Right and Wrong Answers to the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Security is our greatest freedom. Let's not lose it.

In the past forty-eight hours, I have been bombarded by media and punditry relating to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Some people from across the political spectrum had good answers to his assassination.

Ezra Klein, a liberal columnist for the New York Times, wrote an analysis of Kirk's life and legacy. Kirk's longtime political rival, Klein acknowledged that he does not know Kirk and that he makes for a poor eulogist, but he conceded an intense respect for the organization he had built and its effectiveness in rallying the long-out-of-reach young conservative. "A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy," he comments. And Kirk certainly had a taste for disagreement. He ends on a harrowing note about how liberal democracy is threatened when anyone's ability to participate is threatened. "We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that." His concluding sentence: "We are all safe, or none of us are."

This is a good response to Charlie Kirk's death: poignant, tempered, and startling.

J.J. McCullough, a centrist YouTuber, takes a more skeptical view of Kirk and his death, questioning the extent to which he was unique or even interesting. A culture critic first and foremost, McCullough argues that the interesting thing about Kirk's assassination has been the melodrama of the reaction and the extent to which it has been defined by a fashionable apocalypticism and based on the assumption that American democracy is uniquely fragile. He sees this reaction as cynical and opportunist, questioning the extent to which political rhetoric contributes to political violence and points to rising rates of mental illness as a more probable cause.

This is a good response to Charlie Kirk's death: heterodox, critical, and thought-provoking.

Mark Antonio Wright, the executive editor of the famously conservative National Review, focuses his pen on his own faction, exhorting conservatives to consider the best outlet for their anger over Kirk's assassination. Beginning with an excerpt from a poem by William Butler Yeats, he argues that America is facing a crisis of political violence that treads in both directions and that we should remind ourselves that extremism remains a marginal position. Americans are not violent lunatics, and now is the time to be Christ-like, the time for Lincoln's party to follow in the path of Lincoln and seek friends, not enemies. "Tell me a more efficacious path, and I’m ready to listen. But I doubt you’ll find one," he says.

This too is a good response to Charlie Kirk's death: necessary, clear, and moral.

I would recommend all of these articles, each good in its own right, but I would also point out what these authors do not do. They do not:

• Turn a contentious political commentator from a man into a saint.

• Make thinly veiled justifications for the murder of a person who did little more than practice those same rights that every American practices every day.

• Attempt to deploy some rhetorical sleight of hand to distract from the event.

• Use this event as an opportunity to make tangential arguments or shill for a cause.

In the lesser political commentary of the past forty-eight hours, I have seen too many engage in these sorts of arguments. I spent yesterday evening convincing an acquaintance not to “arm up” to protect himself against the radical left. I woke up this morning to a conservative commentator yelling at an NPR host for daring to call the recently deceased controversial. I spent much of this afternoon scrolling through the Instagram stories of friends and acquaintances who indulged in justification and apologism for murder.

I’m going to take a moment here to be uncharacteristically forward: If your first reaction to this guy's death was to say that this will make a convincing argument for conservatism, gun control, or the children of Palestine, I think you're a smug moron. If you just happened to awake from a long social media slumber today to post about a random school shooting in Colorado or your favorite Bible verse, I don't believe you’re acting in good faith. If you think that “Live by the sword, die by the sword” is an appropriate aphorism to apply to a man who never wielded a sword against another man, I think your stupidity might border on evil.

My mom always told me that I ought to stand for something lest I fall for anything. My stance is simple: I don't care who Charlie Kirk was. I don't think it makes an inch of difference whether he was a nice guy, a mean guy, a family man, an abusive patriarch, a good Christian, or a shallow puritan. I am selfish. I want to live in a nice, safe middle-class society where random acts of violence are rare, despised, and persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, as created by an elected legislature and as enforced by an even-handed justice system. I do not want to live in a society where life and death are decided by roving vigilante moralists, unconstrained by democratic processes. In a word, I want a society where everyone is treated equally. I want a society where everyone knows where the red lines are and what will happen if they cross them. I do not want a society where giving a speech on a university campus is a dice roll.

When someone does something unexpected and heinous to another, it undermines this basic equality. Crime creates fear, insecurity, and paranoia. It undermines the social bonds that make life meaningful, and it makes life worse for everyone.

When people make bad arguments about Kirk's murder, when they turn him into a martyr, a villain, or pretend to dodge the matter altogether, they miss this more essential point. They miss that we live in a society bound by certain rules that ensure that we can live amongst each other without killing each other. They miss that we live in a society that strives for legal equality independent of each person's individual judgments. They miss that this beautiful, flawed thing we have is tenuous and rare.

Globally, there are astonishingly few societies that work as well as ours. We live in the oldest significant republic in the world, and one that has successfully reformed itself to become more democratic over time.¹ We are wealthy beyond most people's wildest dreams, with a majority of Americans falling into the global upper class. Nearly a fifth of all immigrants come here as opposed to any other country. Our government, our wealth, and our prestige are exceptional, and it is our privilege that we can vote in the world’s most important elections, order whatever we want to be delivered to us at any time, and watch all the most popular movies without subtitles.

Let's not soil this thing with petty violence.

1. Not that San Marino is insignificant, but there’s a difference in scale.