Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - We Need to Talk About 'Political Violence’

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co When a powerful right-wing figure like Charlie Kirk is attacked or killed, political leaders and media rush to mourn them as a martyr and condemn "political violence." But what does political violence actually mean? While violence against elites is treated as a national tragedy, violence against poor, Black, immigrant, queer, and disabled people is sanctioned. The truth is that political violence has always been part of life in America, but somehow it only becomes a “national emergency” when that violence threatens power. In this video, I talk about the history of "political violence" in the U.S., what the term actually means in practice, how it's weaponized, and what we need to do if we actually want to put a stop to it.  Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series on the fight for free speech and civil liberties online. Today I want to talk about political violence. Charlie Kirk's murder is the latest high-profile example of political violence in the U.S. The murder of Charlie Kirk is heightening concern about the rise in cases of political violence across the country. Political violence has become all too common in American society, and this is not who we are. This is yet another example of the sad reality of rising political violence in our own. our country. A few months ago, I made a video called Someone Needs to Do It about the popular meme encouraging someone to finally Trump. I don't even need to have to say it. You know what I'm talking about.

In that video, I talked about how asking the public to uphold norms while our entire government and everyone in power flouts do process on a near daily basis and never holds themselves to the same standards is a farce. I cited a research report that found that more and more Americans endorsed direct political violence and are expressing a plummeting faith in our political system and democracy. Josh Sidderella, a researcher who studies extremism, told me, quote, the liberal project has basically failed. The enormous accumulation of wealth and power by oligarchs invalidates the rule of law. The end result is that you can theoretically have executions in the public square.

That is what we're going back to. After Charlie Kirk was shot, every political leader and liberal pundit came out of the woodwork to condemn political violence. Charlie Kirk, who espoused some of the most violent, hateful ideology around, is already being treated as a martyr. Asra Klein declared that while he and Charlie had their differences, you know, the whole black people and women are human beings who deserve rights thing, fundamentally, they were, quote, on the same side. Trump said that he would award Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Yankees flew their flag at half-mast, as did a slew of government buildings. Liberal influencers posted teary eulogies to TikTok. I could go on and on,

and I'm sure you've seen the posts, and there will be a lot more of these types of posts in the coming weeks, I'm sure. But I want to talk more about political violence, because I think discussions of political violence and the way people in power continue to talk about it exposes a huge rift in our political environment right now. When political leaders and the media ring their hands about political violence, they're not actually talking about violence in any universal sense. They're talking about violence specifically against elites or people who look like them or people who maintain these existing power structures. The violence that is already a daily feature of life for poor, immigrant, black, disabled, and queer communities is completely

invisible to them. Police tear gassing a crowd of teenagers demanding accountability for the murder of George Floyd is never deemed political violence. Federal agents shooting pepperballs at medics in Portland is not seen as political violence. But the second a right-wing figure is harmed, it becomes a crisis for democracy on cable news. This double standard, of course, has always been there. And it's why so many people, especially in the Middle East and other countries that we've inflicted horrific levels of violence upon, hate the American government. But cell phones and social media have finally made this hypocrisy crystal clear to members of the American public. And I'm not even just talking about atrocities abroad. After George Floyd's murder,

20, millions of people took to the streets to demand an end to racist police killings. What they were met with, however, was an unprecedented wave of state-sanctioned violence. The Department of Homeland Security deployed tactical teams into cities. Police kettled and beat and arrested journalists. Protesters were shot point-blank with less lethal munitions, losing eyes and sustaining permanent injuries. People died in protest-related incidents. But how many of those deaths were mourned by the mainstream media as martyrs of democracy? None. And just, Less months after the peak of Black Lives Matter protests on January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the Capitol calling for the lynching of elected officials and overturning the election. But their violence was excused. Those rioters overwhelmingly received lighter sentences than Black Lives Matter protesters.

Some even used the event to launch their careers as influencers. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges for shooting anti-fascist protesters dead, while peaceful college students ended up in jail. And of course, none of this is new. You can look back at American history and see the state enact violence on our own citizens over and over and over and over again. I think a lot of what happened in Standing Rock in 2016. The government, under Obama, mind you, sent armored vehicles and a militarized police force to attack indigenous people who were defending their sacred land and water. Protesters were blasted with high pressure hoses in freezing temperatures. They had dogs set on them.

People got concussions and other injuries. The media framed the event as clashes, but thankfully we were able to wait. what actually happened as it was live streamed on Facebook. When the COVID pandemic hit, violence against marginalized people was fully normalized. Immigrants, people of color, and the poor were and are currently being sent into deadly workplaces with no airborne disease protections. Prisoners are being left to die of COVID-19 in overcrowded facilities with, again, zero airborne disease mitigations, even today. Joe Biden successfully convinced liberals and even leftists to completely devalue the lives of the lives of the lives of, of people around them to the point that, again, even leftists today,

believe that it's morally neutral to infect and kill or permanently maim those around you by infecting them with airborne disease because you don't want to wear a mask. Killing and disabling millions of Americans by encouraging the spread of an airborne vascular disease is also violence. In Atlanta, in 2023, when activists protesting Cop City were stalked, arrested, and even killed, these pundits mourning political violence were nowhere to be seen. Manuel Tehran was shot and killed and the state labeled them a domestic terrorist for peacefully resisting a police project. According to mapping police violence, more than a thousand people are shot and killed by the police every year, overwhelmingly people of color.

When ice raids rip apart families in the middle of the night, that is also police violence. Since January 1st, 2017, at least 70 people have died in ICE custody. ICE detention facilities recorded 13 more deaths just in the first half of this year alone. And these figures are a massive undercount of the harm that ICE does. ICE will also release people shortly before their death just so they're not counted as dying under ICE custody. Just last month, a man fleeing an ICE raid at Home Depot right here in Los Angeles was killed. The ACLU found that 95% of people's deaths under ICE detention were preventable. And then, of course, we have school shootings, which are completely normalized in this country.

Almost the exact same time that Charlie Kirk was shot, students at Evergreen High School in Colorado were running for their lives from yet another school shooter. Kirk defended these shootings and said that victims of gun violence were necessary casualties to defend the Second Amendment. But we've had dozens of school shootings over the past couple decades resulting in hundreds of casualties and injuries to children. Just last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report saying that school shootings were at an all-time high. and becoming even more deadly. My point is that Americans are already exposed to unfathomable levels of political violence every day. And so the hand-wringing from people in power

when someone like Charlie Kirk falls victim to that same violence just really rings hollow. It especially rings hollow when our country is in the midst of facilitating a genocide. As one Palestinian posted in the wake of Charlie's death, quote, sorry if I don't seem overly shocked. It's just that I'm not. I have seen decapitated babies, shredded limbs, mangled and charred bodies, and much worse in Gaza for 23 months.

As I've said previously, witnessing the most graphic and horrific war crimes imaginable in Palestine, constantly, 24-7 via our phones, revealed the true violence of our country to the American public in a way that I don't think it ever had been before. I think people are finally able to see exactly how violent and hypocritical the U.S. Empire is and how cavalier people in power are about that hypocrisy. And this is, of course, why the government wants to ban cell phones and social media, by the way, but that's a topic for another day. As a social scientist on Twitter put it, quote,

political violence is never acceptable, says a fascist country dominated by political state violence at every level against every oppressed group, both within the country and around the world. Another Muslim woman tweeted, quote, political violence is being condemned across the U.S. after Charlie Kirk's death. Where is that outrage when 100, plus Palestinians are being killed with American weapons every single day. And this is the entire point, right?

Thanks in large part to the internet and social media, people can quite literally see the hypocrisy of these people in power. All their mealy-mouth statements do is reveal whose lives matter to them and whose lives don't. Dozens of Palestinian children shot in the neck are never mourned. Students shot in the neck by school shooters are not mourned. But a right-wing political commentator who defy, those people's deaths is treated as a national hero.

This hypocrisy was also on display after a millionaire for-profit insurance CEO Brian Thompson was murdered, allegedly by Luigi Mangione. We saw how people in power responded to Thompson's murder compared to other brutal murders and the brutal murderous nature of our for-profit insurance system. It's abundantly clear now to everyone in large part due to free and open internet access, which is why we have to fight for free and open internet. that when pundits and politicians and people in power claim to oppose political violence, what they actually mean is that they simply oppose violence that threatens them and their power. The daily political violence that millions of Americans have to endure through incarceration, our for-profit insurance system, neglect, deportation, police brutality, and on and on and on, doesn't count. Our lives don't count.

Every hand-wringing op-ed about civility and democracy is just running. covering for a relentlessly violent system. You can really see exactly how insulated people in power and the elite media are from this daily violence in moments like this. For example, shortly after Kirk's shooting, CNN pundit Abby Phillips tweeted, quote, the degree to which the algorithm on this platform is pushing video of the shooting is incredibly disturbing. There has to be some human that can turn the dial down in a situation like this. I thought this post was so revealing, because I think so many people, myself included, looked at her like, where have you been? You think this video of Charlie Kirk getting shot is gruesome?

Have you not been witnessing the same live stream genocide across every single social media app that we have for the past two years? But the truth is, is that they haven't. People in power remain comfortable in their elite bubbles, completely shielded from the material harm of the violent policies that they support. And I think this is why so many people feel should and Freud about Charlie Kirk's death. He dedicated his life to upholding violent systems and advocated for incredibly violent policies that have resulted in people's deaths.

And Kirk led a legion of millions of supporters who still support this violence. Before his body was even cold, far-right figures were calling for a war on trans people. These are the same people who spend all day online mocking vulnerable people's deaths and celebrating the killing of George Floyd or immunocompromise people dying or the death of a trans girl who jumped off a bridge. Elon Musk posted to his 225 million followers, quote, the left is the party of murder. Right-wing activist Laura Lumer, who's been openly celebrating the slaughter of Palestinian children for months, called on Trump to, quote, shut down, defund and prosecute every single leftist organization, adding that, quote, the left is a national security threat. Lumer said that, quote, more people will be

murdered if the left isn't crushed with the power of the state. Trump blamed the shooting on, quote, radical left political violence in an Oval Office address. Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the Federalist posted on X, quote, I hope that Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho terrorist network that has been terrorizing Christians in this nation unabated for more than a decade. As someone who's actually against violence, all of this is terrifying. As many have pointed out, the whole this shooting is going to be used as a pretense to strip us all of our rights thing rings a little hollow when the government is already stripping all of us of our rights on a pretty much daily basis. They don't need Charlie Kurt's death to continually, brutally oppress

and murder minorities in state-sanctioned violence. But it's disturbing how liberals are already manufacturing consent for this to happen. Several high-profile liberal influencers and media figures are already whitewashing Kirk's legacy and policy positions, framing him as an innocent father who, while they might have had some disagreements with, was fundamentally a good man. This sort of rhetoric is so corrosive. As my friend Matt Bernstein said, quote, Charlie Kirk's death can't be separated from the very systems he devoted his career to promoting. What we need to do is dismantle those systems and we can't do that when people in power still refuse to acknowledge them. The very ongoing COVID pandemic, the genocide in Gaza, and pretty much all the events over the past

few years have revealed just how many people's lives are truly viewed as expendable. We see people in the highest positions of power in this country pushing the idea that poor, disabled, unhoused, immunocompromised, and trans people are better off dead. They push the idea that the unrelenting murder of Palestinians fighting back against their own illegal occupation is somehow acceptable, that the lives of thousands of literal babies in Gaza are totally expendable. People are witnessing all of this and responding by saying, okay, if killing innocent people is deemed acceptable by the state, then why can't we kill the people actually doing harm?

As I said in my someone needs to do it video, I don't actually think most of us want to live in a country where political violence is the norm. I don't think most people want to feel like the only way they can fight back against oppression is through extrajudicial killings. That's a really dangerous system for everyone involved. But we need to stop treating the death.

of powerful people as this unique horror. And we need to start treating the daily killing of poor and marginalized people as the very urgent crisis that it is. This means demanding accountability from leaders who support these violent systems. Political violence is not something that we're sliding towards. It's something that we live with as Americans every single day. It's baked into our horrible, violent, hyper-capitalist system. We need to force people in power and the mainstream media to acknowledge

that reality if we ever want change. Thanks for watching. And if you like my work, please support me on Patreon. It probably won't surprise you, but talking about these issues and doing journalism means that I can't get brand deals the way that other content creators can. To do this work, I rely on support directly from you.

You can subscribe to my Patreon below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter, UserMag, where I read about all of this stuff and more. That's Usermag.com. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon if you prefer. Thanks for watching and please let me know what you think of all this in the comments.