Attendees hold candles during a candlelight vigil and prayer event for Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.David Ryder/Getty Images
The right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk has become a casualty of a version of America he believed could be resisted, simply, with words.
Mr. Kirk built a political empire based on the premise that ideas could lead to great victories; that a high school kid could write an op-ed for Breitbart and, just four years later, speak on stage at the Republican National Convention, and then earn a direct line to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Mr. Kirk would talk to anyone, as he demonstrated at his campus events run by Turning Point USA, the conservative activist organization he started as a teenager and turned into a multimillion-dollar organization. He would be grilled on his beliefs about his MAGA alliances, about gender transitions for youth, about the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, about abortion, about drugs and social disorder. And he would answer – sometimes glibly, sometimes unsatisfactorily to the individual holding the other microphone, but always, seemingly, in good faith.
Mr. Kirk believed in an America that could tolerate even the most extreme forms of political speech; that the country’s institutions were robust enough to withstand even the most inflammatory political dialogue. His faith, it seems, was misguided. Mr. Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University Wednesday, at the age of 31. He leaves behind a wife and two children.
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The America that Mr. Kirk believed in was a vision of a foregone time, akin to how an individual might look at a dying relative in a hospital bed and still see a gregarious aunt serving cocktails at a holiday party. This aunt has been sick before – political assassinations are certainly not a new phenomenon in the United States – but never before has she been so gravely ill.
It’s not simply that attempted and successful political assassinations are becoming more routine: two attempts have been made on Mr. Trump’s life, Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in June, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house was set ablaze in April, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed on a New York street in December, there was a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, and so on.
But it’s also, and perhaps even more alarming, that the American public is growing more apathetic toward, at best – and thirsty for, at worst – this sort of political violence. Seemingly normal people openly celebrated the news that Mr. Trump had been shot last summer; others attempted to justify the assassination of the CEO of an insurance company, noting people are mad about health care costs. A sick America is one where nearly anyone can get a gun and attempt to shoot another person because of his or her beliefs, statements or ideas. A dying one is one where a meaningful proportion of the population believes those actions to be justified.
In the hours after his death, Mr. Kirk’s many supporters insisted that the assassin ultimately failed; that his killing will spawn “a million more Charlie Kirks” to carry on his message. But the reality could turn out to be much worse than that. Indeed, the effect may be at once to chill the voices of people like Mr. Kirk, who might believe in open dialogue but decide that the personal risk of his type of on-the-ground engagement is too high, while radicalizing others, who could very well reason that if someone will shoot Mr. Kirk simply because of his words, they might as well pursue actions of more tangible influence.
Mr. Trump has already promised action from his administration, vowing to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” A President who has not hesitated to call in the National Guard to patrol cities because of crime and murder on paper will surely have no reservations about taking even more extreme measures when the murder involves a personal friend.
At one of Mr. Kirk’s campus events, he was asked what his goal was in going around to universities and taking tough questions from people who abhorred his political actions and beliefs.
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence, that is when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity,” he replied.
Mr. Kirk might have thought he was offering a warning about the continued erosion of American principles: of free speech, of open dialogue, of a generous interpretation of your political adversary’s intentions. But what he was actually doing was making an observation. People have stopped talking, started shooting and, worst of all, begun excusing. How do you treat a sickness like that?