If there’s a problem with political discourse, it’s not that speech turns rational people into irrational killers. It’s how so many people, especially young people have been taught to believe violence is justified, and how others think it acceptable to dishonor the dead for political reasons.
In mathematics, there are numbers that are deemed irrational because they do not conform to our usual understanding. While mathematicians acknowledge these numbers as “real,” they cannot be expressed as a simple ratio between two integers as we can with those that are rational, like one, two, three, four, or most we encounter on a daily basis. Instead, these irrational numbers exhibit strange, counterintuitive properties, namely that they can never be completely calculated even if you have all the time left in the universe to do so. If you divide four by two, the result is an even two, easy to understand for anyone who has four apples and would like to undergo a simple demonstration. Similarly, if you divide the whole number one by two, you will need to cut your apple in half, but you are still left with two simple pieces rather than anything hard to understand or grasp. However, if you attempt to divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, you end up with a value, commonly known as Pi, that stretches into infinity, never repeating itself along the way and is essentially incalculable no matter how much time you have. While every student is aware that Pi is usually expressed as 3.14, that’s only a small, small part of it. If you have the time, you can keep calculating additional decimal points, forever. In fact, Pi has been calculated all the way to 300 trillion decimal points as of April of this year, that’s .14 continuing another 299,999,999,998 times and it does so without any kind of repeating pattern. It is believed it would do so forever, until the end of time or even beyond, and Pi is far from the only irrational number. The square root of even a simple number like two, known as the golden ratio, is also irrational, as are entire sets of logarithms. Indeed, mathematicians believe there are an infinite number of these irrational numbers that are in sense infinite themselves because their calculations never end. Perhaps needless to say, these numbers have properties that differentiate them from the rational; in addition to being non-repeating and non-terminating, they can automatically “create” irrational numbers from rational ones by addition, subtraction, subtraction, or multiplication, but if you do basic arithmetic with two irrational numbers, the result might be rational. The square root of two irrational numbers multiplied together must be an irrational number with a value somewhere between the two originals, and two irrational numbers might not have a least common denominator, among just a few of their properties.
While people are not numbers, clearly we come in rational and irrational varieties. There are those among us who are capable of making judgements relative to external value systems, inculcated as part of culture and family upbringing, and there are those who simply cannot. There are those who are susceptible to reasoned argument and can accept the outcome even when there is disagreement, and there are some who simply cannot accept that there is disagreement in the first place. There are those whose behavior can be explained in terms of logic and incentives, that make decisions based on what they perceive will be the best outcome for them and their families in the context of their value systems, and there are those whose behavior defies any explanation however hard we may try. This dichotomy is true for those who operate outside traditional moral frameworks, exhibiting behavior defined as criminal. There are those who steal and even kill for what we might call on an understandable reason, perhaps they believe they have no choice, perhaps they were involved in an altercation that got out of hand, or suffered from a moment of rage. While this doesn’t excuse the behavior, it is clearly of a different kind from those who are more sadistic, who commit crimes because of impossible define urges or who get pleasure simply from the act like serial killers. We might put at least some of those who commit political violence – even terrorism – in the same category. There are those who do so with rational goals, even if many of us believe the action itself is irrational. For example, the Weather Underground was a group of ecoterrorists active in the late 1960s and early 1970s that took their name from a Bob Dylan song. For almost a decade, they perpetrated domestic terrorism including orchestrating riots in Chicago in 1969, attempting to break Timothy Leary out of jail in 1970, declaring war against the United States government the same year, and a series of bombings including the US Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the ITT building in New York City, all criminal acts, some of which led to the deaths of their own members and innocent civilians. At the same time, they believed these acts would ultimately serve the greater socialist good as they sought “guarantees [of] political freedom, economic and physical security, abundant education, and incentives for wide cultural variety.” As one member, Fred Hampton, put it, they tried playing by rules, but that wasn’t working and they believed they needed to escalate. “We petitioned, we demonstrated, we sat in. I was willing to get hit over the head, I did; I was willing to go to prison, I did. To me, it was a question of what had to be done to stop the much greater violence that was going on.” While this doesn’t excuse their criminality or make them less guilty, it does make their crimes understandable, subject to some kind of logical thought process and analysis.
There are other political crimes, however, that are far harder to understand. When John Schrank opened fire on former President Teddy Roosevelt outside a car in Milwaukee in October 1912, he was convinced the ghost of Roosevelt’s predecessor, President William McKinley, who was himself assassinated in September 1901, ordered him to do so. He believed McKinley had come to in a dream two years earlier and demanded he kill the former President, but we can also divine a motive based on the wider political debates of the day. Roosevelt was shot while campaigning as a third party candidate, an occurrence which was widely believed could cost the Republicans the election because he remained an extremely potent political force despite being out of office for almost four years. McKinley was also what we may call a more traditional Republican than Roosevelt, who was frequently seen as too far progressive and a wild, uncontrollable person in general, someone who served his own mercurial purposes rather than the party. Roosevelt’s opponent, William Howard Taft, his Vice President from 1905 to 1909 was seen as the safer, more moderate choice and at least partially won the primary because of it. Roosevelt had also accused the Republican Party of fraud in picking Taft, believing he was the leading vote getter when actual citizens had a chance to choose their preferred candidate, but had been denied the victory by party bosses making a corrupt, backroom deal. At the time, there were many mainstream Republicans would have preferred Roosevelt withdraw from the race, but the best they could manage was to brand him as a dangerous radical because once he set his mind to something, it was all or nothing and he ran a scorched earth campaign. Political cartoons at the time depicted him mixing and matching views to suit his audience like a mad chemist, injecting racism into the mix as needed for a toxic brew.
Given that context, is it possible Schrank was subconsciously consuming the anti-Roosevelt content, came to the conclusion that the only way Republicans could prevail was if he was out of the picture, and decided to do something about it himself? Incredibly, Schrank himself provides at least some evidence of this. In a letter discovered after the attack, he noted that he believed Roosevelt running for a third term violated an “unwritten law” begun by George Washington and that Roosevelt was backed by “foreign powers”. In the dream where he claimed McKinley commanded him to the act some two years earlier, he claimed the ghost said, “Let no murderer occupy the presidential chair for a third term. Avenge my death!” He also seemed to be aware that murder was a sin, rationalizing his own behavior as overriding the Ten Commandments. Based on this, we might well conclude this was a political assassination with a rational motive, and yet those at the time, including Roosevelt himself considered him mentally ill, formally diagnosing him with paranoid schizophrenia. On November 12, 1912, Judge Backus made the following statement, “The court now finds that the defendant John Schrank is insane, and therefore incapacitated to act for himself. It is Therefore Ordered and Adjudged, that the defendant John Schrank be committed to the Northern Hospital for the Insane, near Oshkosh, in the county of Winnebago, state of Wisconsin, until such time when he shall have recovered from such insanity, when he shall be returned to this court for further proceedings according to law. And it is Further Ordered, that all proceedings in this case be stayed indefinitely and until such recovery.” Putting this another way, even with the field of psychiatry still in its infancy, they were able to recognize that Shrank was fundamentally irrational and that rational explanations of his behavior were impossible. Whether or not he’d somehow internalized the anti-Roosevelt sentiment wasn’t considered relevant because he could not have done so in a rational manner to begin with.
Personally, I would argue that this is true of many of our supposedly political assassins and mass shooters today, where the rational among us on both sides spend hour upon fruitless hour attempting to attribute logical causes to insane acts, believing that somehow the same words and phrases millions upon million hear every day has prompted a certain individual to commit an atrocity. We have even given this concept a name. When we say someone has been “radicalized” we are assuming they were a normal, productive member of society, even someone who generally played by the rules and operated in a traditional sphere of morals, but then they were exposed to some idea, phrase, ideology, or whatever that served as a sort of mind virus which fundamentally corrupted them, transforming them into deranged killers. According to a paper published by The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism “Radicalization is defined as the process of supporting or engaging in activities deemed (by others) as in violation of important social norms (e.g., the killing of civilians). In these terms, radicalization (1) is a matter of degree (in which mere attitudinal support for violence reflects a lower degree of radicalization than actual engagement in violence); (2) represents a subjective judgment proffered by those for whom the violated norms seem important but not by those who have devalued or suppressed the norms in question.” More colloquially and generally, Oxford Languages describes it as “the action or process of causing someone to adopt radical positions on political or social issues.” Left unsaid: What process or action is there other than exposure to speech? Assuming we aren’t living in A Clockwork Orange where a person can be literally brainwashed or a third world country where people are forced into committing certain acts either through torture or another means of coercion, there is nothing but speech that can serve that purpose, making the real question: Does the killer decide to kill because they were exposed to something that made them to do it or are they already inclined to kill and latch onto whatever motive fits their insane desires? Clearly, normal people can engage in vigorous debate, be exposed to all sorts of incendiary language, and yet they do not become politically-motivated killers under any circumstances. Unless someone can demonstrate what it is about certain speech and some sort of mechanism in the brain that responds to this speech, we must assume the issue is already present in the killers themselves and any attempt to rationalize it by considering how a normal person would behave will necessarily fail. If that is the case, we should resist the temptation whenever possible because it doesn’t capture the truth and if it is not the case for some reason, there is no rational argument for free speech. How can we allow open, unfettered dialogue if we believe certain types of speech can transform people into killers like something out of The Naked Gun?
I understand this construction puts me at odds with many of my fellow conservatives who believe that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was radicalized by far left ideology, the same way progressives have been arguing for years that various conservatives have been through the same undefined process. While I can understand the impulse on both sides, in a world where everything is political, every little bit can either help or hurt you, it is a sad reality that some people are either born crazy or have a mental break and go crazy, and that speech in and of itself is not the real problem. This, of course, doesn’t imply that speech and what constitutes acceptable speech in the public square is not a worthwhile topic. If anything, I would argue it further illuminates the issue because it refocuses the discussion on how speech is used and abused, received and not received among normal people for two reasons. First, speech gives us an opportunity to see people for who they really are and I am not the only one to have been disgusted with some of the reactions among progressives to Mr. Kirk’s murder, where many began dancing on his grave before he was even pronounced dead. Second, it allows us to understand what people consider acceptable and unacceptable beyond the realm of speech, when people stop talking and start doing. While the vast majority of us are not killers, how many among us condone such heinous acts for political purposes? Sadly, this is where we see perhaps the starkest divide between progressives and conservatives, one that deserves far more attention than it’s received.
According to a YouGov poll published this past Friday, progressives are far more likely to condone political violence than their conservative counterparts. Though both Republicans and Democrats share an opinion that political violence is a very big problem or somewhat of a problem in the United States, with 90% of Democrats and 89% of Republicans saying the same thing, 40% of those who rate themselves very liberal would not commit to the proposition that political violence is never justified, reporting that they either believe it is justified sometimes or they are not sure, compared to only 8% of conservatives, meaning that somewhere around five times as many very liberal people are willing to accept political violence as conservatives. Further, young people were far more likely to say political violence is justified than older people; those 18-29 reported 34% never or not sure, 30 to 44, 28%, 45-64 20% and 65+ only 9%. Of the liberal group aged 18 to 44, 39% said political violence was justified or they wouldn’t say, swamping the 19% conservative cohort in that age bracket. When asked if it was acceptable to be happy at the death of a public figure, 44% of those who were very liberal said it’s usually or always acceptable, or they weren’t sure compared to only 10% of those who were very conservative with similar skews for the younger age brackets. To some extent, this should not be surprising when prominent young liberals were gushing over Luigi Mangione after he killed a UnitedHealthcare CEO in cold blood – while actively railing against anyone they perceive as potentially a conservative killer up to and including bizarrely claiming Mr. Kirk was killed because he wasn’t conservative enough. To me, they and others are simply insane and should be dismissed as such, the same as irrational numbers are treated differently than rational ones, but as the YouGov poll so starkly reveals, how those we might consider rational rather than irrational view these events is starkly different based on political ideology. To the extent there is a problem with discourse in the country, it is how so many people, especially young people have been taught to believe violence is justified even in contrast to true civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. who condemned it at every turn, and how so many think it is acceptable to dishonor the dead for political reasons. After all, these are the citizens and the voters who will decide the future of the country.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 