Whose Violence Is Taken Seriously Is Political

The selective outrage over recent attacks reveals how violence is politicized—whose lives are mourned, and whose suffering is ignored.

It’s been a month filled with sobering violence: the fatal shooting of right-wing political activist and provocateur Charlie Kirk, the news of yet another devastating school shooting, this time in Colorado. It’s easier than ever to get a gun in America—a cause Kirk himself vocally supported—and we’re all paying the price for that. 

But what’s more—as writer, attorney and political consultant Emily Amick writes—it’s striking how quickly the right has moved to weaponize Kirk’s shooting, and use it to not just fuel but justify their extremism: “The right has spent years building a massive messaging machine and priming their people for revolution. They want violence to be the story, because violence is the terrain where democracy loses.”

And as Jackson Katz writes in Ms., “The [media’s] failure to name the gendered nature of most violence (political and otherwise) is especially notable because a large part of Charlie Kirk’s success was due to the ways in which he pushed for a reinforcement of a certain kind of traditional—and very aggressive—(white) masculinity.”

It’s no surprise Kirk was also an “avowed and often obnoxious opponent of feminism.”

In such a time, when we see a rise in political violence, it’s critical for the country’s leaders to appeal to our sense of unity. Trump is taking the opposite tack. When asked on a Fox News show how Americans can “come back together” to “fix this country,” he doubled down: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”

Trump has focused on blaming the “radical left” for Kirk’s murder and violence against the right, completely ignoring extremist violence directed at Democratic officials: the attempted murder of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, the murder and attempted murder (respectively) of Minnesota state officials Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, and the attempted murder of Rep. Nancy Pelosi that resulted in an attack on her husband.

Of course, what counts as “violence” is always up for debate, particularly under the current administration. In a speech last week where he once again falsely claimed that his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., had eliminated crime in the city, Trump all but said that domestic violence shouldn’t be counted as a crime.

“Things that take place in the home, they call crime. They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see? So now I can’t claim 100 percent [reduction in crime].”

This month has made clear what feminists have long known: The matter of whose violence is taken seriously is deeply political. What about women who suffer domestic violence at the hands of their husbands? Or Epstein’s many victims, who the Department of Justice continues to sideline? Or the man shot and killed by an ICE officer in Chicago yesterday?

I’m thinking, with worry, about those who are scapegoated and turned on in moments like these. Immigrants who are wantonly deported with no regard for the children and families left behind, sometimes to countries far from their country of origin. Transgender people, who have faced a series of escalating restrictions on their rights.

I fear where this violence will lead, for them, and for all of us too.