The danger in stoking fear to scapegoat political enemies
Authoritarians use acts of violence to tighten their grip. But we can choose not to be intimidated.
Near the climax of the great American political thriller “The Manchurian Candidate,” the Soviet sleeper agent wife of vice presidential candidate Johnny Iselin (she played brilliantly by Angela Lansbury; he modeled on the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy) tells her brainwashed son, Raymond, what he is meant to do:
You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head, and Johnny will rise gallantly to his feet and lift Ben Arthur's body in his arms, stand in front of the microphones and begin to speak. The speech is short. But it's the most rousing speech I've ever read. It's been worked on here and in Russia, on and off, for over eight years. I shall force someone to take the body away from him. Then Johnny will really hit those microphones and those cameras, with blood all over him, fighting off anyone who tries to help, defending America even if it means his own death! Rallying a nation of television viewers into hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.
The movie’s premise that an act of violence could be used to generate support for an authoritarian takeover of the United States (in its imagined story, by an ostensibly anti-communist demagogue secretly backed by communist Russia) was believable because it was taken from real life. All this has happened before, in other countries, and can happen in ours.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, owes his rise to power on such an event. A month after then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin picked the once-obscure intelligence officer to be prime minister in 1999, bomb blasts leveled four Russian apartment buildings, killing hundreds of residents. The Russian government blamed the attacks on rebels from the separatist region of Chechnya, though there have long been suspicions that Russian intelligence services staged them to speed Putin’s rise.
“We will pursue [the terrorists] everywhere,” was Putin’s famous response. “Excuse me for saying so: We’ll wipe them out in the shithouse.” A few weeks later, Yeltsin resigned. The younger, more vigorous Putin became president, seizing on the public’s anger to rally support for a revenge-fueled invasion of Chechnya, and for the gradual return of strongman rule to Russia.
Likewise, Joseph Stalin exploited an assassination—of a popular Communist Party leader, Sergei Kirov, in 1934—to launch his final push for totalitarian rule. Stalin falsely pinned Kirov’s murder on the full array of his political rivals and issued a decree on “terrorist acts against the Soviet government” that allowed show trials and summary executions. The resulting “great purge” claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
There are countless other similar cases. The assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by Islamist army officers in 1981 was the pretext for his successor Hosni Mubarak’s imposition of an oppressive “state of emergency” that lasted over 30 years. Sheikh Hasina, the recently deposed prime minister of Bangladesh, used the assassination of her father in 1975 to justify persecuting the country’s main opposition party years later. Pretty much every dictatorship in the world uses counter-terrorism laws, which on their face might appear justified, to suppress peaceful dissent.
The pattern is always the same. There is a terrible act of violence, sometimes real, sometimes staged. A leader stokes the public’s fury and fear and directs it against his political enemies even if they had nothing to do with the crime. He says: “They are trying to destroy us; give me the power to protect you from ‘them.’”
I don’t know if White House aide Stephen Miller has studied the methods of totalitarian despots or if he was just born with their instincts. But when he says that “with God as my witness, we are going to ... disrupt, dismantle, and destroy” what he claims without evidence is a vast network of left-wing groups and non-governmental organizations responsible for the Kirk assassination, somewhere in Hell Stalin is smiling and saying “that’s my boy.”
There are two obvious dangers here.
The first is that there are more young men ready, willing, and armed to commit more despicable attacks like the ones that took the lives of Charlie Kirk, Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman, and others. Most of them aren’t “left wing” (certainly not if they ever wore a Pepe the Frog costume for Halloween, as Robinson did). In all fairness, many of them are not “right-wing” either. After all, the political right in America has an agenda—it wants to slash government, ban abortion, kick out immigrants, etc.—and it tries to win elections to achieve these goals. The young “Groyper” boys have no such aims. They are nihilists who view life as meaningless and hopeless and want to accelerate what they think will be society’s inevitable and laughable demise.
An administration serious about stopping political violence would be directing our federal law enforcement agencies to watch these people, rather than diverting them to stupid investigations of George Soros or to petty immigration enforcement. It would be taking on the social media companies responsible for desensitizing young people to extreme violence and for creating the echo chambers in which crazy ideas reverberate, instead of attacking mainstream journalists and universities.
In other words, the more Trump, Miller, and FBI Director Kash Patel scapegoat their political enemies for Kirk’s assassination, the less attention will be paid to the dangerous young men who are actually eager to commit such acts. We will see more political leaders—Republicans and Democrats alike—gunned down as a result.
The second danger is that Trump and his minions will succeed in exploiting Kirk’s murder to achieve their authoritarian goals. That this is their intent should now be clear, and it is chilling. But we should not lose heart. Most of what they are threatening—lawsuits against newspapers, stripping non-profits of their tax-exempt status, or designating vaguely defined left-wing groups as terrorists—cannot and will not pass muster in court (even the current Supreme Court). It is designed to intimidate, to demoralize, and to induce opponents to give up without a fight (as some law firms and universities unfortunately have).
The best response is simply to choose not to be intimidated. It is to argue with them, to ridicule them, to sue them, and to win every election between now and November 2026 with the confidence that most Americans are sensible people who will reject extremism no matter which side it’s coming from.
“The Manchurian Candidate” was a story about a dark time in American history, when the real threat of communism was exploited by men who tried to take our freedoms. The movie got to be made because we survived that test, and it had a hopeful ending. This dark chapter can, as well.
Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.
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I agree that refusal to be intimidated is the way to survive this fight. Mean as these people are, they are also evil buffoons, and simply don’t merit our fear.
Makes so much sense!