The fallout from Charlie Kirk's assassination could scare people out of the shared civic space. Not us. We believe now is exactly the time for robust debate and fearless journalism.
Welcome to the first edition of Golden State Report, a newsletter about California culture, politics and policy, all filtered through the lens of the city it calls home, Los Angeles. This newsletter will typically arrive in your inbox every Tuesday and Friday, but given the fast-moving events of late, we’re sending this to you a day early.
Angelenos, Californians and all Americans find themselves at a grave moment — one of escalating rhetoric and actions targeting facts, norms, dissent and our ability to understand, let alone shape, the common good.
As I write this, President Trump and others have seized on the reprehensible assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to stoke the chaos and division. We occupy one country but we increasingly inhabit civic spaces cut off from each other, our bubbles inflated by cutthroat politics, partisan media and algorithms. What’s left of our shared ground is becoming desolate.
Just this week, Karen Attiah, a columnist at the Washington Post, got ejected from it for offering the kind of provocative punditry newspaper opinion pages used to defend. MSNBC cut ties with commentator Matt Dowd for a similar offense the day of Kirk’s assassination. Their terminations fit into a larger campaign to silence people in education, medicine and other lines of work who have made crass statements or shown insufficient reverence to Kirk.
It’s bad enough when commentators on national issues face marginalization for doing their jobs. My fear for us locally, however, is that the shrinking of the shared civic space and those allowed to speak in it will be felt much more acutely in communities where governments and other local bodies already operate with less scrutiny. I’ll never forget what former Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson told me — then a young journalist — during the California budget crisis of 2003: When the federal and state governments catch a cold, counties and cities get the flu.
Our communities are where real politics happens, where services are delivered and where the outcomes of elections are implemented. The virtual public square is where we work out housing policy, determine which sidewalks and streets get repaved and educate our children; it’s where we mingle in civic life, where we should begin to understand that those who disagree with us aren’t abstractions but people a lot like us who believe earnestly that they’re making their communities (and the country) a better place.
The fallout from the Kirk assassination could obliterate what’s left of that space. Now, we risk being frightened out of public life at all levels, either by the kind of rampant gun violence that claimed Kirk and Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, or campaigns to exact revenge. This is exactly the wrong response, because a vibrant, healthy civil society serves as a bulwark against political violence.
Now is precisely the moment for fearless journalism – the kind where facts inform opinions and not the other way around, where the truth is amplified no matter the inconvenience to powerful actors. It’s a time for voices from people who do the reporting and check the facts, not rumor mongers eager to blame entire classes of people for a single murder.
Here at Golden State Report, we aspire to help strengthen our corner of civil society as journalists doing what we know to the best of our ability. We believe that the work of honest reporting, checking the facts and putting everything into context is crucial to the future of our city, state and nation.
Because the consequences of abandoning that approach have become painfully clear.
