America’s mask of civility slips again

The FBI has just released an image of a “person of interest” in the case of Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that investigators have found ammunition at the crime scene with pro-trans and “antifa” engravings. 

But we still don’t know much, if anything, about the killer. Speculation as to motives, or snap judgments as to the historical significance of yesterday’s crime, are therefore futile.

On the moronic inferno of X, however, the would-be Nostradamuses of the 21st-century right are weighing in with grave predictions about civil war or revolution or an imminent tide of vengeful justice against “the left.”

Others are suggesting that Kirk, a Christian Zionist, may have been slain for having raised doubts about Israel’s war on Hamas recently. There are also people making gnomic connections between his death and Ukraine and the release of the Epstein files this week.

From another side, a barrage of amateur historians has taken to issuing warnings that Trump’s wannabe Nazi administration will now use Kirk’s death as a sort of Reichstag Fire moment to silence dissent.

And of course we see the usual gun experts insisting – as if only they could know – that whoever “made that shot” must have been a highly-trained sniper. A state-sanctioned hit job, then? The plot thickens – in the sense that the discourse only becomes more asinine.

The truth is that nobody knows very much, and we should probably all keep away from our smartphones in the wake of such horrible news. (Not that I can lecture anyone: I’ve ghoulishly watched videos of the killing. I wish I hadn’t.)

For now there seem three good points to make about this crime. First, all civilized people are appalled that Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, was killed for his opinions. The second is that America appears to be going through another of its periodic fits of political violence. The mask of civility in American life is slipping too often and too quickly (again, the internet doesn’t help).

The third and perhaps more salient point is that Charlie died as a passionate believer in free speech. His murder ought never to intimidate others from speaking their mind.

You can read some excellent – and, we hope, sensitive and non-hysterical – reaction pieces to Kirk’s murder on The Spectator’s website. I’d also encourage everyone to read Charlie’s diary for us about his visit to Britain earlier this year. He was a brave man. Rest in peace.

In other news, Lord Mandelson has stood down as British ambassador in Washington, as more and more evidence spilled out about the extent of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein – which continued even after Epstein was jailed for sex crimes in 2008.

In an interview with the journalist Harry Cole on Tuesday night, the “Prince of Darkness” called his Epstein association “an albatross around my neck.”

Certainly, Westminster journalists have spent years whispering about Mandelson-Epstein stories being mysteriously blocked from publication. But the damn finally burst this week and now he joins Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, as the second British grandee to have wrecked his reputation by palling around with you-know-who.

Earlier this week, I wrote a magazine piece about how Epstein’s ghost will haunt Donald Trump’s visit to the United Kingdom next week. It’s now possible that Kirk’s murder will, in fact, overshadow the whole trip.

Yet many liberty-loving Atlanticists have been hoping that Trump might berate Keir Starmer for clamping down on free speech in the United Kingdom. And that was an issue Kirk, who is already being hailed as a “free speech martyr,” cared about deeply.

Might Trump now invoke Kirk’s name next week to challenge the British government for locking people up for their views? Let’s wait and see.