Today’s blog post was supposed to be a more light-hearted post looking at various nonsense from around social media. That’s still coming this weekend, but today I want to talk about something more serious and more political. If you’d rather not read about gun violence and illiberalism, I don’t blame you. It’s a bummer. Here’s a baby rabbit with a grocery cart full of carrots for your trouble and I’ll see you at the next post. With that said, let’s talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed yesterday attending an event at Utah Valley University.
After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last year, I wrote a post called What is the purpose of liberalism? I’m going to quote from it heavily here, and frankly you may just want to go back and read that post as context.
When attacks like this happen, the first and most obvious thing that every political figure does is to condemn the violence. I think this is the morally correct choice, but it’s worth unpacking why.
Hundreds of years ago, pre-Enlightenment, Europeans discovered that they didn’t really agree on the nature of Christianity. Some were Catholic and followed the pope. Others were defecting to newer, hipper versions of Protestantism. Their solution to this problem was to murder each other.
It’s easy to forget from our modern, first-world vantage point that these religious wars were brutal and unrelenting. When Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door, he kicked off almost two hundred straight years of barbaric religious violence. The French Wars of Religion. The Danish Count’s Feud. The Thirty Years War. The Hessian War. The Dutch Eighty Years War. The Nine Years War. The English Civil War. The Swedish War of Deposition. The Strasbourg Bishop’s War. The defining feature of European history for around 200 years is Catholics and Protestants killing each other.
The world today is so peaceful relative the past that most of us don’t have a good sense for how brutal and violent the world was for most of human history. Violence was not an exception, it was the rule. And it wasn’t just that wars happened constantly, it was the nature of those wars:
These were not gentlemanly affairs. These wars routinely involved genocidal massacres of entire towns/villages for picking the wrong religion. Soldiers paraded around enemy corpses as trophies. One side would execute the other by ripping their beating hearts out of their chests while still alive. Nobody was having a good time.
Enter Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism proposed the solution that both Catholics and Protestants would cease killing each other, and each person (or town, or kingdom) could choose for itself which religion they’d like to follow. Please don’t underrate how revolutionary this idea is because it seems normal now. For most of human history, ‘kill the outsider’ was a cherished tradition. But Europe was able to escape the cycle and miraculously stop the violence.
Liberalism formalized ideas like freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and governing via the consent of the governed. Catholics and Protestants still didn’t like each other much, and often tried to harass or discriminate against each other. Over time, liberalism developed norms to prevent that as well - political freedoms, tolerance, equal treatment before the law, basic human rights, etc.
Small-l liberalism at its core is a piece of civilizational technology to prevent civil wars. It’s the social contract that we settle disputes through ideas and laws, rather than at the end of a gun.
Because I am a liberal and because I understand the core value of liberalism, I am always aghast at acts of political violence. I condemn them without hesitation. I closed that piece with a plea not to take for granted what generations of liberalism have won for us:
As much as you can, resist the hysteria. Refuse to participate in it, refuse to make the polarization worse. The purpose of liberalism is to allow us to disagree with someone without discriminating against them, without harassing them, without killing them. It’s a precious thing, perhaps the most precious thing our civilization has achieved. Every time you break bread in peace with an outsider, every time a Catholic and Protestant shake hands, it’s a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.
Unfortunately, American society seems to be forgetting the purpose of liberalism. We’re backsliding into a new era of political violence. In the past few years we’ve seen:
A plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan
The storming of the capitol by an armed mob on January 6th
Pipe bombs set outside both the DNC and RNC headquarters
The assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare
Multiple assassination attempts on Donald Trump
The assassination and shooting of state-level legislators in Minnesota
The attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi and attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi
The murder of Israeli embassy staffers by a pro-Palestine gunman
Shootings at the homes of New Mexico legislators
The attempted kidnapping of the mayor of Memphis
The firebombing of the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania
An anti-vax political shooting at the CDC headquarters
And now, the assassination of Charlie Kirk
I’m worried about the state of American society. Our freedom from political violence was won over hundreds of years, and there’s no iron law that says that it’s permanent.
We’re in a dangerous place right now. And any honest accounting of how we got here has to include people like Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk was not a good person. He did not deserve to be killed for his lack of virtue, but I won’t gloss over how vile his beliefs were or the massive negative impact he had on American society. He was an avatar for everything wrong with modern politics, a dishonest huckster at the best of times and one of the foulest and most cynical bigots in America at the worst of times.
I don’t want to focus on the many areas of policy disagreement I have with Kirk. That post would be far too long and far too pointless of an exercise for someone who’s now dead. Instead, I want to focus on a single area that’s relevant at this moment - Charlie Kirk was part of the machine that has been legitimizing political violence in America.
Kirk is obviously best known for boosting Donald Trump, a man who suggested that ‘second amendment people’ take matters into their own hands against Hillary Clinton, who asked police to shoot protestors and advocated for shooting migrants. But beyond his promotion of Trump, Kirk himself has also told his very large podcast audience that a ‘patriot’ should bail out Paul Pelosi’s attacker. He heavily promoted a book that called for the systemic mass murder of leftists and used Pinochet and Franco’s fascist regimes as positive examples. He likes to muse about staging public executions and bringing children to watch them. He personally organized buses to send people to the January 6th insurrection. Last month he called for the full military occupation of American cities. He used language like ‘civil war’ and emphasized how violent the left was and how conservatives needed to be ready.
In the coming days, many people will laud Kirk for his ‘debates’, and it’s true that he did travel around to college campuses to debate students across the country. But it would be a mistake to paint him as a champion for non-violent engagement. Kirk was never truly interested in the democratic exchange of ideas, in good faith discourse and understanding. He was in it to dunk on 19 year-old sociology majors, he was farming clips to use on social media. And Charlie Kirk has long flirted with violence in his rhetoric and his actions.
Ironically, one of the few moments of honesty in Charlie Kirk’s political life comes on this exact topic. Comments Kirk made in 2023 have been making the rounds on social media in the wake of his death. The quote:
“"I think it's worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment to protect our other God given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe."
Let’s give him credit - this is an honest look at the tradeoffs involved in American gun policy. Far too many gun rights activists like to pretend that America experiences outlier levels of gun violence for some other mysterious reason that has nothing to do with our incredibly permissive stance towards gun control. That’s nonsense. The reason America has far more gun violence than any other rich nation is because we have far more guns and a far looser set of regulations governing firearms.
The dishonest approach is to equivocate, to deflect to other issues, to pretend like a country with hundreds of millions of guns floating around can somehow end gun violence through other means. The honest approach, and the one that Kirk takes, is to admit that we’re going to have gun deaths but say that you think the trade off is worth it. It’s at least intellectually defensible to say that the freedom to bear arms will have serious negative side effects, but those side effects are an acceptable trade in order to safe guard that freedom. Violence, according to this position, is worth it.
This is an honest position that should be considered seriously. But having considered it seriously, I believe it’s seriously wrong.
Charlie Kirk had two children under the age of 4. They will grow up never truly knowing their father. Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota legislator assassinated earlier this year, also had children who will never get to speak to their mother again. The American conception of right to bear arms, with its unfathomably light touch and its inability to keep guns out of the hands of maniacs, was not worth their lives. It is not worth the lives of the more than forty thousand people that die every year from gun violence in America.
We should be clear about the scale of the problem here. In a turn that would be comedic if it wasn’t so tragic, the one thing that might push news of the Kirk shooting off the front page is a school shooting in Colorado that happened within an hour of Kirk’s shooting. There is no other wealthy nation that deals with gun violence at anywhere near this scale, and it’s because our gun policies are deeply broken. Charlie Kirk said that violent deaths were a necessary price to pay for the freedom to bear arms, but he’s wrong. His life and the lives of millions of Americans affected by gun violence are worth more than the ability to buy guns on demand.
Whenever someone calls for gun control in the wake of a tragic shooting, they are inevitably accused of ‘politicizing’ the tragedy. Now is not the time, say the angry comments.1 This is an absurd argument. In America we literally cannot go a week without a mass shooting of some kind. In 2025 so far there have been 309 mass shootings in the US, defined as shootings with four or more injuries or deaths. It is always the time to talk about gun control because we are always killing each other with guns.
I will fully admit I’m not a policy expert in this area. I don’t know what specific steps would be best. I’d welcome a real discussion about red flag laws, universal background checks, magazine restrictions, mandatory waiting periods, ghost guns, and more. Perhaps some of these ideas would be helpful and others would not. But you don’t have to be a policy expert to look at the current situation and see how deeply broken it is. There has to be a middle ground between ‘nobody can have a gun’ and the nightmare millions of us are forced to live through now.
We shouldn’t have to live in a society where legislators, activists, and everyday citizens are routinely gunned down in broad daylight. But we’re at risk of entering the American version of The Troubles, and we’re doing it because social media is melting our brains, because our political commentators play fast and loose with calls for political violence, and because we have incredibly loose regulations on firearms. The best way to honor the victims of gun violence isn’t with words, tributes, or flags lowered to half-mast. The best way to honor them is to fix the problem. That will require a serious conversation about gun control. And it will require an honest assessment of the people who’ve embraced calls to violence (both on the right, like Kirk, and on the left).
We desperately need to lower the temperature and step back from this ledge, but I don’t know that we’re capable of doing it right now. Trump is still president and is almost certain to continue promoting political violence and a macho, tough-guy politics. The same social media systems that reward conflict and escalation are still in place. College students are increasingly comfortable with using violence to suppress speech. I’m afraid this might just be what America is now. We, like Charlie Kirk, can’t help but flirt with violence. We accept it as a side effect of the things we really want. We’re a rich, violent nation that is slowly forgetting what liberalism is for and descending further and further away from what we should be.
Ironically, one of the last tweets Kirk ever sent was a post saying explicitly that politicizing shootings is a good idea.
This take is refreshing. Yes political violence is bad no matter who does it or why they do it. But it’s been frustrating to see so many people gloss over the plain fact that Trump and his allies, including people like Kirk, have been relentlessly turning up the temperature of political rhetoric for a decade now, which has normalized extreme rhetoric on both sides.
On gun control, I agree with you, but the politics of the issue are brutal. I don’t see how pro-gun control Democratic Party wins back the senate, for example.
I know you want to keep this contemporary, but you could easily add Giffords, all the school shooting, ‘I don’t like Mondays’, Vegas, Brietbart, going postal, Reagan, the Kennedy’s and more going all the way back.
This is America.