We Can’t Let This Be Our Future

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

When Donald Trump was shot last year, I wrote that we were in an “era of close shaves,” as the now-president joined the growing list of political figures — Gabby Giffords, Steve Scalise, Paul Pelosi, Mike Pence — whose lives were threatened but, thankfully, narrowly survived.

It appears our luck is running out.

On Wednesday, the prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at a Utah university. He was 31. Kirk, a close Trump ally and the founder of Turning Point USA, was one of the leading next-generation voices on the right. He leaves behind a wife and two children, who were one and three years old.

Even before Kirk’s tragic killing, there were signs that our era of close shaves was morphing into something darker. In the 14 months since Trump’s assassination attempt, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed in New York; two Israeli embassy employees were killed in Washington, D.C.; and state legislator Melissa Hortman was killed in Minnesota.

The video of Kirk being shot is horrific. I also find this photo, captured by Trent Nelson of the Salt Lake Tribune, to be uniquely chilling:

These young students went to Kirk’s event on Wednesday to participate in political discourse and the free exchange of ideas. Look at how they were forced to leave: running, kneeling, fearing for their lives.

All of us must do everything in our power to prevent this from becoming our new normal. In a democracy, the price of attending a political event and expressing one’s opinions should never be physical danger. If that happens, we all lose, because none of us will be able to speak — or listen — freely.

Kirk’s assassin remains at large, so we know nothing about their motives or their background. I will not be surprised if they turn out to be someone difficult to place on the ideological spectrum, with a mix of views and more signs of mental illness than a firm political attachment.

If this is the case, it will show that there is no group of people — on either side — lying in wait, preparing to cut down their political rivals. But it will make it no less important for political leaders, and everyday citizens, to temper their rhetoric. Everyone has the right to disagree, fiercely, with their political rivals. That is part of being in a democracy. But you should think long and hard before portraying them as an existential threat, if for no other reason than you never know who might be listening, and with what mental challenges.

The easiest way to exit this trap of viewing those you disagree with as more than simply that — people you happen to disagree with — is to spend time with them. Talk with them. Find out about the things you agree on, whether in the realm of politics or far outside of it. Perhaps that experience will end with you finding the person morally irredeemable, but my guess is that you will walk away with an appreciation for their morality, for the fact that they have come to their views honestly, because of a set of experiences or values you might not have considered.

Just like you believe you are arguing strenuously for what’s best for this country, so do they. Once you reach this realization, it will be very easy to continue disagreeing with them. But it will be harder to view them as something foreign, or dangerous, or threatening.

It is a matter of dark, dark irony that Charlie Kirk was one of the few people in the public sphere known for carrying out these conversations: for seeking out people he disagreed with, and encouraging them to attend his events, to question him, to spar with him. In many videos Kirk would post online, you’d see him laughing along with his adversaries — sometimes, even persuading them. That is the sort of discourse we should all try to model now.

Unfortunately, I can’t say with confidence that that’s the direction we’re moving in.

In the hours after Kirk’s death, the algorithm on X presented me with multiple accounts from the left (including this one with more than 1 million followers) earnestly comparing Kirk to Adolf Hitler. This is insane. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 11 million people. Kirk was a public speaker you might have found distasteful. We should all feel lucky to live in a time and place where domestic political leaders are not bringing about mass violence. We should not pretend that we face larger threats than we do, which will sound to some like a larger response is necessary. We all must ground ourselves in the realities and the stakes of our current moment — not because they aren’t high, but because falsely making them out to be higher than they are only invites self-fulfilling prophecy.

Similarly, I was presented with a slew of conservative posters, including members of the U.S. Congress, who asserted that “they” killed Charlie Kirk, as if some nebulous force had conspired to bring about his death, before we’ve learned anything about his killer. This is just as unhelpful. Declaring with certainty (but not evidence) that a specific group is responsible for Kirk’s assassination, or that “THIS IS WAR,” only sends us further towards a tit-for-tat of political violence, in which we are all harmed.

I also saw immediate competitions spring out: Democrats insisting that political violence comes mostly from the right, and Republicans arguing the opposite, as if there are not plenty of tragic examples to go around. President Trump, unfortunately, was one of these voices, using his address after Kirk’s death to list only political violence victims like Thompson and Scalise, when it would have been so easy (and unifying) to then add Giffords, Hortman, and Pelosi. Anyone who tells you that political violence is confined to one side is simply lying to you, and is trying to score political points while hiding from a harder reality.

But, mostly, I saw an outpouring of grief, support, and condolences, from Democrats and Republicans alike. It can be easy to scroll social media, especially in times of tragedy, and forget that most people are normal, and have much healthier relationships with politics than algorithms make it seem.

There are countless surveys suggesting that a distressingly high percentage of Americans excuse political violence. However, in 2022, a group of academics found that the median existing estimate for support of political violence (18.5%) was nearly six times larger than the median estimate they found (2.9%), after accounting for the fact that disengaged respondents often chose an answer randomly when not presented with an “I don’t know” option and the fact that many respondents will express support for violence in general but pull back once offered specific hypotheticals.

When respondents were confronted with searingly specific stories of both Democrats and Republicans committing actual political violence, expressions of support plummeted.

I hope, hope, hope this is the case, just as I hope this study from last year is right that support for political violence fell in the wake of President Trump’s assassination attempt. As much as I worry about the threat political violence, I also worry about what can happen if we overhype that threat and then make it real, because so many people on either side are (falsely) convinced that they have to pre-empt attacks from the other. It is reassuring to see, both in the 2022 hypotheticals and in the real-life case with Trump, that once political violence becomes more real to people, most drop the pretense of supporting it.

This is not the first era of American history to be marred by political violence. In fact, our country has gone through much worse, from the run-up to the Civil War (when there were more than 70 violent incidents between members of Congress) to the 1960s (when three major political leaders were killed in just five years). Inside a moment, it always feels like it is permanent. But new leaders, new norms, new legal regimes — even new crises — have a way of bringing us together.

Even the men who built America were there for such a moment. In his book “Fears of a Setting Sun,” Dennis Rasmussen recounts how many of the Founding Fathers died deeply dispirited about the country they had founded. With partisanship on the rise, many of them expected the U.S. to survive them by only a few years. They were proud of what they had done, but sure it would prove temporary.

“Remember Democracy never lasts long,” John Adams wrote in 1814. “It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.”

Rasmussen’s book, strangely, is an optimistic one, even though it is dedicated to recounting pessimism. Even as our political discourse has coarsened, I have always taken it as a measure of hope that we’ve been here before and climbed out of it, that we had avoided the worst of what was once predicted, even since the very beginning. When someone will bemoan that it’s never been this bad, I’ll often remind them that that’s hard to say when we’re talking only about poisonous political speech, and political violence used to be the norm.

With Charlie Kirk dead at 31, shot down in the very moment he was publicly engaging with someone who disagreed with him politically, I’m not sure that rejoinder works anymore. Predictions of doom generally prove wrong, but they often presage years of pain, even if we ultimately rebound. I fear that might be the case now. Only a small deranged minority support political violence, but all it takes is a small minority — fired up by a much larger faction that they think are cheering them on — to bring us into chaos.

I hope we find leaders who work to prevent that, not fuel it, who know that even if it might feel good, and might win votes, to use the darkest rhetoric possible, it is far from worth it in the long run. And I hope we all model responsible discourse for ourselves, since our leaders will only be as level-headed as the people that elect them.

I hope we prove our Founders wrong.