In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk‘s assassination, one thing is clear: We need a “Kirk Commission.”
Some will instantly reject the idea because of the dismal failure of the Warren Commission to settle any questions around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1973. Besides, naysayers will note, though the presumption of innocence remains, most of the public has no doubt about who assassinated Kirk.
But a Kirk Commission isn’t a murder inquest. FBI Director Kash Patel and the whole of Utah law enforcement will discover whoever was connected to the killing. If there were a broader plot, it would be exposed.
No, we need a Kirk Commission to investigate and report on a wholly different subject: What has the internet done to Gen Z, and what is it doing to Gen Alpha? The radicalization of any percentage of an age cohort is a huge problem. A radicalization that tips young people into political violence is even worse. We are there.
But we don’t know the size and scale of the problem. We do know it will be extremely difficult to address. The First Amendment protects online nuttery, and after the astonishing abuse and censorship of the virtual public square by Biden-era officials, the public is rightly going to be very suspicious of government-sponsored regulation of the World Wide Web (See Sen. Eric Schmitt’s [R-MO] new book The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court for all the stunning details of the Biden administration’s “censorship enterprise.”)
YES, CELEBRATING MURDER IS GROUNDS FOR SOCIAL EXILE
But if parents, school teachers, coaches, and youth pastors are going to have a fighting chance to stave off the worst, they need more than The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, good though it might be. They need more than the very wise counsel Justice Amy Coney Barrett gave to parents in an interview with me on Monday. We all need an alarm that is grounded in fact, not fear, detailed with precision, and not just calamitous rhetoric.
We need a “Kirk Commission on Violence Among the Young.” The Speaker of the House and Majority Leader of the Senate, as well as their minority party counterparts, get two appointments each. President Donald Trump should have five. Congress should stand it up as it did the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” (the “9/11 Commission”), which was established by Public Law 107-306, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003, on Nov. 27, 2002. That commission was bipartisan and serious. It did excellent work. Its recommendations made sense, and many were adopted. So could this commission focus on domestic terrorism that has raised its deeply dangerous head in Utah, and in New York City and elsewhere?
Objections will be raised from both the Right and the Left. But after two assassination attempts on Trump, the murder of healthcare executive Brian Thompson in New York in December of last year, the murders of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark on June 14 of this year, the killing of Kirk, and at least some of the school shootings we have all been horrified by, we need a bipartisan group of respected, serious figures to step into the muck and mire of the deep web and try to discover and articulate what is driving this madness.
The country has been in this place before. The Weather Underground of the late 1960s and early 1970s was responsible for dozens of bombings. The radicals of that era retreated into academia, as chronicled by Christopher Rufo in America’s Cultural Revolution. The rising generations seem far more nihilistic than even the crazed theoreticians of that era. It is the return of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, but amped up and armed. We need to know the scope of the problem. We need to know how to counsel parents and schools. We cannot just hope all will be well or that the shock of Kirk’s murder will bring a sudden sanity into the virtual world. Just the opposite has, in fact, happened.
POLITICAL VIOLENCE ON THE RISE IN THE US: A TIMELINE OF KEY INCIDENTS
Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz has noted on the podcast that he and other Commentary writers produce Monday through Friday that the web has allowed communities to come together that ought never to have been allowed to come together. They are communities of the crazed and the evil.
The First Amendment protects speech in so fulsome a fashion that shuttering even extremist hate speech isn’t an option. But understanding the origins of the rage and possible antidotes to it is well worth the time, money, and political blowback. Hopefully, Trump will back such an effort, and the appointees pursue their tasks with careful attention to detail and zeal for protecting a republic that feels increasingly fragile.