The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 37
Sept. 15, 2025
This week:
- RIP, Charlie Kirk
- The ideology sapping respect for human life
- Jasmine Crockett for Senate?
Outlook
Kirk assassination: The assassination of conservative orator, podcaster, debater and activist Charlie Kirk obviously dominated last week’s political news. We extend our condolences to his family. We would also recommend readers who have not done so to examine his body of work in terms of speeches, podcasts and videos.
In addition to his public events, Kirk was essential to President Trump’s 2024 re-election, thanks to his work in registering young college men to vote and improving voter turnout among young men.
That said, this assassination is an ominous sign. It has completely crowded out all other political conversations and provided a rather brutal reality check to conservatives about exactly what kind of country they even live in.
A recent new YouGov poll shows that only 38 percent of Democrats agree with the statement that “it is always unacceptable to feel joy at the death of someone they oppose,” compared to 77 percent of Republicans. This is a sign something has gone very wrong.
And this result, though surprising, is not implausible, given the sudden outpouring of celebration in so many corners of social media immediately upon Kirk’s death. These were mostly not Democratic leaders, but random people — teachers, medical professionals, and government employees were among the best-represented professions online caught not just criticizing Kirk but actively celebrating his murder and even in some cases mocking his widow. Indeed, Kirk’s final contribution may be to substantially improve education when these teachers and school administrators are fired for moral unfitness.
Is this just a right-wing version of cancel culture? No, not really. Recall that during the Woke Era, the canceled were generally those who failed to embrace an ideology or perhaps made the mistake of singing a lyric on video that contained the n-word when they were teenagers. There was a time when saying that men cannot become women, for example, or supporting President Trump, or openly espousing pro-life views or holding what were then unfashionable views about DEI or affirmative action — or even just having made an insensitive joke in the distant past — could potentially result in real-world reprisals, loss of job, etc.
Disagreement or even minor offense-giving is not the same thing as celebrating an assassination — actively, openly supporting and praising political violence. The former is an intellectual exercise, right or wrong — the latter evinces a pathology, and it is a pathology that seems to have quite thoroughly suffused the modern American Left.
Devaluing of human life: This was already clear when Luigi Mangione became an icon for many random online people. But this is not a fringe problem. From Joe Biden’s famous “Red Speech” accusing half of America of being “semi-fascists,” to major Democratic officeholders’ insane insinuations that Trump will cancel future elections — and the people saying these things do not genuinely believe them — the climate of deliberately setting off political-moral panic at the risk of actual people’s lives has been fully mainstreamed.
In the realms of reason, the need to stop the Trump juggernaut has resulted in lawfare and other severe abuses of power in order to stop Trump. They tried to remove him from ballots, prosecute and sue him into exhaustion so that he could not run, but he proved inexaustible.
But in less reasonable quarters, this message leads certain unstable people to do more drastic things, like shoot at Trump (don’t forget, this happened twice) or even at someone who is really just an influential private citizen like Kirk.
The real culprit, at heart, is the ideology spread openly on campuses for decades and popularized during the Woke Era, which explicitly teaches that the free speech and debate that Kirk championed are violence if it contains the wrong sort of message, and that violence in response to such speech is therefore justified.
This well-known ideology delineates alleged oppressors from the allegedly oppressed and creates separate sets of rules in society for each. In most versions, racial and gender hierarchies make one an undesirable oppressor for being white or male or straight, et cetera, or else a victim of one of those people.
In its most extreme interpretations, the very lives of so-called oppressors are negotiable if it means the so-called oppressed no longer have to discuss, debate or listen to them. Think back to the Woke Era and the strenuous efforts to prevent or avoid debates about whether blanket discrimination is bad if it is against whites or Asians, or that there are more than two genders. To question the premises took a lot of courage. The loudest voices were simply hell-bent on forcing everyone to accept radical new ways of viewing the world and represent them as the new normal — or at best to debate such issues within an artificially constrained framework that no one had agreed to in advance. Witht the political Left capturing so many important institutions, they felt they could simply tighten their grip and force the issue. But they moved far too quickly and “boiled the frog,” so to speak.
Not only does this ideology view the freedom of speech as a bourgeois value, but such debates are also characterized as not worth having, because they supposedly force the oppressed constantly to debate their own existence. This dubious characterization attempts to silence people maximally on issues of great societal import, but to many people it is an emotionally appealing characterization.
By now, every American has come across this branch of academic critical social theory. Having been mostly confined to the toxic spaces of academia for decades, it flowed out and completely overtook public political culture in the early 2010s, peaking at the height of cancel culture and corporate wokeness in early 2023. Today, it is in retreat — being routed, really — and this has definitely affected the nation’s political culture. Election 2024 was a milestone in this regard.
Shutdown fight: But this does not mean Election 2025 or 2026 will continue to move the ball politically in that direction. The more likely outcome is that, over time, Democrats will moderate and move gradually back into the space that the Left created during the Woke Era by denouncing as fascistic everything from math education to pretty girls to fitness to family formation and beyond. For a lot of leftists, it is still hard to understand just how exclusionary they became by rejecting and denouncing things that most normies do or consider valuable.
It seems hard to imagine they will all give this up, and it may happen slowly, but it has to happen. The incongruity inside the movement is too great to ignore. For example, the victim hierarchies they promote are largely rejected by most actual racial and ethnic minorities — evinced by the fact that, tellingly, Hispanic, Asian and Black voters all moved sharply toward Trump in 2024, and they did so despite all the messages about fascism and despite the opportunity to vote for an Asian and Black candidate.
That is the long-term outlook. For the moment, the immediate political fallout of Kirk’s assassination has of course been to take off the front pages many of the debates that had been going on before. Practically speaking, for example, no one will be talking about the Epstein files for a few weeks.
However, there is still one big debate that looms and cannot be avoided, no matter what happens: Whether Senate Democrats will play the game of chicken with Trump and shut down the government when the new fiscal year begins at midnight on October 1.
Democrats have very real incentives not to launch a filibuster and cause a shutdown. One reason is that they are more likely to take the blame for it this time than they ever have been in previous shutdowns. But more important to their project and to their institutions, the resolve and uniqueness of the Trump 2.0 administration has to factor into the calculation. A shutdown will empower Trump to take all kinds of bureaucracy-clearing DOGE-like measures that congressional appropriations have legally prevented up to this point. That is precisely why Senate Democrats surrendered on this issue back in the Spring.
But their base really, really wants to see them fight and was sorely disappointed by that episode. To complicate things further, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) could face a primary from his left if he folds again.
Governor 2026
Florida: A new poll taken two weeks ago by the Associated Industries of Florida Center for Political Strategy shows Republican frontrunner Rep. Byron Donalds (R) with a decisive eight-point edge over former Republican Rep. David Jolly (D). Jolly, the only officially declared Democratic candidate, although it remains to be seen whether their voters will want another former Republican after Charlie Crist. He had earlier dropped an internal poll showing himself within one point of Donalds, whom President Trump has endorsed. This splashes a bit of cold water on that.
Senate 2026
Maine: Democrats are eager to get Gov. Janet Mills (D) into the Senate race against Sen. Susan Collins (R), and they may get their wish. Politico reports that Mills is interviewing staffers for a campaign and plans to make an announcement by November.
That timing is shrewd, even if she has already made up her mind to run. To make an announcement now would be to invite questions about how she would vote on shutting down the government if she were in the Senate — not to say that someone couldn’t still ask such a question.
Texas: A side-benefit of redistricting in Texas for Republicans is that it might impel a newly out-of-the-job Jasmine Crockett (D) to run statewide for U.S. Senate and, at least according to one poll, win a Democratic primary against other potential candidates.
Although Texas has not been looking very blue lately, the expectedly brutal Republican primary between Sen. John Cornyn (R) and Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) at least presents Democrats with an opportunity that will probably vanish if Crockett is their nominee.
The same poll shows both Cornyn and Paxton struggling among Republican voters at 32 to 26 percent — neither one anywhere close to the 50 percent majority required for the nomination, either in the initial vote in March or in a May runoff. Rep. Wesley Hunt (R) is still considering a Senate bid, and the poll suggests there may be room for a third major candidate in the Republican primary.
