America, like every state, was founded on violence and maintains itself by violence, observed the French thinker Jacques Ellul.
A vortex of political violence in the US threatens to devour rights and freedoms. Who benefits?
The assassination of the Christian nationalist and propagandist confirms that Canada’s neighbours are living in the throes of a political revolution — one that resonates with restiveness in parts of our own country and other struggling democracies around the world.
As the American empire continues its descent into chaos, anger and grift, the insurgent administration of Donald Trump is already using Kirk’s death to grab more power, silence its enemies (real or imagined) and legitimize the installation of a Mafia-like state with Christian symbols.
Many on the left have assumed that revolutions must hail from an oppressed peasantry clad in guerrilla fatigues. But the rise to power of Donald Trump speaks otherwise.
Charlie Kirk, an evangelical kid from suburban Chicago, was one of Trump’s revolutionary acolytes. He supported Trump’s MAGA juggernaut and even served a vital role in vetting government appointees after his re-election. Just how a seemingly devout Christian could accept the leadership of a rapist, convicted felon and friend of a notorious pedophile perhaps speaks to the very depth of the political crisis now undermining the United States.
Here is why it is important for Americans — and Canadians — to understand the forces at work. Citizens can either stand apart from the whirlwind or surrender their freedom and get swept into the vortex.
Rising Violence
All political violence has historical roots in changing material and spiritual conditions of the people. The historian Peter Turchin, author of End Times, knows that history moves in cycles. With alarm, he has been watching the data on political instability change for several years. In 2010 he warned that growing economic inequality and declining health and living standards of working people, combined with a proliferation of power-seeking elites, would result in an explosion of political tensions and violence by the 2020s. He expected this could manifest itself in any number of ways including riots, mass shootings, assassinations, terrorism, attacks on politicians or civil war.
Turchin’s United States Political Violence Database shows the period between 2020 and 2024 witnessed seven politically motivated assassinations. This is not as severe as the period just before the Civil War but much higher than the previous peak of political violence in the tumultuous 1960s.
It is not just Turchin documenting these trends. Reuters, for example, recently identified 300 cases of political violence since Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The incidents, at least 51 this year alone, include an anti-Trumper running over an 81-year-old Trump supporter with an ATV. Reuters described the events as “part of the biggest and most sustained increase in U.S. political violence since the 1970s.”
Although Trump repeatedly blames the “radical left” for the violence, studies by the non-partisan Center for Strategic and International Studies and the right-wing Cato Institute show that “violent far-right perpetrators such as white supremacists” have accounted for most of it to date.
History, as Turchin sees it, has now placed the United States (and much of Europe) in an unsettling place. By his analysis, “declining well-being and growing ‘precarity’ of the commoners and overproduced degree-holders, coupled with an explosion in the numbers and wealth of the uber-rich, results in the feeling of profound injustice among the non-elite population.”
It should be added that liberal politicians and market forces ignored or minimized these historical trends and actively helped build this furnace of widening material inequality and cultural polarization.
Out of it came a revolutionary movement: MAGA.
The leader of this revolution, Donald Trump, increasingly exercises power by inciting or commanding acts of violence ranging from the storming of the Capitol to the use of the National Guard to police cities. Now add to this mayhem the violence of social media, a robber-baron economy, invasive technologies and increasing spasms of political violence. The rising tide of “micro-events” and political instability, adds Turchin, signals “that something is deeply broken within the social system in which they happen.” No kidding.
The Second American Revolution
If members of the mainstream media mostly still refuse to say that Trump leads a revolutionary regime, there is no shyness about that fact from the regime’s foremost supporters. As provocateur Steve Bannon recently noted, “It’s a revolution about America’s role in the world, our position geopolitically, the global commercial relationships, plus the administrative state and how the country’s governed.”
To see the effect in action, simply watch the titans of Silicon Valley grovel at Trump’s table like members of the Communist Party of China.
Charlie Kirk started as a social media maven on the platforms those titans constructed. After being rejected by the military academy West Point, he turned to the internet and started Turning Point USA at the age of 18 with funds from a Tea Party activist. Its secular goal was to advance capitalism and free markets. Trump and the pandemic radicalized Kirk over time as he morphed into a fervent Christian nationalist. The sort of Christian nationalist who gained followers by declaring Martin Luther King, a Christian apostle of non-violence, to be “not a good person” and in fact “awful.”
To his college-age supporters, the charismatic Kirk deftly identified a social problem. Democratic elites “have given hundreds of billions of dollars to illegals and foreign nations” while gen Z was forced to pinch pennies “just so that they can never own a home, never marry, and work until they die, childless.”
For Kirk, the conservative business leaders who employed undocumented workers and lobbied against granting them a path to rights and citizenship were too inconvenient to acknowledge. Nor did he rail against the Republican presidents and members of Congress who crafted and advanced the United States’ carrot-and-stick foreign aid policies.
He offered instead simplified salvation: “You don’t have to stay poor. You don’t have to accept being worse off than your parents. You don’t have to support leaders who lied to you and took advantage of you for your vote.”
Kirk enticed his largely young male followers with what the U.S. psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton has called totalism. It promises “fixity and definiteness and absoluteness” in times of turmoil and dislocation. To Kirk the totalism of Trump promised to deliver a new age of freedom in a spiritual battle against those that hate God.
As such Kirk rapidly became the icon of Christian nationalism in the United States. It is an old ideology that views Christians as the founders and rightful rulers of the United States. It does not believe in separation of church and state. The ideology also endorses the Seven Mountain Mandate, a revolutionary theology that calls on Christians to take dominion over critical spheres of influence in society: government, education, media, family, business, arts and religion. (Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, is a fervent believer.)
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and lead organizer of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign, testified before Congress in 2022 about the threats Christian nationalists pose to the U.S. Constitution and a pluralistic democracy:
“Christian nationalism is window dressing for white supremacy that makes racism seem like an acceptable choice,” said Tyler. “Since the language of Christian nationalism is more coded than explicit racism, it flies under the radar and is harder to root out.... In civil settings, we see the influence of Christian nationalism when the government co-opts Christian symbols and language to reinforce the power of the state.”
In her testimony Tyler also noted that Christian crosses and religious iconography adorned the rioters who assaulted the Capitol building in 2021 in their attempt to overthrow a legal election. Christian nationalists “built impromptu gallows and signed them with phrases like ‘Amen,’ ‘God Bless the USA,’ and ‘In God We Trust,’” noted Tyler.
In the mob were supporters of Charlie Kirk whom he’d bused to the event.
Twisting What Jesus Taught
That Christians might find themselves attracted to authoritarians like Donald Trump is not a new phenomenon. In his prophetic 1969 essay on violence, the social critic and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul noted that a large majority of German Christians readily accepted Adolf Hitler’s world view. They called themselves “deutsche Christen” and in so doing embraced “nation, race, courage, pride, socialism — and violence.”
Reading Ellul today is like hearing an echo. Many evangelical Christians in the United States now embrace nation, greatness, order, capitalism and revenge against evildoers.
Ellul observes that Hitler scorned any form of Christianity that might hold appeal for “the weak and effeminate, for slaves, introverts and cowards.” And so “the deutsche Christen took up the gauntlet and affirmed that Christianity, too, exalted courage and strength and did not shrink from violence. They declared their readiness to participate in violence in order to attain socially just objectives... determined by the Hitler party.”
To Ellul, “the acquiescence in violence of the deutsche Christen was one of Hitler’s victories, the fruits of which we are still reaping.”
To Ellul, “the acquiescence in violence of the deutsche Christen was one of Hitler’s victories, the fruits of which we are still reaping.”
Let us end then with a brief reflection on violence. As Ellul noted in his famous essay “Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective,” violence is everywhere and is not just political. Every state is founded on violence and maintains itself by violence. Our competitive economic system directs serial violence against the natural world and human communities. The relations between classes are often violent. Urban growth is a form of violence because it disintegrates existing communities as well as ecosystems. Technologies do violence to the human character. And so on.
But all forms of violence follow immutable laws. “Once you start using violence, you cannot get away from it” is the first.
The second law of violence is reciprocity. “All who take the sword will perish by the sword,” said Jesus. He recognized that violence creates violence, begets and procreates violence.
Every study of violence shows that it takes its many excusers and explainers, whether of the right or left, down a one-way street toward “the reciprocity and the reproduction of violence.” To Ellul there was only one Christian response to violence, and that was total rejection, and the courage to contest the propaganda and power that unleash it.
But the power-driven revolutionaries and Christian nationalists running Trump’s government have no such reservations. Without evidence they have now declared war on a “vast domestic terror network” that they claim contributed to Kirk’s death, proving once again that “modern tyranny is terror management,” as historian Timothy Snyder has observed.
In a revealing conversation with Vice-President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and a dedicated white nationalist, laid out a revolutionary future for the United States on a Charlie Kirk podcast, no less.
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
The second American Revolution now has a martyr, and his name is Charlie Kirk.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Nikiforuk has been writing about epidemics, globalization and the oil and gas industry for nearly 20 years and cares deeply about accuracy, government accountability and cumulative impacts. He has won seven National Magazine Awards for his journalism since 1989 and top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists.
Andrew has also published several books, including two about pandemics: The Fourth Horseman (1996) and Pandemonium (2007). The dramatic, Alberta-based Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2002. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, which considers the world’s largest energy project, was a national bestseller and won the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was listed as a finalist for the Grantham Prize for Excellence In Reporting on the Environment. Empire of the Beetle, a startling look at pine beetles and the world’s most powerful landscape changer, was nominated for the Governor General’s award for Non-Fiction in 2011. And Slick Water: Fracking and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry, won the 2016 Science in Society Journalism Award.
Website: Andrew Nikiforuk.
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