O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?”
In the days since Charlie Kirk was murdered, I’ve found myself repeatedly musing on this passage from George Orwell’s 1984. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, had once written in his diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” In Orwell’s totalitarian state, this assertion was a thought crime, and following Winston’s disappearance into Big Brother’s torture chambers, the party sought to break him—or, more specifically, to break his commitment to the existence of an objective reality.
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” Winston blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
The moment that news of Kirk’s shooting hit the internet, MAGA—its influencers, podcasters, media figures, Republican elected officials, Cabinet directors, Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump—immediately began insisting that two and two make five. Their gaslighting around Kirk’s death has been so extensive—and so speedily promulgated—that it’s hard to fully grasp the sheer magnitude of their mendacity. Here’s a very brief summary of some of the self-evidently false assertions the right has been feverishly proclaiming in recent days:
- Kirk’s killing was organized by the American left. (The alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, is a 22-year-old gamer from a conservative Mormon family who did not vote in the 2024 election. All evidence suggests he acted alone.)
- Robinson became indoctrinated by radical leftists while at college. (Robinson attended Utah Valley University—a relatively conservative school whose student body identifies as 70 percent Mormon—for one semester, before enrolling in an electrical engineering program at Utah’s Dixie Technical College.)
- The left celebrated Kirk’s killing. (Every significant Democratic elected official, including all leading progressives, immediately condemned the shooting and called for an end to political violence.
- The left is responsible for most political violence in this country. (Unequivocally, the vast majority of extremist mass killings in the U.S. are linked to the far right; the vast majority of U.S. political speech praising or inciting violence comes from right-wing politicians; and it sure wasn’t a Democratic president who actively instigated a violent attack on the Capitol several years ago.)
Though all of these lies are shocking and dangerous, the narrative that has been most troubling to me—or at least has most caused me to feel like I may actually be losing my mind—has been the right’s insistence on the universal public canonization of Kirk. They have endeavored to make his mourning mandatory, enforcing it through threats—backed by the full power of the state—against anyone who dares to share truthful observations of who this man really was. Participate in the hagiographic whitewashing of a dedicated provocateur’s career, or suffer the consequences. (Unless, of course, you’re Donald Trump, who had already gone back to obsessing over the White House ballroom within hours of Kirk’s death, and skipped his Kennedy Center vigil to go golfing.)
Kirk was an extremely talented communicator and activist whose efficacy in building up the organizing infrastructure of the far right has materially affected American politics. He was also, by most reasonable standards, a demagogue whose espousal of Christian nationalism, platforming of racist attitudes, attacks on free speech, and support for political violence made our country a more dangerous and unjust place.
That doesn’t in any way make his murder less vile. Kirk was a human being, and his life was sacred. It is tragic that he was murdered, as it is tragic every time a human is murdered—whether it’s a student struck down in their school by another mass shooting, or a civilian shot in their car by a police officer, or a child killed in Gaza by an American-made weapon. We live in a nation where gun deaths are a dime a dozen. For many of us, this is a desperate moral catastrophe and an eternal shame; for others, it’s just the price of living in a “free” society.
The effect is that these tragedies are overwhelmingly forgotten within days, hours, or even minutes, as was the case in last week’s shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado, whose victims had the added bad fortune of being killed by a far-right teen the same day as Kirk. We barely mourn these tragedies anymore, and—as Kirk himself demonstrated regularly in his posthumous attacks on victims of police violence like George Floyd—we certainly do not accept that the circumstances of someone’s death rewrite the facts of how they chose to live their lives.
But this rewriting of Kirk’s life is being forced on us all the same. Today, Kirk is being framed as an elder statesman and a free speech champion, a model of positive civic virtue. Anyone who resists this false characterization now risks being targeted, not just by MAGA trolls online but by literally the most powerful people in the world.
Vice President JD Vance, recording The Charlie Kirk Show directly from the White House, ended the episode by exhorting listeners to respond to “someone celebrating Charlie’s murder” by “call[ing] their employer.” Attorney General Pam Bondi proclaimed that employers “have an obligation to get rid of people, you need to look at people who are saying horrible things, and they should not be working with you.” She also announced that the Justice Department would be looking to prosecute any businesses that fail to support the mourning of Kirk: “Businesses cannot discriminate. If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute them for that.”
These are not idle threats. Already dozens of Americans—teachers, professors, U.S. military members, even a Washington Post columnist—have lost their jobs for sharing messages that were critical of Kirk’s stated beliefs and conduct. And far worse free speech crackdowns look to be on the horizon. As White House policy adviser Stephen Miller put it, “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, eliminate, and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.”
It would be bad enough if those of us who were ostensibly opposed to MAGA authoritarianism were facing this assault on the truth with a united front. But we are not. Too many Democratic leaders and liberal pundits have preemptively given in to the far right’s framing. The highest-profile example of this was New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s now-infamous essay arguing that Kirk “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” The Kirk of Klein’s fevered imagination is a man no one else has met: a free speech advocate who abhorred political violence. This bears very little resemblance to the actual Charlie Kirk, a “Stop the Steal” champion who sent “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president” on January 6, 2021, and encouraged supporters to bail out the man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.
Equally shocking were decisions by Democratic governors like Josh Shapiro and Jared Polis to copy President Trump in ordering their state’s flags to be lowered to half-staff in honor of Kirk—a sign of respect and public mourning that Polis notably did not extend to the victims at Evergreen High School in his own state.
To get a sense of how insane this Democratic folding to the far right is, try imagining the political response we would see if, God forbid, a high-profile leftist like Hasan Piker—who, unlike Kirk, has not worked to actively incite political violence or trafficked in blatant bigotry—were murdered. I find it difficult to imagine Governors Shapiro or Polis engaging in any sort of public mourning for Piker; the idea that any GOP governor would fly their state’s flags at half-staff for him is beyond laughable. It’s similarly impossible to imagine the Trumpist right enforcing a period of public mourning for a murdered liberal figure—which we saw clearly with their response to the assassination of Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman by a Trump-supporting anti-abortion extremist in June.
The affirmation of MAGA’s false narratives by high-profile Democrats and liberals greatly reifies the far right’s goal of severing our nation’s grasp on the existence of an objective reality. Because let’s be clear: That is their project. As Winston’s torturer in 1984 put it, “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston.” By mobilizing the power of the state to force the nation to see Kirk through the eyes of the Republican Party, the right is using his killing to escalate its war on truth. George Orwell understood the radical dangerousness of such efforts: “The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future, but the past.… This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”
We cannot allow ourselves, like Klein, Shapiro, and Polis did, to help construct that nightmare world. We must fight to hold onto an understanding of reality that exists outside of MAGA’s dictates. As Winston insisted to himself in a moment of clarity, “The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre.” Two plus two do not make five. Two plus two make four, and—regardless of the costs—it’s never been more important for the enemies of totalitarianism to stand up and say so.
