I would say a month ago, two months ago, my sense of it was that, as bad as it was, it wasn’t quite holding together. And then Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And I guess — well, let me ask you this: How have you seen them change what they are saying, what they are doing in the aftermath of that? So I think at the level of words — which I’m usually a little skeptical of, but I think in this instance matter — you see the emergence of vengeance as a language. Vengeance is an old language. It goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Bible. And it’s a very dangerous language. There’s a reason why the Greeks were terrified of it. Because, put it this way: It has a licensing structure that is extraordinarily permissive, on the one hand. But on the other hand — and this is almost a paradox — it has a very stern injunction — a moral injunction at the heart of it: You have to take revenge for this loss. And if you don’t, it’s as if you’re committing a second murder yourself. You’re not honoring this person. And this is a really terrifying language. It’s not one that’s monopolized by the right. There was a wonderful historian, Arno Mayer, who wrote a wonderful book about the French and the Russian Revolution — it’s called “The Furies,” actually, after the ancient Greek gods, about the role of vengeance on the left. And it is absolutely terrifying, this holy violence that it seems to authorize, where people are morally empowered to do horrible things that they wouldn’t ordinarily feel themselves authorized to do. So just before I came over here, I looked, The Chronicle of Higher Education is just keeping track of how many people have been fired — faculty and jobs — since the Charlie Kirk murder, because of that. It’s up to almost 40 this morning. That’s — are we less than a week? It’s about a week now. That’s just one week. And just one industry. And one industry — and voluntary. These are decisions of employers that are just doing this. And in an industry, by the way, where you have the most protection of any employee — more protection than you have, Ezra Klein, with tenure and often union rights and so forth. Hannah Arendt wrote a letter to her mentor Karl Jaspers in the middle of the McCarthy era. And she said: Everything melts like butter under the sun. What she meant was the collapse of the institutions and the collapse — the leaders of the institutions, of people who, as you were saying about Hollywood, just the day before sounded a little bit more robust. And this murder has galvanized the right for reasons that like the second Red Scare are both strategic and sincere. And you can see it. And it feels like they’re just getting started.
