My Hot Take is that Murder is Bad

How big parts of the online left stopped worrying and learned to political violence

Like countless Americans, as I write this, I’m dealing with my health insurance company. I’m lucky - I’m basically healthy, and I have the time, resources, and stubbornness to argue with a giant corporation that makes its money (in large part) by coming up with creative ways to avoid paying for people to get healthcare. Many others aren’t so lucky, because as everyone knows, health insurance companies suck.

But when did so many of us decide that means their CEOs deserve to die?

I’d grown used to MAGA calling for violence, relishing violence, excusing violence, flirting with violence. I’m not surprised that Kyle Rittenhouse became a right-wing folk hero after fatally shooting two unarmed protestors, or that Texas Governor Greg Abbot pardoned convicted murder Daniel Perry after he drove into a crowd of protestors and started shooting. I’m terrified, but not surprised.

What did surprise me, and terrify me, in the wake of the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO, was how many non-MAGA people seem totally fine with vigilante violence, too.

This okay-with-murder-ness mostly took the form of glib jokes on social media. (Some from comedians I like, by the way.) There was the occasional very brave post from a keyboard revolutionary. There was also a lot of wink-wink, “I know murder is wrong, but the real story is how bad health insurance companies are,” talking and posting.

Even now, I feel compelled to say - and how did we get to the point where this needs to be said? - that just because I’m against murdering a person in cold blood doesn’t mean I agree with their decisions, or the decisions of an organization they lead, or even that I think they’re a good person.

But with that said, how did so many people decide it’s possible to simultaneously believe in equity and fairness and supporting marginalized communities and also justice meted out by random killers on the street?

Part of it is the internet, obviously. But part of it is a giant intellectual shift that’s taken place among a big portion of the online and social-justice left. Leading thinkers have spent years creating a permission structure to endorse violence.

So that’s what this post is about. How a good chunk of people who agree with me that Trump is awful, white supremacy is loathsome, and oligarchy is repugnant have also decided that violence is sometimes the answer - and why that conclusion is not just morally wrong, but, purely from a strategic standpoint, profoundly stupid.

“THE VIOLENCE OF INSTITUTIONS” FROM RFK TO TA-NAHISI COATES TO MLK(ish) TO NOW

One of the best speeches of the 20th century, and maybe any century, was delivered by Robert F. Kennedy (the good one) in 1968 at the City Club of Cleveland. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and Kennedy spoke about what he called “the mindless menace of violence which again stains our land.”

Most of the speech was dedicated to condemning physical violence and assassinations (RFK himself would be assassinated not long after). “A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.” But part of what elevated the space, and made it such a classic, was that Kennedy connected the mindless menace of physical violence to the conditions that left people so desperate they might resort to violence.

“There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

Here’s the thing, though: it is obvious, because of everything that came before it, that Kennedy was speaking figuratively. Because we’re grown ups, we know the difference between a metaphor and a literal description. A hunger for sandwiches is different than a hunger for change.

But in the last ten years or so, a certain set of intellectuals have decided that when it comes to violence, the distinction between figurative and literal ought to be erased. I’m not a scholar of this stuff, but the first place I noticed it was in Ta Nahisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. It’s a beautifully written book, and here’s an early passage from it:

“All our phrasing - race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, even white supremacy - serve to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodge brains, blocks airways, cracks bones, breaks teeth.”

Is Coates speaking figuratively about the violence of institutions? Yes - but with a lot more specificity than Kennedy. And fairly early in the book, Coates very carefully conflates the distinction between figurative and literal violence. Here’s one example, where he’s talking about the connection between “the schools” and “the streets.”

“Fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspend and sent back to the same streets, where they would take your body.”

Coates is making an interesting point. But the extension of what he’s saying, an extension he certainly doesn’t shy away from, is that there’s no difference between someone who murders you and someone who puts you in the position where you can be murdered. That the violence of institutions is not, as Kennedy said, “another kind of violence,” but is in fact the exact same kind of violence.

That’s a huge intellectual step toward justifying violence. And while in that book, Coates never says that violence is often the answer, he argues that non-violence is often not the answer, which is essentially the same thing.

I’m not sure if Coates was the first to so aggressively argue that institutional violence and physical violence are the same - but he was certainly the most popular. He was the most prominent person I noticed making this argument. And by 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, I noticed that the contours of the argument had gone from people like Ta Nahisi Coates, who whether you agree or disagree with him is a extraordinarily gifted writer and a powerful intellectual force, to random posters on the internet.

In particular, back in 2020, I noticed a lot of people posting a Martin Luther King quote that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” The implication was that we’d been misled about King, and just as he opposed the war in Vietnam in a way that was at the time considered radical, he also supported rioting. But that takes him out of context. Just as Kennedy condemns physical violence, King clearly says, in the same speech, “Riots are socially destructive and self-defeating.” In fact, almost as if he knew that years later millions of people would take him out of context on the internet, he lays out exactly what he hopes to achieve:

“I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way. But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots.”

But the intellectual movement that conflates institutional and physical violence wasn’t - I don’t think - interested in quoting MLK accurately. So the condemnation part never made it into people’s posts.

I’m sure I’m skipping ahead a little bit, but I think the next big development in the online left embrace of violence was October 7th. Many people - most people - condemned the October 7th attacks. But there was a significant portion of the online left that rebranded shooting civilians in cold blood or burning people alive in their homes as “violent resistance,” essentially - in their view - a proportional response to the violence of state repression. Similarly, people started calling all Palestinians held in jail by Israel (some of whom were tried and convicted of serious crimes, but others, it should be said, are held under very sketchy pretenses) “hostages,” in order to excuse the taking of actual hostages by Hamas.

My point, to be 100 percent clear, is not to say that I think everything done by Israel in Gaza has been justified. I don’t think that at all. But just because two things are bad does not mean they are the same thing.

And I think because Gaza - for plenty of legitimate reasons, in my view - generated so much attention and outrage online, especially among younger and more left-leaning people, an entirely new cohort has been introduced to the idea that institutional violence and physical violence are the same thing.

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US NOW?

Here’s a post I saw on a friends’ Instagram story recently. I wasn’t familiar with Mattxiv - apparently he’s became famous as a makeup artist and is now an activist - but he has 1.7 million instagram followers.

With all due respect, this is dumb. Not in the sense of “I disagree with it,” although I do, but in the sense that anyone with a dictionary can tell you it’s false. Our insurance system is cruel and terrible, especially to people who aren’t rich, but people are not murdered by paperwork any more than people’s hunger for change can be sated with a sandwich. And while our healthcare system is fucked up in lots of ways, no, it isn’t violent. This is literally a “Webster’s dictionary defines ‘violent’ as” level of obviousness.

And this poster isn’t like Kennedy or King, who made it clear that they were speaking figuratively, or even Coates, who blurred lines but at least did so in interesting, provocative, intentional ways. This kind of Instagram nonsense is simultaneously thoughtless and pretentious.

I don’t mean to pick on mattxiv. It’s just that he said in a serious, direct way what a huge number of people have been saying in joking or oblique ways: United Healthcare’s actions resulted in deaths, therefore we shouldn’t care about - or condemn - the murder of its CEO.

Personally, I think on a moral level, this is pretty barbaric. It’s not like we get a limited number of compassion points to spend. You can think that murder was wrong while also thinking that a healthcare system that incentivizes insurances companies to deny care is also wrong.

But let’s put aside the moral argument for a moment - because what I think a lot of people have convinced themselves is some version of what the shooter argues in his manifesto - that murdering someone in cold blood may not have been the ideal route to changing the system, but it’s the only effective means of driving change that remains. It’s kind of a Robin Hood argument but for killing people.

I think this is particularly misguided. And I think progressives who normalize violence now are going to deeply, deeply regret it - not in the long term, but very soon.

WHO WINS IN A WORLD OF ROBIN HOODS?

To see how the violent Robin Hood theory of change would work in practice, just look at a different health insurance company. Anthem BlueCross BlueShield was planning to cap the amount of time doctors could keep patients under anesthesia. Then, the United Healthcare CEO was murdered, everyone began talking about the awfulness of the healthcare system, and posts about the proposed anesthesia cap blew up. Anthem backtracked on the plan.

When I was in college I took a course on this history of Israel, and one of the things I remember the professor saying we should take away from that history (on all sides) is that “terrorism works.” The Anthem thing would seem to be an example of that, only domestically. The means were immoral, but the ends were good. On net, you could maybe even argue, lives were saved.

But here’s the thing: no one gets to decide which act of violence is the last. What happens when the next Robin Hood decides that it’s the middle-class person who works at the insurance company’s claims department who deserves to die? Or that the best way to change policy via terror is to target the doctor at the abortion clinic, or the election official you believe tried to rig the results? Or whoever Elon Musk most recently called evil on Twitter? Our justice system is far from perfect. But the alternative imagined in this case is one where the power to dispense justice rests with young men who own guns, are inclined to write manifestos, and have decide to forfeit their own lives for a cause. That’s not a very representative group. And call me cynical, but I suspect that the vigilante justice system will be substantially less fair than the one we have today.

Particularly if you feel that a major source of unfairness is that the rich and powerful have too much money and power. The biggest thing to come out of this assassination isn’t going to be Anthem changing a policy. It will be CEOs hiring expensive private security - because they and their companies can afford it. The Planned Parenthood staff can’t afford to protect everyone from violence. The election workers can’t. Protestors and advocates can’t. Normalizing vigilante violence ultimately won’t harm CEOs much - but it will result in a lot of regular people dying.

I think a lot of progressives believe that conflating institutional and physical violence means you’ll get less institutional violence. It seems pretty clear that it’s more likely to lead to the opposite result: just as much institutional violence, supported by even more physical violence.

And who will that violence be directed against? There are now five million silencers in America, and nearly 400 million firearms. The vast majority of them, I suspect, are not owned by progressives. Right-wing vigilantes are already getting favorable treatment in court, and now we’re entering an era in which the machinery of justice, not to mention the military, is going to be controlled by MAGA - and I doubt most online progressives think that local police departments are wildly friendly to their concerns, either. The right-wing embrace of violence is appalling, but it’s strategic.

For the same reason, condemning political violence - especially now - isn’t “scolding” or “language policing” or “pearl clutching.” In addition to being the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. The mindless menace of violence is bad for everyone - but it’s much worse for those who lack power when the violence starts.

Which is why for progressives to embrace violence would be both appalling and appallingly boneheaded. However you want to define “the left,” it has less power than at any point any of us can remember.

Maybe - just maybe - this is a bad time to decide that might makes right.