Utah Governor Spencer Cox has responded to the assassination of Charlie Kirk with a call to remove cell phones from schools, and implement more extreme algorithmic surveillance of social media.
It’s a ridiculous prescription, on par with locking up the CVS because you refuse to admit who the shoplifters are.
But Spencer Cox is in an impossible political situation.
His whole brand is that “we’re all Americans” and “what unites us is more important than what divides us”, which means that:
Tyler Robinson needs to have been a deeply unusual person whose actions do not enjoy mainstream approval, and
His radicalization needs to be in some way orthogonal to partisan politics, something that “could have happened to anyone”.
But of course neither of these things is true. By all accounts, Tyler appears to have been weird in alarmingly common ways: it wasn’t Jodie Foster or his dog telling him to kill people — it was his social circle of radical communist transsexuals, and a broader Left that is increasingly comfortable with (at least) rhetorical calls for political violence.
And even if you wanted to argue that he was a lone nut, we now have over 60,000 documented posts cheering the murder, with hundreds of thousands undocumented, and millions of combined likes and shares.
My friends and I have been surprised, not only at the depth of hatred people had for Charlie, but the comfort they feel in expressing it under their real names.
If you look for comparisons from the political Right in the last twenty years, the closest you get are Jared Loughner (who shot Gabby Giffords in 2011), Dylan Roof (who killed eight black churchgoers in 2015), and Vance Boelter (who killed Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and State Senator John Hoffman in June of this year.)
In none of these cases was there a groundswell of sadistic glee from any significant corner of the political Right.
And, to be clear, no maudlin collective contrition, either.
Mostly these events are met with confusion and annoyance — none of the victims of these crimes were major antagonists that right-wingers had strong feelings about, or, indeed, that we had even heard of prior to the crime. In the case of Gabby Giffords, the assassination attempt was what gave her national political relevance.
In most cases, the default narrative about such shooters is that they are being encouraged (or at least ignored) by the intelligence bureaucracy to create a cause celebre and an excuse to suppress legitimate dissent.
(Just like homeless schizos are somehow sane enough not to attack a 6’5” MMA fighter on the train, so-called “right-wing” schizos always seem to restrict their targets to obviously-innocent mediagenic nobodies — never anyone politically relevant.)
We don’t identify with the attackers at all, who are obviously lunatics engaged in disordered, meaningless, and counterproductive violence.
Maybe many leftists don’t exactly identify with their schizos’ particular motives, either — but they clearly identify with the violence.
Leftist schizos target people that mainstream leftists want targeted: they feel intense frisson and catharsis when these people are hurt or killed, and they don’t mind telling you about it.
From these facts, you could argue that the Right are simply gentle, non-violent true-believers in Free Speech and the Marketplace of Ideas — “The Real Liberals”.
But framing it that way is both dishonest, and a strategic error. (The only advantage we have over the Left is the truth. Lying is always a strategic error.)
Can you not think of any leftist politicians or bureaucrats or commentators who are, in your judgment, guilty of unpunished capital crimes?
The people who threw open our national border, who sold our industrial base, who enriched themselves by debasing our wealth, who flood our interior with drugs, who teach your children to hate themselves — the vampires, the poisoners, the mutilators? What would become of these people, in a just world, if it were up to you?
Is it true that “mass deportation is the moderate solution”?
What do you mean when you say that?
The Right rejects (and obviously should reject) the Leftist model of pointless, spiteful, suicidal political violence.
The Right has been disciplined by decades of law enforcement infiltration and surveillance to speak more circumspectly about such things — but lamppost memes and helicopter memes and “physical removal” memes are obviously “calls for political violence” — they’re just less direct and legally actionable than calling for (or celebrating) a specific act at a specific place and time.
Declaring political opponents criminal traitors and calling for their arrest is a call for political violence — and all of this you see routinely in right-wing spaces.
None of this means that both sides are morally equivalent — it means that pacifism and endless dialogue are not the source of our moral superiority.
And we have to stop talking as if they were, because there’s actually very little left to “dialogue” about.
Political dialogue can serve one of two purposes, conveniently represented by Charlie Kirk and Spencer Cox:
You can talk to your opponents about the facts and attempt to persuade them — to come to a common understanding of reality and thus eliminate conflict. This is what Charlie Kirk meant when he discussed the need for dialogue.
You can negotiate with your opponents to find an acceptable modus vivendi in spite of irreconcilable differences of opinion and perspective. This is largely what Spencer Cox means when he says we need to “Disagree Better”.
The question before us is whether either form of dialogue is still possible or desirable.
We can start with the trans issue, since that appears to be the assassin’s motive.
As of 2022, 38% of Americans claimed to believe that a person’s gender can differ from their assigned sex at birth. Many of these people are conformists who have not thought deeply about the question, but a huge number of Americans have made costly and irrevocable decisions on the basis of this belief, they consistently talk about it among themselves, they’ve developed a complex body of theory around it. Point being: whether they exactly “believe” in it factually, they definitely mean it, in a moral sense.
If their view of the world is right, then failing to intervene medically with a “trans child” prior to puberty is to consign that child to a lifetime of alienation and suffering. And of course, if this view of the world is not true, the opposite — children must be protected from this kind of ideation, and especially prevented from acting upon it, at all costs.
The stakes for the child in question are existential and irreversible in either direction.
So what facts can be debated here?
Transness is empirically invisible — it has no etiology, no coherent body of symptoms. There is nothing that tells you a trans-identifying male is “actually” a woman except for his assertion. As a consequence of intersectional feminist commitments, queer theorists can’t even admit any broad categories of “femininity” that indicate (or, critically, contra-indicate) a person’s trans identity.
Whether you believe trans identity is invisible-and-real or invisible-and-fake, it exists outside the purview of rational inquiry. You can “debate” about it in the sense that Matt Walsh did with What is a Woman, by pointing out that trans identity is evidence-less and circular, but that’s all there is to say about it.
And what modus vivendi is possible here?
You cannot give trans mommies the right to castrate their children without abolishing child abuse as a concept. There is almost nothing a parent could do to a child that is more damaging than to wrongfully and intentionally castrate them, sterilize them, and permanently derange a perfectly normal and healthy endocrine system.
If parents are legally allowed to do that to their children (again, with zero falsifiable evidence of medical justification), there is no coherent basis to restrict any parental prerogative, no matter how obviously insane or sadistic or self-serving.
Unfortunately for Spencer Cox, you also can’t ban childhood transition without the trans mommies accusing you (consistently, from within their perspective) of withholding life-saving medical care from children.
There is no middle way.
You can find analogues in all the issues for which leftists are currently howling about Charlie Kirk.
Things like “systemic racism” and “the gender pay gap” are fake and imaginary. It takes about 15 minutes to “debate” what facts there are to debate.
As with trans identity, we are attempting to disprove the existence of a spook — an evil miasma that is the cause of all manner of social ills, but one that is beyond all powers of human empirical detection, and can only be proven tautologically:
“We observe (and have always/everywhere observed) unequal outcomes, therefore minorities and women must experience (and must always/everywhere experience) ubiquitous invidious discrimination.”
There is no way to simultaneously accommodate people who believe in these things and people who don’t, because what is at issue is the relative status of the concerned parties. Either the unequal outcomes are the result of a millennia-long, billions-strong global conspiracy with no defectors ever until 1950, or they are the result of naturally occurring group differences.
A society cannot be organized with both of these perspectives in view. People who hold the one set of beliefs cannot tolerate being governed by the other.
We can only be ruled together by force from one side or the other. We have arrived at the limits of dialogue.
And to argue that Charlie Kirk was just about dialogue is to misrepresent his work.
I didn’t know Charlie personally, but I am sure that he would have loved to persuade every single person he spoke to — to help people unravel difficult problems together, and come to a peaceful accord.
But he was also one of the most effective political organizers of our time, because he did not pursue “dialogue” in the sense that Spencer Cox and the “cuckservative” GOP do: he was not trying to build a world in which Christian families and Satanist child mutilators join hands. He did not demand that necessary action be delayed until every single academic Marxist and schizophrenic Discord troon was persuaded of its necessity.
Endless “dialogue” of this kind serves only to prolong the conflict to the enemy’s benefit: handing them half of what they want now, so they can come back for the rest when we’re no longer capable of resisting.
Charlie spoke about the need for political solutions to avoid civil war — but a political solution that included compromise with these forces was obviously off the table. In fact, he argued that many such compromises from earlier generations had weakened the nation, and would have to be rolled back.
The purpose of Charlie’s rhetoric was to persuade the persuadable from the politically-relevant center, and to give the mainstream Right the moral confidence to demand action — thereby achieving political outcomes which could be imposed upon the incorrigible leftist holdouts, in an orderly and lawful and broadly-acceptable way.
And that is why they shot him.
To imply that Charlie Kirk believed in an endless collegial dialogue with the radical left — that he did nothing to provoke leftist rage — is to deny his courage: he wanted to confront and defeat the forces that threatened his family, his country, and human civilization.
His politics were not toothless. His eyes were open.
And that’s critical to understand, because the Right (or the faction of sanity, of reality, of nature) has a unique opportunity to make use of this moment, and the proper course of action is not more dialogue, and it is not a renunciation of force.
We have got to immediately discard the idea that our moral authority derives from our refusal to exercise power. That is not what makes us the Good Guys.
What makes us the Good Guys is that we are not at war with God and reality.
Because leftism is a set of obvious lies and absurdities, leftists have to shatter people psychologically in order to rule them. Mao and Stalin had to terrorize their people into epistemic exhaustion and collapse, so that they could be made to confess, with feeling, that two and two make five. For us, the question is whether a man is a woman, if the Party says he is.
By contrast: Lee Kwan Yew, Franco, and Pinochet were authoritarians who brooked no challenge to their power — but because they were not at war with human nature, they did not need their people to accept and mouth absurdities. They did not need to batter down the mind of every citizen to root out the will and capacity for reason, and force them to inform on one another for any relapse toward sanity.
Rightists also don’t rely on an army of criminal mutants to seize power. Every leftist leader since Robespierre has recognized how much they depend on the spiteful, the warped, the stunted, and the insane — because that’s who is willing to join a fanatical crusade against reality.
If a leader like that takes power, he has no choice but to give his foot soldiers the Revolutionary Terror that they signed up for, at least until he can consolidate enough power to dispose of them.
(This is why
is wrong to argue that a Blue Caesar would be as good as a Red one — the path to get there would not be at all equivalent.)What we learned this weekend (if we didn’t know it before) is that our media, our military, our intelligence services, our schools, our hospitals, are absolutely lousy with this kind of person.
And we know they aren’t interested in dialogue, because they told us so.
Because he spoke basic truths embraced by millions of Americans — your dad, your uncles, and certainly all of your ancestors — these people told us (in public, under their real names) that Charlie Kirk deserved to have his throat opened in front of his children.
They (correctly) intuit that no accommodation between our perspectives is possible — and because they are at war with reality, any further dialogue (of Charlie’s kind, on the facts) can only erode their support and weaken their position.
Commentators should, of course, continue Charlie’s work — it is good to peel off defectors, and to give Trump-loving normies ammunition to act with enthusiasm and confidence.
But to this (apparently enormous) cohort of die-hards, there is nothing else to say. Somebody has to win, and it needs to be the side that is not insane.
There are encouraging signs that the Trump Administration takes this moment seriously, at least at the top.
But the task ahead of them is monumental: it will take a purge of the federal bureaucracy on par with Denazification or Reconstruction just to adequately investigate and target the left-wing terror network that they have now declared war on. The call is coming from inside the house.
It won’t be enough to tell these bureaucrats that they can’t Say Gay. These are people selected almost from birth for commitment to left-wing orthodoxy, and they’ve spent the last eight years building the narrative that Trump’s authority is illegitimate even when he acts within his Constitutionally-defined role (which he will have to exceed.)
These institutions have to be comprehensively restaffed from top to bottom by patriots loyal to the American people and their President, or else abolished altogether.
I’m not aware of any historical analogue for a political transformation of this kind that was achieved without meeting violent resistance — and unless such a transformation takes place, the leftist terror apparatus that murdered Charlie Kirk will ramp up their insurgency until they regain control of the executive — after which they have promised themselves a purge (and revolutionary terror) in the opposite direction.
So the choice is not between conflict and conciliation — the choice is between organized and limited conflict conducted by duly elected authorities under color of law, or a disorganized and unlimited conflict conducted by amateurs under no legitimating or restraining authority.
While we hold our breath for these decisions to be made far away, what can we do?
We should pray for the Trump Administration to be quick and vigorous and thorough — accepting that this is an emergency surgery with an uncertain prognosis.
We should report every apparatchik who confessed their malice toward normal Americans, from government officials to HR harpies to schoolteachers. This opportunity will pass quickly, but it thins the crowd that has to be purged procedurally later on.
And we should prepare our families for the disruptions that will certainly come, whether this campaign is prosecuted effectively or not.
Whatever happens, we will likely live in an uncomfortable superposition of crisis and normalcy for the better part of the next decade.
The mob that is dancing on Charlie’s grave and mocking his grieving widow are participating in a strictly online narrative phenomenon. This means that they are very unlikely to engage in direct political violence themselves, but it also means that they will never reach any point of surfeit or self-disgust over the violence they demand. It will remain a game that they play on their phone, it will continue to create the permission structure for more unstable personalities with less to lose, and the tempo of such violence will accelerate.
But you’ll still have to go to work in the morning. The lights will stay on, people will still raise families and build things and make money. Things will get much more difficult for people who stay asleep — but there are always opportunities in volatility. Every crisis creates billionaires.
Figure out who your friends are. Get to a jurisdiction where you can surround yourself with people you trust, where your civil and property rights will be respected. Secure assets that are difficult to expropriate. Find ways to respond to emergent needs.
We are building for what comes next. Join us at exitgroup.us.
EXIT News
On last night’s full group call (9/16) we discussed constructive action in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. EXIT men in several cities are preparing service projects in memoriam, and organizing for on-side political candidates running in 2026.
Next week (9/23) we will discuss Great Houses with Greg Treat, reviewing concepts explored over the last several months on the weekly Great Houses call.
Meetups:
This weekend, we had impromptu member meetups in Salt Lake City, Nashville, Houston, and Dallas.
Austin meetup 9/27. See #ATX channel for details. Cocktail hour for Substack subscribers below the paywall.
Nashville meetup 10/10. See #tennessee channel for details. Cocktail hour for Substack subscribers below the paywall.
Zion Canyoneering trip 10/17-10/18. Full-day hike in Zion National Park. See #utah channel for details. Members can get in touch with Devin or me to RSVP.
Oklahoma City meetup 10/25 (tentative).
Portland meetup 11/8. I’ll be speaking at a conference hosted by
. More details to follow.
Cocktail hour invites for Austin (9/27) and Nashville (10/10) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.
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