Political Violence Shouldn’t Be a Team Sport

Beware the “conflict entrepreneurs” telling you how to think.

Heather Cox Richardson may not be a household name, but she’s kind of a big deal here on Substack.

A history professor at Boston College, she has written a daily newsletter (“Letters from an American”) offering political updates from a liberal perspective since 2019. Her newsletter now has the most subscribers of any Substack: more than 2.6 million, the same number of people who subscribe to the Washington Post. Richardson is highly influential among Democrats: she does events with Barack Obama, interviews with Joe Biden, and fundraisers with Kamala Harris.

I probably shouldn’t be writing this, not only because she’s a big fish in the Substack pond (actually, the biggest) — but also because a lot of you read her! In fact, Substack tells me, fully 20% of my subscribers are also readers of her newsletter. When a lot of your readers are fans of someone, it’s probably not a great idea to criticize that someone.

But I also know, above all, Wake Up To Politics readers are interested in getting accurate information, no matter where the information leads. So, in that spirit, I do want to open today’s newsletter by saying that Richardson wrote something yesterday that really raises doubts about her reliability as a news provider.

The Saturday edition of her newsletter (published at 2 a.m. on Sunday) starts out by talking about Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor whom Donald Trump has tried to fire. Eight paragraphs in, she turns to the death of Charlie Kirk. After quoting Republicans who had blamed the political left for Kirk’s assassination, Richardson writes:

But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.

I’m always hesitant to use the word “lie,” because it’s a word that purports to know what’s in someone’s head (i.e. that they know what they are saying is not true). So, instead, I’ll just say that Richardson’s statement here is extremely, extremely incorrect.

Now, let’s be clear: There is a lot we don’t know about Tyler Robinson right now. A lot more is likely to become clear in the next few days and weeks. But we can certainly say that flatly stating he “was not someone on the left,” as though that is established fact, lacks any evidence.

If anything, by the time Richardson hit “publish,” an official, reliable source had already indicated the exact opposite. “It’s very clear to us and to the investigators that this was a person who was deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox — a moderate Republican who has been praised by the left and right for his response to Kirk’s shooting — told the Wall Street Journal in an article published early Saturday.

It had also been reported before noon on Saturday that Robinson was in a romantic relationship with a transgender partner, which is not hard evidence of his ideology, but — when put in connection with Cox’s comment, the fact that Kirk was speaking critically of transgender people when he was shot, and the fairly-well-established political dividing lines on transgender issues — would, at least, make me hesitate before telling two million people that Robinson was obviously coming from the right.

I do agree that it is too early to state definitively that Robinson is a left-wing ideologue (and there is no question that many on the right rushed to that assumption much too quickly, before Robinson had even been identified). But, surely, then it is also incredibly irresponsible to state definitively that Robinson is a member of the right. There is definitely no evidence for that, and it’s not even where the facts seem to be tipping directionally.

Richardson goes on to support her statement by saying that he is a “young white man” (which, of course, does not tell us his politics) “from a Republican, gun enthusiast family” (it’s true that his parents were Republicans and had photographed him with guns, but this also tells us nothing about the son’s politics) “who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical” (a statement for which there is zero evidence).

No relative, friend, or writing of Robinson’s has emerged to suggest that Robinson had “embraced the far right” or disliked Kirk because he wasn’t conservative enough. Of course, this could, theoretically, end up being the case: that Robinson was a far-right extremist with a transgender romantic partner. (Many online commentators have noted that Kirk had critics from the right, including the allies of far-right activist Nick Fuentes known as “groypers.”) I have no ability to rule it out right now. But to say that it “appears” true, at this time, is purely made up. There is literally not a shred of evidence establishing ties between Robinson and the far right. (The most anyone has pointed to is a bullet casing left behind by Robinson, which referenced an Italian song that has been used a) by antifacist protesters on the left, b) in a “groyper” playlist on the right, and c) by video game enthusiasts with no obvious political valence. Not a lot to go off of.)

To be fair to Richardson, she wasn’t the only person peddling the fairy tale that Charlie Kirk was definitely shot by a right-wing extremist. (Again, I say “fairy tale” not because there is no way it will end up being true, but because anyone saying it now is making a statement supported only by their own imagination.)

I, like many political journalists, have what could probably be described as an addiction to the website X, formerly known as Twitter. That means when I learned the identity of the shooter, the first thing I did was go to X. In those frenzied initial minutes, as every amateur sleuth with a broadband connection tried to research Robinson, you could almost feel the political internet holding its collective breath. Everyone was in their corners, ready and waiting to pounce.

You could see the conservatives gleeful at the opportunity to pin the shooting on someone from the left, as they had been doing since just after Kirk was shot. And you could see progressives hopeful that maybe, just maybe, the shooter would end up being from the Nick Fuentes right. It was truly a gross display: a man had been killed, two small children were without a father, and legions of online actors were searching for any tiny piece of evidence they could find in order to blame the death on their political rivals. That was the first thing on their minds after Robinson’s identity was revealed — and, frankly, it seemed like many were excited to be doing it.

Of course, in an epistemological sense, there was nothing that was ever going to be gained from those first few moments. Most of what we need to know about Robinson will eventually be provided by an indictment and other official sources: scouring obscure corner of the internet wasn’t going to tell us more than investigators will announce once they deem appropriate. But influencers on both sides of the aisle spied an opportunity to shape the narrative like clay before it hardened, as Richardson was doing on the left and many of her counterparts were doing on the right.

This was a project that President Trump participated in on the night of Kirk’s death, when he blamed the shooting on “radical left political violence” before a gunman had even been found. It continued on X over the weekend, as false claims spread both that Robinson was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and that he was a Trump donor.

What made Richardson’s post so galling, though, was that she took part in the misleading narrative-crafting at the same time as she rebuked others for doing so. In the same edition of her newsletter, she accused the “radical right” of “working to distort the country’s understanding” of the shooting. “Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world,” Richardson wrote, one paragraph after she did the same.

“In fact,” her statement about Robinson began, carrying the unmistakable voice of an authority correcting false information, even as she spread mistruths herself. (Richardson’s Sunday newsletter, published last night, did not correct her Saturday missive, nor did it mention Kirk at all.)

There are many Democrats and Republicans, it is all too clear, who choose to live contentedly in a “fictional world,” consuming their media from sources who would rather feed them comfortable lies than uncomfortable truths.

Of course, these constructed realities extend farther than just the Kirk assassination. There are few tragedies that unite America anymore, as 9/11 did almost exactly 24 years to the day that Kirk was killed. Instead, nearly every national tragedy is now picked over by both parties to see if they can find a partisan advantage, and then divvied out accordingly. This first struck me when covering the Democratic convention last summer, as I watched victims of gun violence share harrowing stories on stage — after the Republican convention featured speakers whose family members were killed by fentanyl, immigrants, or the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal. Each party had chosen tragedies to call their own; if you asked rank-and-file Democrats or Republicans, I’m sure very few would tell you with a straight face that the other party’s tragedies were any less horrendous. But you certainly didn’t hear either party mention the horrific events being elevated by the other.

This, of course, goes double for acts of political violence, for which — as Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle recently put it — “many people have an encyclopedic command of the attacks perpetrated by the other side, and have memory-holed attacks by their co-ideologists.”

To take two examples from the right: “The assassination attempts are only happening in one direction,” Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s former national security adviser, wrote on X to 80,000 followers after Kirk was killed, ignoring the recent assassination of Minnesota Democratic legislator Melissa Hortman, among others.

“Does the Left understand how lucky they are that the Right doesn’t riot?” Blaire White, a conservative podcaster, wrote to 700,000 followers, ignoring the attack against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The crazy thing is, I don’t even think “lying” is necessarily the right word here either: I think it’s possible that people are so deep in realities of their own that they think what they are saying is true. These are the only tragedies that come to mind, because they are the only ones they choose to remember, since that is easier than grappling with a more challenging reality. Or, when an incident is too obvious to ignore, you can always make things up, as Richardson is doing now or as conservatives did after the attack on Paul Pelosi.

The other day, I went back to a 2022 newsletter I wrote debunking right-wing misinformation after the Pelosi attack. I had remembered that it had destructed viral claims about Pelosi; I had forgotten that it used a post from Charlie Kirk as a jumping-off point. “Why haven’t we seen the security or body cam video?” Kirk wrote, raising doubts about the attack. “Or is it just more convenient to smear millions of conservatives?”

Of course, Kirk was also engaging in the game of selective mourning at the very moment he was killed, although this time he was egged on by a liberal questioner. The last question he ever answered was from an interlocutor making the point that only a slim percentage of mass shootings are committed by transgender perpetrators, to which Kirk responded by bringing up gang violence. Both were pointing to their chosen tragedies. Then, Kirk became another one.

I don’t know what to do with that, I really don’t. I know Kirk didn’t deserve to die, and doesn’t deserve for his death to be mocked, just because he used other deaths as talking points or spread misinformation about Paul Pelosi. But I also understand his critics who find it hard to give him grace because he didn’t give grace to them. One would hope that, now that both parties have been touched by political violence many times over, the experience would make both more likely to respond to acts against the other side with open hearts (or to feel regret for past responses), since everyone has been here and knows how awful it is. Instead, we seem to be engaged in endless rounds of Political Violence Olympics, with each side trying to one-up the other while both forget that they are referring to real lives that have been lost or threatened.

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It is already well established that American politics has begun to bear many of the traits of sports fandom. In a 2015 study, Patrick Miller and Pamela Johnston Conover tried to answer the question: Why do partisans engage in politics? What drives someone to pass out petitions or knock on doors? They found — like studies showing sports fans derive just as much joy from seeing a rival team lose as their own team win — that partisans were more animated by hatred of the other party than support for their own, and certainly more than by any devotion to those pesky things called policies, which are theoretically why someone would want one group of people to run the government over another.

“When partisans endure meetings, plant yard signs, write checks, and spend countless hour volunteering, what is likely foremost in their minds is that they are furious with the opposing party and want intensively to avoid losing to it—not a specific issue agenda,” the duo found. “They are fired up team members on a mission to defeat the other team.”

In his book, “Politics is for Power,” the Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh draws a similar parallel:

One famous example comes from a controversy surrounding the New England Patriots in 2015, called Deflategate. Star quarterback Tom Brady was suspected of being involved in an effort to deflate footballs to make them easier to grip. He was suspended for a few games. Researchers surveyed Patriots fans, and fans of other teams. Patriots fans reported that Brady was innocent. Everyone else thought he was guilty. Patriots fans were three times as likely to strongly believe that the NFL punished Brady “in order to distract people from the league’s other problems.”

The difference between Patriots fans and nonfans was especially stark among fans who were the most interested and most knowledgable about football. If people reached conclusions about Deflategate based on the facts, then those most aware of the act should have been the ones most likely to agree with one another. The more informed people—the listeners to sports radio, the readers of sports commentary—should have seen eye to eye on what happened. But informed Patriots fans and informed fans of other teams were the least likely to agree.

In politics — like sports — “we are fans first, not fact finders,” Hersh adds (and by “we,” he especially means well-informed voters, the ones who should be most aware of all the facts). He points to a study that showed side-by-side photos of the audiences at Obama 2009 and Trump’s 2017 inaugurations, in which the crowd at Obama’s as plainly larger.

Hersh:

Researchers showed the side-by-side pictures to a random sample of Americans and asked them a simple, factual question: Which of these pictures shows more people? Two percent of Clinton voters got the factual answer wrong. Eight times as many Trump voters (15 percent) got it wrong. Among Trump supporters, the ones with the highest education levels got it wrong the most often. It’s not that these people couldn’t grasp the truth. It’s that they gave the answer that gratified them, regardless of the facts. The educated ones, who were more likely to be informed about [Trump’s claims about his inauguration], knew what answer to give to cheer or their side.

There is nothing wrong with sports, but it is probably not ideal to lift the mentalities used when rooting for a football team into the arena that shapes consequential matters of public policy. It is certainly not reassuring to know that for, at least some amount of people, engaging in politics is frying their brains to the point that they are unable to separate fact from fiction if it means breaking with their tribe.

But it is really depressing to see that mentality applied even to our darkest moments, as people on both sides of the aisle seem to be literally cheering for someone who committed a heinous act to have belonged to the other team and seem to be viscerally relieved when they can cling to a reason, however small or non-existent, to tell themselves phew, it wasn’t us, don’t worry.

This exact thing happens in the TV show “Veep,” when the fictional politician Selina Meyer is told by an aide about a school shooting. “Oh. Muslim or white guy?” she responds.

“Don’t know yet.”

“Which is better for me?”

“White guy.”

“Fingers crossed.”

Except now that storyline doesn’t seem very fictional, especially as you now see people flat out denying facts and what they can see with their own eyes if it means serving a political agenda. One anti-Trump pundit appeared to suggest this weekend, to 215,000 followers, that Kirk was not even shot, despite the video evidence available, just as there is plenty of evidence available for attacks on Democratic politicians that conservatives seem to want to deny. What mental gymnastics so many go through to deny anything that makes them uncomfortable.

In addition to misleading you, the influencers doing this are also trying to deprive you of the most simple of democratic rights: the right to make up your own mind, to see facts and arrive at a reasoned conclusion. By depriving you of accurate information, and offering half-baked conclusions, they are taking that judgement-forming process out of your hands. Just sit back, they’re saying, we’ll take care of the narrative and let you know what it is when we’re done.

Spencer Cox, the Utah governor who has gained bipartisan acclaim for his handling of the last week, has long called these figures “conflict entrepreneurs,” a term I have written about him using before.

“The conflict entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us, and we are losing our agency, and we have to take that back,” Cox said yesterday. “We have to turn it off.”

My advice: Pay close attention to those parts of your media diets that are engaging in these behaviors — feeling relief, actual relief, or even glee about anything relating to a murder; treating violence like a competition; refusing to engage in inconvenient facts; offering conclusions without evidence — and choose carefully where you get your information accordingly.

If a source agrees with you 100% of the time, and always aligns with your pre-conceived beliefs, it’s appropriate to feel a little suspicious. They might just be a conflict entrepreneur, trying to trade off your emotions, rather than an honest broker.

And, above all, know this: if an information source has misled you once, they will be willing to mislead you again.