Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and writes the subscription newsletter “Notes from the Middleground” at Substack. He is the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test. He is currently working on a book for Princeton University Press about Leo Strauss and his influence on the American right.
In this conversation, Yascha Mounk and Damon Linker discuss reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, what it shows about polarization in America, and the likelihood of further political violence.
Note: This episode was recorded on September 14, 2025.
This transcript has been edited and lightly condensed for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I’m very glad you’re here, though I wish that it was under more pleasant circumstances. Obviously, Charlie Kirk was shot and murdered at an event at Utah Valley University a number of days ago. That was a horrible event, and in the first hours, the reaction to it, by and large, gave me hope. I mean, there were some sociopaths celebrating his death on Bluesky and on Twitter and on other platforms, but by and large, people across a wide ideological spectrum came together to condemn it, including some practicing politicians. Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, gave, I thought, a very, very thoughtful press conference. Bernie Sanders recorded an emphatic condemnation of violence. These are two politicians who aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath, but who I think really stood up to that moment.
Since then, I have to say that my impression has become a lot more negative. It seems to me that, since Wednesday, the hell machine of social media has found excuses for people, or people have used the hell machine of social media to find excuses for themselves, to go back to their place of comfort, which is to hate the other side, to think that they are saints and everybody else is evil. And you see that on parts of the right, which are, despite the fact that there have been political assassinations of people across the ideological spectrum over the last years, seizing upon this horrible assassination to say, we are better and the left is evil, and we’re gonna now use this as a moment to—as Stephen Miller said—go after all of these supposedly violent organizations and institutions in an unprecedented way. Elon Musk tweeted something to the effect of “either we fight back or they kill us.”
But also on the left, very quickly anybody who had a positive word to say about Charlie Kirk was attacked, and quotes by Charlie Kirk were circulating, either completely made up or very significantly distorted to paint him—and he’s obviously somebody whose views I don’t broadly agree with—as a kind of extremist that he wasn’t.
So I have to say that I’m now at one of my most pessimistic moments about America. I really feel that this past week has brought forth a new darkness that I’m very worried about, and I’m wondering how you experienced the events of the last days, and whether you share the sentiment or feel differently.
Damon Linker: No, I think we’re very much on the same page, Yascha. In fact, if anything, I was feeling pretty dark about it pretty close to immediately after the event. I wrote a quick piece on Thursday that was just a walking-through of my last 18 hours, because I was walking across Penn’s campus a little after 3 p.m. on Wednesday, on the way to class to teach a first-year seminar on conservatism, and I saw on my phone that he had been shot and I thought, no, this is is bad. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this. I went to my class and there was this very familiar kind of adrenaline-driven buzz that you’re used to these days when there’s big breaking news and everyone’s on their device looking for the latest. And right before class began at 3:30, one of my students out of 15 who came in at the last minute and someone told him what had happened, his response was, good. I used that as an occasion to start the class by trying to say, I don’t want to be picking on you in particular, but that kind of a sentiment is just not good. Politics is a way of trying to get along and live together with people you disagree with without violence. If that thin layer of civilization breaks down, we will be in a world of heartache unlike anything anyone in that room, certainly, has ever known—that neither of us in our lifetimes have either.
That worried me, seeing Elon Musk’s tweet very soon after the news came out, even before we knew that Kirk had died, saying that the left is the party of murder. And that sort of set the tone. It was almost like he was responding tacitly to the few tentative signs of optimism that you detected, and saying, no, actually, our response to this should be something else. It should be a declaration of self-defense or war.
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It’s very hard, I find, as someone who’s broadly in the middle of our politics, maybe inclined center-left, but yet desperately wants us to avoid going into a self-recriminatory spiral that ruins our ability to govern ourselves. It’s very hard to simultaneously say yes, Charlie Kirk was a right-winger. He did indulge in inflammatory rhetoric, even if he did also believe in free speech and debate. He should be praised for the latter. But if you’re not on the right, you’re not going to like the things that he says. He’s not talking to you. He’s talking at you in an accusatory way on behalf of a very different outlook and ideology. But you have to simultaneously somehow manage to hold on to that conviction that he was wrong, and maybe you think a deeply bad influence on our country, and still say that shooting him to death in the neck is such an absolute evil and such an absolute assault on free government that it doesn’t really matter that he was wrong and had a bad influence in a lot of ways—because the consequence of even muddying that message the littlest bit, I think is dangerous and will halt our and kind of impede our ability to stop the downward spiral.
I wrote about this in another post with that title—Enduring the Downward Spiral—that I fear we’re in with Trump. Just a week ago, he tweeted an AI picture of himself as Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now talking about sending in troops to Chicago, I guess over Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner. I mean, that is just such an over-the-top provocation. It’s like he wants anyone who is anywhere to the left of him to respond in an understandably overwrought way to this provocation so that he can say, see, that’s why we need to send the troops in, because they hate us. They hate America. They’re bad for the country. And I somehow want to use the little influence I might have in the world to try to repeatedly make the case that we have to resist the urge to lash back because, in the end, they’re the ones who control the government right now. No good is going to come from saying, yeah, Charlie Kirk, obviously you don’t want to assassinate him, but this and that, and the other kind of sort of semi-exculpatory statements about, what do you expect when they talk like this and provoke us this way?
Mounk: I’ve been trying to gauge for the last few days how widespread some of the really ugly sentiments on social media have been in the country as a whole. The easiest guide to reality is social media. I think that on social media, after this brief period of relative reasonableness, both sides, and I use that term knowingly and deliberately, went back to their worst selves. The extent to which a number of very famous and influential figures on the left ended up spreading misinformation, as the favorite term of some of those people goes, about particular things that Kirk had supposedly said, is astonishing, including some mainstream media outlets who, for example, claimed that Kirk had advocated the stoning of homosexuals when there are many, many videos of Kirk defending gay members of the conservative movement. He had very socially conservative views about homosexuality that I don’t share, but he was doing battle with straight-up homophobes to say that there needed to be a place for gay conservatives in the movement. The reference he has to a famous line about stoning gay people people in Leviticus actually was in response to a progressive bringing up a Bible line to justify a particular kind of policy, and him saying you can’t selectively quote Bible lines in order to justify particular public policies, which is a perfectly reasonable point to make.
I was at a conference about artificial intelligence at Harvard this weekend, and a perfectly reasonable, reasonably senior Biden appointee who I was chatting with, did end up just offhandedly saying, I don’t see why anybody’s upset about this. This seemed like a very otherwise reasonable, pleasant person, not an extremist, somebody who had interesting things to say about the subject of the conference. I was quite struck by the fact that clearly in the bubble that this person is in, that does seem to be the expectation of how you see the world, and so they’re then very free to share that to a stranger at a conference in a way that I found to be additionally saddening because it was the first time that I’d actually seen that in real life rather than on social media. I think there is a real difficulty in thinking through where all of this is going to lead. Right now it feels like a moment in which the centrifugal forces are much stronger than the centripetal forces, in which the basic logic of justifying political violence is really present.
I always think back to what a few scholars about civic conflict have said about this, and I think Rachel Kleinfeld is one of those. We sometimes think a little bit naively that political violence tends to be justified by people who say the people against whom we’re exercising violence are not human, they’re animals, they deserve it, we can do whatever we want to them. By and large that isn’t actually how it works, because to get humans to engage in wanton violence outside us is not entirely easy. Our evolutionary instincts do make that one of the things that is in our political repertoire, and I think a lot of the goal of our politics always has to be to restrain that danger. But it takes a lot of work. And normally the way that that work is done is by saying, we are in danger from the others. You don’t start by saying, they’re animals, they don’t have rights, they don’t have any interests, we can do whatever you want to them. You say, they are the ones that are a danger to us, and unless we defend ourselves against their dangerous tendencies, we are going to be toast. And so the real justification for then vilifying them and calling them animals and saying we can do whatever we want to them starts with this persuasion that either we win or that’s the end of us. I have to say that it feels like America has been consumed by that sentiment for the last few days.
Linker: The thing that has struck me most powerfully and chillingly in observing this reaction is the extent to which right-wing or even just right-leaning journalists and other influencers are all over Twitter/X. It's almost as if they received marching orders from a central location, which I don’t think they did, I think it’s one of these viral things that happens on social media where they all are talking in these terms, essentially saying, we’re being hunted. They shot our president. They killed Charlie Kirk. You know who’s next. Then all it takes is like one real account or a bot account—I sometimes don’t even know which it is—listing all these other tiny anonymous accounts saying things like, Ben Shapiro next, Trump next, Vance next, and it almost doesn’t matter if those are even real or who those people are. Do they have 50 followers? Do they have any outside influence in the real world? I don’t know. Or maybe they’re Russian or Chinese or North Korean or Iranian disinformation campaigns that are out there and they get scooped up into a screenshot post then goes out saying, see, that’s what they want to do to you, and then it gets linked up with quotes from Joe Biden talking about the threat posed by the Trumpist right or Kamala Harris’s campaign calling it fascism in the final days of the campaign in 2024. Very quickly we already have a sort of unified front of conviction on the right that it’s either us or them—they are hunting us down with rifles and will destroy us if we don’t protect ourselves.
You mentioned Stephen Miller—his statement that he put out on Twitter/X last Thursday morning, it was around the time that Trump had his alarming press conference remarks. That was a truly chilling statement by someone who’s in a senior position, and has the ear of the president of the United States every day, essentially saying, we need to go out and destroy the left, break up left-leaning organizations, universities, arrest people in large numbers, in order to, it’s implied, idestroy the left which wants to destroy us and America. That’s rhetoric at such a high pitch of panic and emergency that almost anything can happen.
The last thing I’ll say on this that I’ve started to see in just the last 24 hours is yet another ratcheting up of this among people who are pretty well-connected on the right, who might not have direct ties to the Oval Office, but they’re kind of high up kind political consultants on the right tweeting things along the lines of, if only the left knew what’s coming, they wouldn’t talk like this. I’ve seen that line about what’s coming as if they’re privy to some discussions going on, like there are plans to follow through on what Stephen Miller was saying and what Trump in his statement on Thursday kind of insinuated: that they’re going to be sending people in. And the Trump administration is still in negotiations with universities over cuts to funding, to grants, restrictions on universities being able to bring in foreign students and visas. What if the administration begins demanding, if you want to continue to function as a university, you have to fire every single person on this list who is deemed a left-winger?
Mounk: One interesting side plot on German twitter has been that the Washington correspondent for one of the main German public broadcasters has made some rather extreme statements, and sometimes I think really described Charlie Kirk in very misleading ways, misquoted him in ways that the American mainstream outlets did as well. Then the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, under Trump’s first term, took to Twitter to say that his visa should be revoked—and somebody from the State Department jumped into that Twitter thread saying, we’re looking into it. I hope that cooler heads will prevail, but it would be really quite remarkable if the visa of a prominent journalist ends up being revoked because of statements that he made in this kind of context.
Of course, there's a way in which some of the people who are rightly concerned about cancel culture on the left and who led the charge against that from a conservative perspective—or I think the kind of centrist, heterodox voices—by and large have been very consistent. And we’ve heard from a number of people, from Thomas Chatterton Williams, from Melissa Chen, from Rikki Schlott, from others in the last days, expressing their deep concern about the way in which conservatives are using this moment in order to justify a cancel culture on the right. But certainly, a number of senior figures on the right, who in the past have claimed to be concerned about cancel culture, now are leading the charge in compiling databases and calling for the firings of a number of people. That, I think, of course, is very bad.
One other thought I had is that we always talk about the influence of social media on one side and the influence of misinformation on the other side. And often, those two conversations end up being fused. What we think of as those two things is effectively the same. But I would say that the last days actually show that these are slightly separate problems. I’ve been gradually becoming more convinced in general that the rise of the internet and of social media is really a key explanation of everything that’s gone on politically in the last 10 or 20 years. I’ve always thought it was partly an explanation—in The People vs Democracy I talk about it as one of the three things going on—but I think the centrality of it seems to me to be becoming more obvious each year. I wrote recently about the really striking changes in the personalities of young Americans who are becoming less conscientious, more neurotic than they were in the past in ways that I think can only be explained by the growing prevalence of social media. So I think I’ve bought into that explanation. I’m increasingly skeptical of the misinformation explanation.
One of the things that I thought was striking about the last few days is that social media was able to take us from a moment of shared and broadly-expressed horror at this assassination to everybody being back in the corner saying within two days, we are the pure ones and they are the evil ones. The role of misinformation in that seems to me to have been rather small. There was some misinformation in terms of speculation about the identity and the motives of the assassin, there was some misinformation in terms of the quotes by Kirk that people use, some of which were really misrepresented. There was one I thought rather ugly piece in which a very, very viral tweet that garnered about 20 million views omitted a key part of the sentence in Governor Spencer Cox’s speech. He had expressed the, I think, rather humane sentiment that, as Governor of Utah, his first instinct was, I hope that somebody from outside did this, somebody from another state, somebody from another country, somebody who allows us to say, this is not us, but sadly those prayers weren’t answered. It was one of us and this is something we have to reckon with. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable sentiment to express. A number of viral tweets took out “from another state” in order to make that sound as if Spencer Cox was saying, I would have loved to vilify immigrants and outsiders for this, in a way that I think clearly was not his intent, and that was also put in the New Republic and other mainstream media outlets in those kinds of ways. So misinformation played some role. But I don’t think it was the real driver here. What brought us back into this deep logic of division was just the dopamine hit of hating on people and getting lies from it on social media, combined with irresponsible political leadership, combined with the deep deep polarization of our society today.
Linker: I think that’s right. I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of the emphasis on disinformation as the source of our problems. My attitude—even going back to, say, the 2016 election and the role of Russian disinformation—is that if we weren’t already so polarized and divided, there’d be no traction for that stuff. Whenever you make a kind of exogenous or external causality argument, you always have to account for like, well, but why did it work? Why did it actually become sticky and make a difference? It’s that latter concern that always had me pointing more towards social media, so I agree with you on that. I’ve been working on constructing an argument for a while about how this works, thinking in terms of James Madison’s writing about factions and how the whole idea behind making a kind of nationwide republic, which was very controversial in the 18th century, was, could it work? Because republics had usually been small. If you had a larger political regime or nation, it tended to be a kingship or a monarchy. Then larger than that would be an empire, which obviously is not democratic in the pre-modern period.
James Madison made the argument that actually we can get away with this, and in fact expanding the size of this early United States will be better, because the problem of factionalism and disagreement will actually be helped by the size, because we’ll have a proliferation of factions, no one of which will be big enough to oppress any other. So the diversity and differentiation of our society will actually help democracy. The problem with social media is that Madison’s argument only works if you’re talking about factions in real space. So where is a faction? Well, it’s in this city, this industry, and then it’s formed by people within proximity to each other joining together in common interest and participating in politics to get their interests recognized by the government. But social media allows the formation of factions in virtual space. And what that means is that every person on Wednesday who was inclined to hear about Charlie Kirk being assassinated and combine it with a statement of rage about the left, that they want us dead—everyone who took that extreme view instantly, or almost instantly, finds every other person who’s inclined to have such an extreme reaction. Then, on social media, hot statements travel much farther and faster than cool statements, because whether you like or hate what you’re hearing, you say, my gosh, look what I saw. Then you share it and then other people share it. So the left can help share the right's most extreme statements in an expression of disgust, but yet it still leads them to travel further and to shape the conversation.
So what we have here is this situation where people say, social media is not the world. It’s not that many people who are on these apps doing these things. And that might be true. We’re a nation of 340 million people—a fraction of that is sitting there on Twitter or X after an event like this. And yet, how many people does it take to really ruin a democracy? How many of us need to be committed to, not even political violence, but supporting an illiberal crackdown on the threat of political violence? A million, two million, three million? What’s that? That’s 1% of our population. Three million people committed to political violence can do a lot of damage. And so what you end up with, I think, is a lot of Americans, and the ones who aren’t that looped into all of this, observing it, scratching their heads, like, how is this happening? Why is this happening? I don’t understand. I think it’s terrible what happened to Charlie Kirk. And yet, there’s some highly-activized and radicalized marginal people who have such a loud megaphone because of these technologies that they inevitably end up driving the conversation and driving the politics. Especially when we’re in this configuration where it’s the right who is most agitated and angry and scared at this moment, they’re also in the White House with all the power, and not just the White House but in Congress, the courts and so forth.
Mounk: I have a few thoughts about this. I was speaking a few days ago to Sabina Ćudić, the great young Bosnian MP who has been on a past episode of The Good Fight Club and is going to be on future ones as well. She was talking about growing up in what was still Yugoslavia, and she was I believe about 10 years old as the civil war was approaching, and she remembers the New Year’s Eve party in which her parents were talking about the prospect of political violence. A lot of her friends and her family said, we’re sitting here in Belgrade, we have friends who are from every ethnicity, there’s so many mixed marriages, which in that context means, people from different parts of Yugoslavia. How on earth is this going to work? If there’s a civil war, you know, it makes no sense. It’s impossible.
And then three months later, she and her family went to Sarajevo, and the horrible siege of Sarajevo began, and lots of these people died during the war. So I’m sort of stuck between these different interpretations of the United States. I for various reasons don’t believe that a civil war is a realistic prospect in America and I think some of the political scientists who are talking about that are more interested in selling books than in really analyzing the situation. The basic structural problem is the same. You still look at polls in America and most Americans have reasonable views about all kinds of things, including highly emotionally charged culture war questions, including, I assume, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I’m positive that a majority of Americans did not see anything to celebrate in it. Is this majority of decent people going to be able to continue resisting the logic of a deeply polarized political system that calls a small minority of people to at the very least disrespect the basic rules and norms of a political system that allow us to settle deep disagreements by the ballot box and by institutional means rather than by force? I’m less certain of that as we’re speaking today compared to where I was a week ago or a month ago or a year ago.
I also want to circle back for a moment to Federalist 10 because as it happens I’ve just been teaching Federalist 10 in my course on democracy and populism. I mean it’s one of the most brilliant texts of political theory anywhere of course and one of the most brilliant texts of the American founding. The problem of factions sounds a little bit abstract. It sounds a little bit like a special interest and stuff like that, but to the founders it really was a fundamental problem of how to build a self-governing republic that could survive. When James Madison sat down to write Federalist 10, there had not really been a self-governing republic in a long time. Athens had failed, and Sparta had failed, and the republics of medieval Italy had failed. The Republic of Venice was on its very last legs. And you had the Dutch Republic, which was basically dominated from the outside. And you had Ragusa and San Marino. That was about it. Every damn attempt at governing ourselves had failed. Federalist 10 said, factions have been the problem that have led to the downfall of each of those republics. So you would normally think the solution would be to go against the problem. If a friend of yours drinks too much and you’re worried about that, what is the natural response to that? It’s to tell them to drink less and to get them the help they might need and perhaps rehab or whatever it is. But if you drink too much, the solution is to drink less.
Madison says, no, you can’t solve this problem by reducing the number of factions. The only way to get rid of factions would be to kill liberty. Liberty is to faction as air is to fire, and trying to solve a problem of fire by somehow getting rid of all the air in the world would be a cure worse than the disease and the same is true of liberty and factions. So what we actually need to do is to multiply factions so that not a single faction ever would be able to have a majority and act upon it. That of course is the founding of the deep belief in freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and all of those things which are naturally going to lead to factions but characterize our political system and of course to a large territorial system with political representation of people who are supposed to look after public good and so on.
One challenge to this image is the rise of political parties, which started very quickly and came into being really by the year 1800. Political parties don’t really appear in the founding documents of American democracy or of most democracies, but then they emerge as a key component of political systems very quickly. Because of the electoral system that you get very quickly in the United States, for most periods of American history, you do have two political parties. You might say that the failure of Madison’s scheme therefore is very, very old-standing. Now you’re making a slightly different argument, which is not that the fact that so much of America can be squeezed into Democrats and Republicans shows that the aspirations of Federalists had failed. But somehow those political parties that battle between the left and right, between liberals and conservatives, between MAGA and everybody else, however you want to characterize it, sort of post-dates the invention of social media. That the two political parties somehow don’t become two rival factions in a way that destroys Madison’s scheme by 1990 or perhaps by 2005, but now it does. So explain to me why you can have a two-party system without that really running in the face of Madison’s aspiration, but you can’t have a deeply polarized two-party system in the age of social media without that being the case.
Linker: I don’t see the rise of parties early in the Republic as kind of proving that Madison had been wrong, because I see parties as ways of organizing factions. It’s true that once you’re doing that, it is always kind of a threat or a danger that the two parties will basically become the two factions, with one trying to oppress the other. But for much of American history, it didn’t work like that. Now, it did begin to work like that in the 1840s and 50s as the slavery question came more and more to the fore and each party ended up basically taking up the position on that question to the exclusion of every other question. The result obviously is a civil war. At that moment, it appeared that Madison’s hopes had indeed truly failed because that was the fear being made manifest. But it was a function of the fact that slavery had remained an open issue. Then after the Civil War, especially into the 20th century, by the time you get to the postwar period, I think we’re sort of living the Madisonian dream because we still have two main parties, but they’re very differentiated, very ideologically confused. They don’t overlap or they do overlap. They don’t oppose one another in some unified sense.
So I think things actually worked quite well through the decades of the late 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, all the way down past the end of the Cold War into this century. What has become a problem is that we’ve begun to see that kind of ideological sorting that preceded the Civil War again. This time over the other things that divide us now, not slavery, and that’s dangerous. Then we now have the added overlay of social media. What I said about the capacity of people to sort of form factions and virtual space on social media, I do think is a major contributing factor to why we have seen the rise of right populism all over the democratic world. It’s because the kinds of voters who support that kind of politics tend to be rural, not living in major city centers, not necessarily living in the parts of the countries that are thriving the most.
And yet it’s very hard to organize those people if you don’t have some technological way of doing it because those areas, those more rural areas of the country, have lower population density. People are further flung. How do you organize a political party combining, like, angry rural farmers in Iowa and South Texas and in the Northeast and in California? It’s very difficult to do that. It’s one thing to do it in highly dense East Coast cities or on the coast of California around democratic urban machine politics. But in a rural area, that’s challenging, unless you have something like social media that allows like-minded people in all of those far-flung people to recognize each other in virtual space and join together into a right populist faction that isn’t tied to actual geography in the world. And therefore, we have a kind of mobilized right in a new way with a new style of right-wing politics that is populist, organized against the people in the big cities who make the money, and have the college degrees, and the prestige, and so forth. I don’t see that being as easy to put together without the technological glue that allows it to happen, that makes it possible for people to find each other in virtual space.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha Mounk and Damon Linker discuss the likelihood of civil war, whether political violence will increase, and how to build unity in America. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
