The Great Gaslighting of 2025

Dear Weekend Jolter,

Imagine our surprise when progressives’ online gaslighting started to resemble the divisive and unreasoned propaganda of a Russian bot army.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the left’s disinformation campaign about the alleged shooter’s motives and profile has been shocking to see even by the sadly loosening standards of internet journalism. Where Jimmy Kimmel's ABC suspension is concerned, there's even gaslighting about the gaslighting. The profusion of cherry-picked, misleading, and flat-out wrong details appears to come from a mix of political operators and people who are “transparently in denial,” as Jeff Blehar documents. The product has been a grotesquely distorted picture of what happened in Utah. Jeff writes,

As each new detail trickled out, and the killer’s transgender associations became clearer and clearer, the hysterical spin and assertions of blunt unreality mounted. Cynical pros began inserting outright lies into the mix, as partisan myrmidons took up their work and used it in desperate, craven attempts to either spin facts in ridiculous ways (“his parents are Republicans!”) or simply pretend the facts weren’t “facts” at all. All of it was done with the intent of trying to will into existence — through the spread of fear, uncertainty, and doubt — an alternate narrative whose intended moral calculus amounted to, in so many words, Charlie Kirk was killed by his own team, and this is actually your fault. . . .

I can’t understand any of this after Tyler Robinson was caught on Friday morning. At that point, mere ignorance and wish-casting turned into an active disinformation campaign, and it was particularly appalling to see from people whose civic responsibility it is to know better.

By Sunday, it was increasingly clear that despite the suspect’s family’s Republican leanings, he did not appear to share them at the time of the shooting. Despite his identity as a white male, that identity did not -- obviously -- dictate anything about his political beliefs. Despite the fact that Charlie Kirk was disliked by some on the far right, this -- again, obviously -- did not mean that his killer did it for them. In a matter of hours, however, motivated speculation to this effect was advanced as fact among progressives.

As Noah Rothman writes, wielding receipts, this was primarily an online phenomenon:

“Kirk’s apparent assassin seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals,” wrote onetime Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. . . . As Heather Cox Richardson, one of Substack’s most popular writers, with a 2.8 million-strong subscriber base, insisted that “in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left.” Rather, he is “a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.”

Then, on Tuesday, Utah prosecutors presented their evidence, which systematically invalidated those narratives. The suspect’s father was “diehard maga” (as one text put it), but, according to the mother’s statements to law enforcement, Tyler Robinson had started to “lean more to the left” and become more “pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” He had started to date his roommate, a male who was “transitioning genders.” This led to discussions between him and his dad, “who have very different political views,” according to the charging document.

As to motive, Robinson allegedly told his roommate in a text message: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

More will surely come out as the case proceeds, but the evidence could not be more at odds with the online left’s body of work to date about Charlie Kirk’s shooting. It’s not clear that the facts of the case would have changed anything; partisans set out to sow doubt about the public reporting, and they succeeded. Motive unclear may be the chyron of collective memory that lives on from this tragedy.

The right, meanwhile, is dabbling in cancel culture for a change -- to some extent justifiably, to some extent not. Kimmel is only the highest-profile to fall (in that case, he blatantly misled his audience, but the FCC shouldn't have bullied broadcasters either). Jeff, writing before the Kimmel news, made some critical distinctions about this “purge”: milquetoast posts by ordinary people lamenting Kirk’s death while voicing disapproval about his politics should not lead to social shaming or demands for firings. But those who openly delighted in or gloated about his killing -- especially if they are in the media or other positions of prominence -- can't be too surprised about professional blowback. Charlie Cooke argues that, on this question, a person’s job or role in society matters.

If only AG Bondi had thought more carefully about those distinctions.

But online spouting is one thing. The material world is another. As rabid and divided as our culture looks to be, there is cause for optimism. As Noah writes, real-life America is (we hope) nowhere near as radical as it appears to be on-screen: “If you look around, you will not see a nation on fire. . . . If we only honor Kirk’s legacy of good-faith engagement, we will reflexively step back from the precipice.”

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

Wind it down: Abolish the FCC

Um, somebody send a copy of the Constitution to the DOJ, stat: Pam Bondi’s First Amendment Follies

Call Schumer’s bluff, if necessary: Republicans Shouldn’t Cave on Obamacare Expansion

ARTICLES

Stanley Kurtz: How State Legislators Can Honor Charlie Kirk

James Eustis: AI Will Destroy Entire Industries, and That’s a Good Thing

Jim Geraghty: ‘Consequence Culture’ Comes for the Angry Left

Francisco Gonzalez: Charlie Kirk: A Witness of Faith, Truth, and Courage

Audrey Fahlberg: Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Marks Devastating Chapter for Young Conservatives, Trump Movement

John Yoo: In Defense of John Bolton

Abigail Anthony: Planned Parenthood Is Teaching Teens How to Get Around Gender-Transition Safeguards

Haley Strack: ‘Non-Marginalized’ Cornell Business Students Told to Skip Minority Recruiting Events — or Face Consequences

Christian Schneider: The Atlantic’s Originalist Sin

Senators Bill Cassidy & John Barrasso: President Trump Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for Operation Warp Speed

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Giancarlo Sopo pays tribute: Robert Redford, the Statesman of American Cinema

Brian Allen takes us through the surprises and Hispanic Society treasures in a Texas capital museum: A Visit to the University of Texas’s Art Museum in Austin

“As bland as Brokeback Mountain,” Armond White writes: What’s Wrong with The History of Sound

FROM THE NEW, NOVEMBER 2025 ISSUE OF NR

Yuval Levin: The Assassin’s Other Target

Jeffrey Blehar: The Trump Effect: On the Media

Andrew McCarthy: The Trump Effect: On the Rule of Law

Christine Rosen: The Trump Effect: On Our National Memory

Jack Butler: The Trump Effect: On Washington, D.C.

Daniel Foster: America Should Take a Digital Sabbath

Yours truly: Take the Turnpike to the East

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THESE EXCERPTS

The new issue of NR is out. It features a host of stories on “The Trump Effect,” on everything from the media to the economy to alliances and more. Thumb through at your leisure. But first, Yuval Levin writes in the wake of Kirk’s killing about the awful alternative to liberalism, and the importance of a free society:

The first waves of response to the brutal public murder of Charlie Kirk tended toward the personal. Many influential figures in our public life knew Kirk, and many more had been shaped or inspired by his work. Even many of his critics understood his assassination in terms of Kirk’s prominence and persona, or the place he held in our politics.

But most Americans did not know Charlie Kirk personally or follow him online. It is reasonable to assume that the average American had never heard his name until he was assassinated. And yet Kirk’s killing at Utah Valley University should matter to those Americans, too. His murderer evidently sought to strike at Kirk for expressing views the killer thought abhorrent. In doing so, his murderer therefore also struck at the foundations of a political order that is utterly essential to the flourishing of the average American — indeed, to the very possibility of living a life in which you do not have to know the names of influential public figures to be free.

That political order, the liberal-democratic republic we have inherited from prior generations of Americans and are privileged to enjoy and obliged to pass along in decent shape to our children, has been so successful that we now routinely take its benefits for granted. Some intellectuals mistake its insistence on rooting the law in the equal dignity of all for amoral proceduralism, and so insist that it poses unacceptable impediments to moral formation. Some radicals are bored by its constraints and frivolously call for its overthrow. All these detractors from our political order imagine that the alternative would be a society unabashedly devoted to their own vision of the good.

But Charlie Kirk’s murderer showed us what real-world alternatives would actually look like. Our political order has been so successful that we too easily forget what it arose to prevent and replace. In this world, and especially in the morally diverse mass societies of the modern West, the only serious alternative to some kind of classically liberal politics is violence.

Needless to say, this is not good news. It means our range of options is more constrained than we would like, and maybe also that it is more constrained than the alternatives available to prior generations in other civilizations. The liberal society — that is, a society organized to safeguard equal rights and limit the powers of both governments and majorities through institutions of law and consent — has never been best understood as a utopian proposition. It is much better understood as a coping mechanism for those seeking virtue in a fallen world. It calls on us to constrain our expectations of politics, so that we might reach higher in every other facet of our lives.

But constrained expectations of politics do not mean that our politics must be shorn of moral substance or closed off to the pursuit of truth. Some liberal societies have tried to achieve such a vacuous politics — draining the public arena of morally freighted disputes, restricting speech, constraining religious appeals, narrowing the range of permissible arguments. This strategy has not worked well for them, because it is rooted in a misunderstanding of the promise of liberalism. That promise does not rest on proscribing belief and expression but on proscribing domination. It imagines a public arena built for persuasion, and therefore precisely for energetic arguments about the most important human questions.

The United States has always been an exception even among liberal nations for prioritizing the preconditions for such a constructively contentious public life. Our constitutional protections of speech, religion, assembly, and the press are unique in the world. And they mean that our ideal of social peace is far from quiet. On the contrary, it assumes that quiet is a mark of oppression and can only be achieved by force. Charlie Kirk made this point himself, saying at one of his campus appearances: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens.”

Exactly.

Audrey Fahlberg reports on the movement impact of Kirk’s murder:

Those who knew Kirk personally say he excelled in all the areas that make someone an influential political operative, from fundraising and public speaking to social media strategy and grassroots advocacy. But he also carved out a unique identity in refusing to isolate himself within solely Republican circles and only engage with people who agreed with him politically. His entire project revolved around engaging people with whom he disagreed for the express purpose of persuading young people to join the conservative cause.

Now, that influential and inimitable force is gone, in an instant, from the conservative movement — making his loss all the more profound for those involved in it.

People who knew Kirk describe him as a sincerely religious and family-oriented father of two with a knack for remembering names and faces, as well as a supremely loyal friend who constantly did favors for others without expecting anything in return.

“He recruited me to get into politics instead of going to medical school,” said Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.), who worked for Turning Point USA as director of Hispanic engagement before becoming the first alumna of the group to be elected to Congress.

The late Kirk stood out from other influential Republican political figures in his tireless dedication to his college-campus-focused mission, says Trump world political operative Andy Surabian, a friend of Kirk who says he spoke with him via phone call or text almost every day for the last five or so years. “He knew he could make a lot more money doing other things, taking all his political connections and relationships to the business world or Silicon Valley,” Surabian said in an interview with National Review. “But what really drove Charlie wasn’t money. It was God, and it was his family, and it was his friends.”

And he always found ways to uplift young conservatives in his orbit, even when Turning Point took off as a successfully political organization and he became a household name, people who knew him from a young age said. . . .

Kirk’s murder marks a dark chapter in American politics. And yet his former colleagues insist that his assassination has hardened the right’s resolve, citing tens of thousands of requests to start Turning Point high school and college campus chapters as a sign that his legacy will live on.

John Yoo pens a thorough defense of John Bolton:

Long before President Trump stitched Make America Great Again onto a red cap, John Bolton had stitched it into conservative American foreign policy. Without Bolton, the Trump Doctrine would not be what it is today: a coherent strategy that helped unite the coalition that won the 2024 elections. If not for Bolton’s intellectual influence, wielded over decades, it might be Trump who would be sitting at home writing his memoirs, not Bolton.

Nevertheless, the administration has chosen to persecute Bolton, who served as national security adviser in the first Trump term and has since become an outspoken critic. In late August, the FBI searched Bolton’s Maryland home and Washington, D.C., office, reportedly for evidence of classified information. They seized laptops, smartphones, memory drives, boxes of his “printed daily activities,” a white binder labeled “Statements and Reflections to Allied Strikes,” and folders marked “Trump I–IV.” As seems to mysteriously happen with the FBI and political cases — including the August 2022 FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home — television news crews quickly appeared on scene to provide breathless coverage.

For all the drama, the Justice Department had offered no official explanation for the raid. But on Friday, the FBI released the affidavit that supported its application for a search warrant. It revealed that investigators partly based their case on years-old intelligence suggesting that a foreign adversary — most likely Iran — had hacked Bolton’s AOL email account while he was in office. Although large portions of the affidavit are blacked out, the visible portions point to foreign espionage — not any allegation of misconduct by Bolton.

Most unredacted portions of the affidavit focus instead on the old fight over Bolton’s 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened. It refers to exchanges between a career national security staffer and Bolton’s counsel about modifying passages that might have contained classified information. The NSC staff cleared the manuscript, but a political appointee tried to keep it secret. Bolton went to court (as the law permitted) and prevailed. A federal judge approved the publication. Its portrayal of a president uninterested in and unknowledgeable about foreign affairs — except when they served his personal interests — quickly became a bestseller. . . .

Considering Bolton an enemy, not a friend, ignores his central role in developing what has become MAGA foreign policy. Commentators often label Bolton a “hawk” who favors war for its own sake, but that caricature grossly misrepresents his thought. Bolton was talking about sovereignty before it was cool and was attacking globalization before JD Vance was even thinking of writing his own memoirs. As an assistant secretary in the Reagan State Department, Bolton resisted efforts to cede power to supranational bodies. He insisted that the United States should use its military, political, and economic power to defend its own security and pursue its own interests. He fought against the United Nations, not only because it created an illusion of global security, but also because it had been captured by anti-American opponents. “There is no United Nations,” Bolton declared in 1994. “There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along.”

The winner of the 2025 Buckley Essay Contest is James Eustis, a junior at Washington and Lee University. You can read his winning essay right here:

While the scale of the impact of artificial intelligence is debatable, there is no doubt that automation will continue to replace jobs. The real question is how society will choose to respond: Will we restrict technological progress and rely on the government to preserve existing professions, or will we trust the free market to adapt as it has done successfully throughout history?

In 1880, more than half of all Americans worked in agriculture. Today, agriculture and related industries make up only 10.4 percent of U.S. employment. In a centrally planned and protectionist economy, bureaucrats and elected officials would see the consistent decline in agricultural occupations as a problem. They would perhaps attempt to combat this trend with government tools such as price floors on agricultural products, trade barriers, and restrictions on new technology. After all, those millions of Americans who may lose their farm jobs are voters, and politicians might face their own personal unemployment crisis if they fail to respond to their constituents’ demands.

Such policies, however well intentioned, would stifle innovation. Artificially higher food prices, intended to keep a small number of people employed, would harm consumers. They would also divert labor and capital away from other, naturally productive sectors, slowing overall economic growth. In this example, thankfully, the free market was largely, albeit not entirely, preserved. Agricultural innovation was allowed to develop. This resulted in today’s economy, in which more food is produced per hour of labor than ever before.

To find similar examples, one does not have to look to professions as timeless as agriculture. Typing pools, common in the middle of the 20th century, have been effectively phased out of the modern American economy. Skilled professions that people spent their entire lives mastering, such as individual shoemaking, have almost entirely disappeared. Yet, unemployment has historically remained low, and the living standards of the average American have skyrocketed. Workers have adapted, moving to new sectors and learning skills that further benefit the economy. As we face new technological revolutions, American policymakers would be well advised to remember this lesson and allow free market innovation to flourish. . . .

Technological disruption is one of the most dramatic and large-scale methods that entrepreneurs can use to gain an advantage over their competitors. As the fall of Kodak cameras proved, failure to embrace technological revolutions can upend industry giants. Central planning, on the other hand, results in products and services that are not tailored to the consumer. Rather, under a centrally planned system, economic production is directed by government actors who have little personal incentive to provide the best possible result to consumers.

CODA

Here’s some Billy Cobham for a change of pace. Have a pleasant one.