Charlie Kirk’s Killing: What It Reveals About Us
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a landmark moment in American life, like JFK’s — because everyone saw it. People watched. People reacted immediately. This event forces a choice. How you respond tells everyone where your moral compass points.
Laura Perkins was particularly on point with this writing. “I wasn’t this shaken when they tried to assassinate President Trump. Presidential assassinations are awful but have happened in the United States. But to murder in cold blood a man involved in politics … described him was shocking. The next ones in line are the voters. Think about that.”
The alleged shooter acted like it was a joke.
Leaked messages show him joking about the shooting in private Discord groups.
What’s scarier is how many on the left mirror that attitude. From The New York Times to Jacobin, you can read condemnations — and also find the rhetoric that paved the road to this moment.
Those outlets helped make it normal for average Democrat voters to call Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians Nazis, fascists, or existential threats. The shooter’s words match the language now routine on the left.
The Associated Press complained about this in the aftermath of the shooting in a piece headlined, “Graphic video of Kirk shooting was everywhere online, showing how media gatekeeper role has changed.” They wanted to keep the video from the public, but instead it spread like wildfire.
Everyone saw what happened. And everyone reacted. For too many people, that reaction revealed something ugly: family, friends, coworkers, old classmates, and even church leaders either openly supported the assassination or blamed Kirk for being shot. Many others who used to shout about everything went strangely quiet.
The same people who told you “silence is violence” went silent when a political assassination rattled the nation. That slogan was always trash. You can call it cowardice — only violence is violence.
The louder problem is worse. People are doing one of two things. They either blame Charlie Kirk for getting shot, or they shrug and say “punching Nazis is good.” One friend told me she’d been told we needed more events like Charlie Kirk.
If you have a functioning soul, any of those responses is barbaric. Forget the hypocrisy of liberals claiming to be tolerant. Declaring everyone else depraved lets them justify murder in their heads.
Charlie Kirk was not a Nazi, a white supremacist, or some violent radical. He was a hyperactive campus activist. The debate events he ran are old-school conservative outreach — not something new or extreme.
In conservative legal circles we have The Federalist Society, which holds formal debates on campuses. Those debates get the same heat and vitriol the same treatment Kirk often faced. The idea that he “brought this on himself” is absurd.
Put it all together and one ugly conclusion emerges: if your beliefs look like Charlie Kirk’s, it’s become mainstream on the left to dehumanize you as a Nazi or white supremacist. That dehumanization gives moral cover for killings like this.
Everyone I talk to reaches the same bleak conclusion: they have friends, relatives, or neighbors who would be fine if those folks were killed for their beliefs. It sounds extreme, but cheering or excusing Kirk’s murder leads you to that truth.
Some people have gone further — mocking Kirk’s death and even mocking his widow’s speech. Those actions expose the reality: no tolerance, no love of country, no basic decency.
What’s left for those people is pure rage and hatred. If you disagree with them, they’ll cheer your death.
It’s not everyone, of course. But Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a test every nation faces. It’s a pass-or-fail exam for a society’s soul. Fail it, and your claims and demands lose moral weight.
If you fail this test and celebrate your neighbors being killed for political or religious beliefs, don’t be surprised when those neighbors stop risking anything to help you in a crisis. Why help someone who wants you dead?
I worry long-term about this trend. It’s the real path to an unbridgeable divide. When people prefer their political opponents dead, we stand on a dangerous cliff. Abraham Lincoln was correct in saying a nation divided against itself cannot stand.
