The Killing of Charlie Kirk

On the tragedy and what might happen next.

Charlie Kirk had just passed the microphone to an interlocutor when the crack of a rifle silenced the murmuring throng of students that gathered to see him at Utah Valley University beneath the noon sun on a clear day. It was the first stop on his American Comeback Tour, and the last. For a stunned second that dragged on, the crowd watched Kirk recoil as blood spurted from the hole in his neck while his body locked into a fencing pose. Then all hell broke loose. Someone had just assassinated one of the most prominent political activists in the United States.

What did Kirk mean to us? That depends a lot on who you ask. His death sparked a deluge of nasty rhetoric, with some on the left callously celebrating, and some on the right calling for burning whatever bridges with liberals one might have in their life. Others went further and, directly or indirectly, declared that violent tit-for-tat reprisals are inevitable or even necessary.

I knew Charlie for a few years. We first met through the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowship program. Whatever disagreements we had then and later, he was always amiable in private. Fundamentally, he was a loving husband and a good father. Certain people are litigating his record, evaluating whether the weight of his peccadillos would tip a scale against a feather. I don’t think that matters right now. I don’t care that we came down on different sides in the end. There is a video making the rounds of Charlie with his little girl, shopping for toys, and he speaks to her the same way I speak to my girls. But she will never hear his voice again outside of recordings.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, a former Republican and frequent critic of MAGA, reflected on the incident to a group of students at the University of Southern California and said, “I was thinking about his children. They will only be reading about him now, instead of him reading to them bedtime stories.” Does that break your heart? It did mine.

And as much anger as Kirk’s killing stirred up, I do not recall a time when I saw so many people from both sides of the aisle acknowledging that something terrible is happening in this country, and that it affects us all. Schwarzenegger wasn’t the only high-profile celebrity who otherwise dislikes MAGA to mourn him. In an interview, the very liberal Jamie Lee Curtis weepingly called Charlie a “man of faith” and said she hoped his beliefs provided him with some measure of comfort during the final moments of his life. In the immediate aftermath of those awful events, as others used their platforms to insist that America was splitting at the seams, college Republican and Democrat groups issued joint statements condemning political violence in shows of solidarity that were nearly drowned out by the rancor on social media, fueled by moronic voices not only on the left but also on the right.

After the socialist magazine Jacobin denounced all forms of extremism and called Kirk’s death a tragedy, Blaze Media podcaster “Auron MacIntyre” declared that sentiment to be in bad faith, essentially arguing that people who do not share his political views are incapable of expressing genuine sympathy.

MacIntyre is one of the worst offenders, working hard to enshroud his audience in ignorance and impotent anger. He would have them believe that people on the left, liberals included, are not able to feel human emotions like sorrow or experience empathy. Take that to its logical conclusion, and where do you find yourself? Abstracting millions of people—friends, family, neighbors—into an ideological, mortal enemy that cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with. What happens, then, if you really believe that? Of course, MacIntyre would recoil from the logical conclusion here, in part because he does not actually think through the words or much of anything for that matter. This is a fundamentally unserious person living out a fake warrior persona under a fake name from behind a microphone who cannot defend any of his ideas or rhetoric without effete snark and smarm and whataboutism. Fortunately, most people in this country are better Americans than MacIntyre and are capable of rising above the brain-destroying partisanship he peddles for a living as someone whose personal life and persona have no meaningful connection to his barbarian put-ons.

In The New York Times, the liberal columnist Ezra Klein wrote that Kirk practiced “politics in exactly the right way,” and added that liberalism “could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.” Several of his staunchest young rivals published tearful videos, extending condolences to his family and instructing anyone who celebrated or justified Kirk’s death to unfollow them. I bring all these things to your attention because, unlike people such as MacIntyre, I believe in Americans, and I believe the above commiseration is proof that we are still a fundamentally decent people, that the gap between conservatives and liberals is not so unbridgeable as vituperative talking heads make it seem. I should know, I was one of them. I fueled the divide. I was a bomb thrower, and I regret that, because if we are going to find a way through this, then we are all going to have to take a look in the mirror. Yes, Kirk’s killer, Tyler Robinson, had left-wing views, something that so many prominent voices on the right have grabbed hold of and used as a weapon to attack half the country to make it seem as if the time has come to drape an Iron Curtain along ideological lines between neighbors.

Anyone who is, in fact, glorifying Kirk’s death ought to be ashamed of themselves—but to take that repulsive behavior and ascribe it to millions of Americans, to attempt to convince your audience that every last liberal is lying in wait to slit conservative throats and drink their blood, is insane slander of the worst kind. Indeed, I would wager that these buffoons do not believe it themselves, that it is just a performance, a means of racing to the top of the commentariat trash heap. Grift or delusion, the result is the same: the individuals with the largest platforms are contributing to poison coursing through the veins of the public discourse. How many of these purveyors of rage couldn’t care less about the killing of Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman? How many of them have commented on Desmond Holly? On the same day Kirk was killed, 16-year-old Holly took a gun to school in the next state over in Colorado and attempted to carry out a mass shooting. According to the police, Holly had been “radicalized” by an “extremist network” online. His social media footprint indicated support for neo-Nazism, and he dressed up like one of the killers from the 1999 Columbine High School incident. I believe that Holly, like Robinson, suffered from something other than the wrong politics, something that doesn’t fit neatly inside the prefabricated boxes that hucksters would like to package them with for their audiences.

I raise these points not to be a contrarian, but because I worry that anger will be used to provide the pretext for increased government censorship. The right is so blind with rage that it cannot see beyond its stamping feet, but it got a clue of what might be to come when Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated that she would use Kirk’s death as a pretext for cracking down on “hate speech,” which threatens to be conflated with criticism of the incumbent ruling party.

The right criticized Bondi but completely ignored the fact that Donald Trump explicitly defended her remarks the following day to a reporter and implied that, indeed, “hate speech” in his mind is speech that is critical of him and his government. He reiterated that view later, telling a reporter that Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, should consider going after the broadcasting licenses of media organizations that give him “bad publicity or press.” That comment came after Carr pressured ABC into canning Jimmy Kimmel, supposedly because he made some insensitive or factually incorrect remarks in the wake of Kirk’s death. Defending Kimmel was something that I wouldn’t normally do, even if I were being waterboarded, but the reality is that Kimmel was just a trial run for a possible crackdown on speech and expression that used Kirk’s death as the cover. Trump praised Carr afterward and, again, suggested that other networks might get the hammer next, but dropped the pretense that it would have anything to do with Kirk or political incitement. This is not a left versus right issue. It comes down to whether you believe people ought to be able to criticize their government or not. Trump does not, because he is in charge of the government, and he has no qualms about using the tragedy with which we are all reckoning to advance an ulterior agenda.

If Americans are going to get through this in one piece, then they will somehow have to learn to live together while not allowing their fear and anger to be used against them, they will have to reject the voices of the pundits who want to turn neighbor against neighbor, and the politicians who would ask them to surrender their independence for the illusion of safety.

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