Charlie Kirk was assassinated while sitting on a panel in front of hundreds of students at Utah Valley University. During his short life, the founder of Turning Point USA debated hundreds of young people on any topic they chose, and he did it in cheery, civil, good faith.
Mere minutes after the shooting was reported, MSNBC’s Katy Tur referred to Kirk as a “divisive” figure, strongly intimating that his positions precipitated blowback. Guest Matthew Dowd, whose brain has been irreparably fried by partisanship, skipped any intimation, vilifying Kirk as a dispenser of “hate speech” which was inevitably going to boomerang in violence.
Conservatives are apparently responsible for both right-wing and left-wing violence.
Now, of course, every political position uttered by a pundit, reporter, activist, politician, or average American is by its very nature divisive. If we didn’t disagree, it wouldn’t be politics in the first place. Kirk’s opinions were no more contentious than Tur’s or Dowd’s. Though only conservative ideas, it seems, are framed in this way by the media. “Far right.” “Controversial.” “Divisive.” As if any deviation from the left-wing orthodoxy is itself something hateful and intolerable.
But even if Kirk had been especially divisive, it’s irrelevant. Any American, any decent person, really, wouldn’t offer justifications or excuses for violence against a person offering opinions. The political space is where Americans are supposed to air their grievances and disagreements.
It’s difficult to govern my emotions even though the facts regarding the shooter are not yet known. But we are already in crisis when a not-insignificant faction of the progressive Democrats celebrates the murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione, as if he were a revolutionary heartthrob. When I was young, students only wore T-shirts of murderous degenerates like Che Guevara. We live in a time when a “Free Palestine” activist executes two people in cold blood on the street in DC, and “influencers” with millions of followers celebrate. Twice in the past year, someone tried to kill the president. It is not normal.
Neither side indeed has a monopoly on political violence. It is also true that in the United States, the left has always been more prone to use it, from the anarchists of the early century to the 60s and 70s, when there were virtually daily instances of left-wing political terrorism, to the radicalization of the modern left. It is always in the throes of hysteria. If you keep telling your supporters that average political opponents aren’t merely wrong but evil, sooner or later, some of them will start believing you.
CHARLIE KIRK’S HONORABLE LEGACY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE
There is something seriously wrong when a third of American college students believe that it’s acceptable to use violence to stop speech on campus. A Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression poll found that 15% believe that violence was always or sometimes acceptable to shut down speech, while another 19% said it is only “rarely acceptable.” This, remember, is the generation that was taught that speech they dislike is tantamount to violence. There is no evidence that we will be more civil in the future.
Through all of this, we shouldn’t forget the personal dimensions of a married 31-year-old with two young children being gunned down in public. It is gut-wrenching to contemplate what the family is and will go through. Yet, it is also heartbreaking for us that an American engaged in peaceful free expression has been shot down. Whether you agreed with him or not, Kirk epitomized the best of the American civic tradition.
