Silencing the Press, Targeting the People: The Pyramid of Authoritarian Violence

When reporters become prey, the public becomes the battlefield. We’ve crossed into the second tier…

The FCC chairman just threatened to pull ABC’s license because of a comment Jimmy Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk, and ABC just indefinitely took him off the air. This is the sort of thing you’d expect in Russia, not America.

But let’s back up a minute.

First, those who use violence come for the politicians. Then they come after the pundits and reporters. And finally they encourage average people to turn their guns on each other.

The dark story we’re living — this rise of fascism and destruction of civil order — fits a pyramid, not a straight line. And it explains why the killing of Charlie Kirk, aside from the right’s incessant amplification of their outrage, actually is a big deal and very dangerous sign for today’s political moment.

At the apex of the pyramid of people first targeted for violence are politicians, people who choose to live in the blast radius of public power.

When the taboo against political bloodshed cracks, it often cracks there first, with, for example, the attempted assassinations of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi by Trump’s mob, the murder of Minnesota State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, the bombs Trump fanboy Cesar Sayoc send to President Obama and other elected Democrats, and our history of political assassinations.

The second tier down from the apex is the world of thought leaders, editors, and reporters, the people who interpret events for the rest of us. In healthy times they’re noisy, sometimes infuriating, and very much alive.

The brutal assassination of conservative activist and organizer Charlie Kirk in Utah wasn’t just another awful headline, it was America making the transition into that second tier on the way toward civil war or a police state. You don’t have to like his views to see that this is part of the transition from public debate to public violence.

I really wish we didn’t have to be having this conversation, to be considering the possibility that our politicians, our thought leaders, and eventually each one of us ourselves could be the victims of violence incited by political conflict. But that’s where we are.

And instead of trying to bring the nation together or heal it, Trump and those around him appear committed to turning the heat up.

When countries are sliding into fascism, after politicians are cowed, this middle level of the pyramid — the thought leaders and reporters — become targets.

We’re already tracking a surge of assaults on journalists in the United States this year, recorded by nonpartisan monitors, and the warnings from press freedom groups are growing louder as we head into another supercharged election cycle.

It’s why Trump threatening Jonathan Karl this week was such a big deal.

At the base of the pyramid is everyone else, the broad foundation of ordinary citizens who expect to disagree without fear of dying for it. In the last stage of democratic decay, the taboo collapses here too.

Conflict trackers that normally study civil wars abroad are now publishing monthly briefs on our own streets, and their July readout flagged spikes tied to political flashpoints and the growing risk of lone-wolf attacks.

That’s the tremor you feel underfoot; it’s a warning that a nation has been seized by authoritarians and could be on the verge of civil war.

This is not an abstract model that I just came up with this week: it’s American history.

In the 1850s the pattern first announced itself in Washington when rightwing Congressman Preston Brooks walked into the Senate chamber and nearly beat Senator Charles Sumner to death for denouncing slavery.

The attack wasn’t just an assault on a man, it was a public declaration that the rules had changed and that violence could now answer argument. The country was shocked, and then it was hardened. That moment signaled that the apex of the pyramid had been breached.

From there the target set widened into the second stage, the “killing pundits and reporters phase.” In Kansas, proslavery posses sacked the Free State stronghold of Lawrence, destroyed printing presses, and burned the Free State Hotel while waving banners that proclaimed “Southern Rights.”

Across the Deep South, meanwhile, newspaper publishers and editors who called out the Confederate oligarchs or opposed slavery were lynched, shot, or driven out of town.

The point was terror and silence. Smash the presses, you smash the story. The attack was part of the cycle we remember as Bleeding Kansas, when political dispute metastasized into raids and reprisals across towns and farms. Once the middle layer began to break, the base wasn’t far behind.

We can see the rhyme today.

Minnesota mourned Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband after a stalker hunted them down, and federal prosecutors have indicted the suspect. You don’t get a clearer sign that the apex is under fire than a state’s senior legislative leader and her spouse being killed.

We’re now seeing a loosening of the bolts on that middle tier with the Kirk assassination. Political leaders sneer at reporters and pundits, crowds chant for punishment of the press, and too many people decide that a camera and a notebook are acts of war.

And then comes the revenge. After our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, threatened to prosecute people for what she called “hate speech” (which is not a crime: remember the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois?), Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was blunt:

“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed.”

The data points stack up, each incident small enough to shrug off, all together large enough to chill a newsroom and make a young journalist, podcaster, or influencer think twice about showing up. Which is exactly what the authoritarians want.

If we want to keep the base of the pyramid steady, we must keep that middle standing, because when people can’t trust that their words will be heard without violence or censorship, some will reach for other tools.

The lesson from the 1850s isn’t that violence always walks in a single file, but that it climbs down the side of the pyramid. Once elites normalize it, once opinion-makers are bullied or bloodied into silence, the next stop is the rest of us.

That’s why the response must be immediate and nonpartisan. Every decent official, left and right, should make it crystal clear that assassination is not politics, that stalking is not activism, that censorship or threatening a reporter or a comedian isn’t patriotic.

And that the worst response to violence is to blame an entire political party, the people who make up half of America, calling them “crazy,” “lunatics,” and “terrorists.”

Tragically, that’s exactly the path Trump and the GOP are following. They’re trying to turn Charlie Kirk into America’s Horst Wessel, the martyr that Hitler used to successfully rally people around the Nazis’ shared sense of victimhood.

We still have time to shore up the apex, protect the middle, and keep the base from cracking, if only Democratic leadership (talking about you, Schumer and Jeffries) would find the courage to speak out loudly every day against the explosion of blame and hate being promoted now by Trump and the rightwing media that brought him into power.

The few Republicans of good conscience left must reach out to the Trump administration and demand they dial down their own violent and provocative rhetoric. And stop throwing people off television for exercising their First Amendment rights.

We don’t have time to pretend the pyramid will hold itself together without our intervention and that of our political leadership.