American Babel
Political violence and the rhetoric around it reveal both the limits of language and the dangers of its misuse. It becomes more difficult to understand our fellow citizens when our common cultural and political vocabulary is disintegrating into ever-smaller fragments based on identity and tribe, and when so much of life unfolds not through personal encounters but in virtual spaces. The hours after the assassination of the popular MAGA personality Charlie Kirk were a potent reminder of these trends. Confusion over the messages engraved on shell casings found inside the assassin’s rifle allowed various parties to interpret his motivation according to their own preconceived certainties: the shooter was a “trans-antifa-radical-leftist” or a “Groyper-right-wing-fascist-racist.” The suspect used phrases and memes from the culture of the “terminally online,” with multilayered ironies and jokes nearly nihilistic in their intentional meaninglessness. Garbage Day, an online newsletter covering the internet, described it as the secret language of an “accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum.”
No such translation guides are needed to understand those whom Mark Lilla has called “the bile-spewing cadets of the MAGA movement.” Their debasement of language is of a piece with their debasement of government, civil society, and the truth. Mike Lee, Republican senator of Utah, joked on social media about the shooting of two Minnesota legislators and their spouses in their homes. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has referred to migrants as “dirt bags,” and J. D. Vance to Chinese laborers as “peasants.” And then there are the president’s own offhand insults, which have become so routine that we hardly even notice anymore. Washington Examiner’s Peter Tonguette recently wrote that Donald Trump’s “greatest sin may be in mainstreaming the idea that offensiveness is a sustainable posture in public life.” That may not be his greatest sin—the list is long—but there’s no denying Trump’s singular role in the debasement of our discourse. He lays down an ever-lengthening trail of cruel, vulgar, racist, and hostile statements, many of which are also lies. If many Americans have become desensitized after a decade of mucking through this verbal effluence, that just underscores the harm that has been done. As Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic, Trump’s mode of communication “has reshaped the emotional wiring of many otherwise good and decent people.”
George Orwell wrote in 1946, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.” There was a time when Marco Rubio at least tried to sound like a statesman; now, as Trump’s secretary of state, he often sounds like a thug. When someone on X described the administration’s killing of eleven civilians on a boat in international waters as a “war crime,” the vice president of the United States replied, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” When Fox’s Brian Kilmeade—on the day after Kirk’s death—called for the summary lethal injection of mentally ill homeless people, it wasn’t hard to hear it in Trump’s voice.
Kirk’s own way with words won him a large online following, mostly of young men who reveled in his targeting of the left. Kirk’s willingness to take his act into public settings may have been commendable, but it’s hard to credit the idea that he valued productive debate. To mention him alongside Socrates, as George Will and Bishop Robert Barron did, is to trivialize our venerable tradition of open intellectual exchange. Kirk’s “invitation” to debate—“prove me wrong”—emphasized the crush-your-opponent mode of interaction he favored, not an openness to exploring contentious issues honestly. He didn’t elevate the discourse; he degraded it. He leaves a damning record of smears against Black women, immigrants, Muslims, and transgender people, among others. He made fun of the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi and demanded capital punishment for Joe Biden. He wanted executions to be televised and said that children should be forced to watch “as initiation.” His standing as an exemplar of Christian values only demonstrates how successfully his movement has distorted Christianity to suit an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist worldview. Whipping up hate against transgender people doesn’t make you “pro-family,” it just shows you hate transgender people. Asserting that the right to bear arms is worth the many gun deaths this country suffers every year doesn’t evince belief in the sanctity of life; it reeks of the culture of death. Among Kirk’s legacies is the watch list he compiled of university professors who didn’t conform to his ideological strictures. Since his death, many of his targets have reported a surge in threats against them.
We remain lucky (for now) to live in a country where Kirk was free to say whatever he wanted, as ugly as it often was. The importance of this freedom is one of many reasons we should all condemn his assassination. But that freedom is in greater peril every day—and the biggest threat to it now is not sporadic political violence, but the Trump administration’s escalating efforts to punish and even criminalize political dissent—in schools and universities, online and in the press, everywhere. Kirk’s death has given them one more pretext for these efforts. But they cannot plausibly celebrate Kirk as a champion of free speech while threatening to silence anyone who dares to criticize him or them.
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