people, but that I again have a personal connection to, and that might still yet get me in trouble.
When people like the Vice President come out and publicly say things like “I’m desperate for our country to be united in condemnation of the actions of the ideas that killed my friend…We can only have it with people that acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable,” they are staking a position of moral authority that authoritarians, and really most people in positions of privilege and power, have been maliciously using to maintain their power for a very long time. Vance is a bit of a clown and a pretty transparent usurer of other people’s stories for his own gain. I remember in 2016 Hillbilly Elegy being put forward as some kind of telling and deeply insightful understanding of rural white poverty, and showing up on all these critical race theory syllabi and getting bad vibes just reading the book’s description and never feeling like that was one I needed to touch. Then I read reviews like “Thinking about Reading ‘Hillbilly Elegy?’ Don’t” and was happy to see someone putting forth a clear explanation for what was making me feel so uncomfortable with the book, and is something that pops up over and over again in Vance’s public speaking and political career. Vance is never interested in actually understanding other people. He is interested in reducing other people down into stereotypes and soundbites that he can exploit to profiteer. Even when I look at his supposed statement of a call for unity, it is transparently only unity for forcing other people to see Kirk’s death as a national tragedy and not a personal one (admittedly, a personal tragedy for a potentially large number of people in the United States, its really hard to tell whether Kirk was as popular as he is being made to seem right now and is not just being exploited for political points), and thus I find it pretty concerning that Vance, and the entire Trump administration are so hot to identify “political violence” as the rallying cry that they want to use to bludgeon the very large number of people in this country that are opposed to Trumpism and its policies, into passive obedience.
First of all, “Political Violence” is a very loaded but also open-ended word that is easy to use to demonize and attack oppositional ideas and the people who espouse them. I don’t think anyone could read the first paragraph of that Wikipedia definition and not think of ways that applies to 99% percent of the violence that has ever been carried out in the establishment, defense, colonial expansion of the United States, or the repression of its people. It is clear that Vance has a very specific definition of political violence in mind when he is talking about how that there can be no unified condemnation of the “actions or ideas that killed my friend” without also condemning political violence, but he probably isn’t talking about forced deportations to 3rd party countries or Israel bombing the political leaders of Hamas in Qatar. He is probably trying to use a definition of political violence that defines it as the targeting of political figures by civilians, but Charlie Kirk was not a politician. He was the CEO of a non-profit media organization estimated to be worth about 12 million dollars, and Trump already declared the murder of CEO Brian Thompson to fall within the context of “political violence that needs to be stopped,” so I would really say that the clear implication here is that the Trump administration is trying to define political violence as the targeting of people in positions of power or authority within the US, and that this does not only include acts of direct physical violence, but also speaking out against them, their actions, or their abuses of authority. Accepting VP Vance’s assertion that national unity requires condemning anyone who does not agree to this definition of political violence is to accept Trumpist authoritarianism is the only path to national unity.
Personally, I think “national unity” is a pretty bad idea to begin with that is essentially just a smoke screen for compulsory nationalism. We saw this happen intensely after 9/11 and it resulted in a US population marching gleefully to what became multiple wars fought on false pretenses. An authoritarian state pushing a definition of “political violence” that essentially exists to protect them from criticism under the guise of national unity is a disgustingly bad idea that deserves to be subject to extreme scrutiny, ridicule, and derision for its hypocrisy and transparent disregard for people or for the rights enshrined in the US constitution. I can say this without really knowing very much at all about Charlie Kirk or the circumstances of his murder, without either condoning or condemning what happened to him, because those circumstances actually have nothing to do with what this administration is trying to do by forcing their own “helpless victims who hold all the power of the US military and law enforcement agencies in their executive branch” narrative over the whole situation. It is pathetic and the only thing more pathetic is the number of people throughout the country that seem ready to lap it up and defend it as an act of civility from an administration ripping kids from their families and disappearing people without trial into clandestine incarceration around the world.