Yesterday afternoon, at a Utah Valley University political event, hundreds of attendees watched the murder of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, a conservative movement-builder and itinerant controversialist. Within hours, millions more had seen the gruesome video of the moment when, in mid-sentence, a bullet pierces Kirk’s throat and streams of blood issue forth. It did not look like a survivable wound, and I am sorry to say that it was not. As a combat medic in Afghanistan once told me, “You can’t put a tourniquet on a neck.” No motive is known, and authorities have named no suspects.
The public reactions have been, to my relief, generally nonsociopathic. Opponents of Kirk who have in other instances celebrated the murder of their enemies have, for the most part, remained decorously mute this time, and I suppose from some people the most precious gift one can hope for is total silence. Until recently, I would have assumed revulsion from everyone at the murder of a political figure at a public debate. Now the expressions of sympathy, condemnations, and gestures of humanity land differently from how they used to. They are in one sense a relief, given the outright glee with which other recent acts of murder have been received. In a paradoxical other sense they are worrisome, because each time one arrives, I remember that just a few years ago these minimal acts of grace would not have been in doubt.
From working on previous gory beats, I have seen horrible images. Ubiquitous doomscrolling now grants others the same awful privilege. In No Country for Old Men, a sheriff fresh from a grisly crime scene is asked whether he thinks one of the massacre’s survivors knows the type of men he’s dealing with. “He ought to,” the sheriff replies, with a dryness only Tommy Lee Jones in West Texas can produce. “He’s seen the same things I’ve seen, and it’s certainly made an impression on me.”
I am too much a pessimist to believe that seeing this disgusting scene of high-definition murder—as opposed to the grainy video, say, of the shooting in the back of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson—will restore the moral senses of all those who have hitherto been casually pro-violence. But I think many people have convinced themselves, at some level, that violence is virtual and that the dead either never lived in human form, or would respawn after their death, after taking the L for the day. The cult of Luigi Mangione surely has at least a few such delusional sociopaths, people who laugh at the thought of an execution but would barf at the sight of one. Now and then I see public stencil art of Hamas commandos, hang gliding into the Nova Music Festival on October 7. A bolder graffitist might have depicted what happened after its pilot landed: Bristling with tactical gear, he stood over the body of a half-naked 19-year-old he had just shot in the head as she begged for mercy. But passing over the violence itself is the point, because many who celebrated that slaughter could do so only because they suppressed their sense of Israeli humanity, not because they had no notion of that humanity in the first place.
Until Kirk’s assassination, the act of public violence that was riling up the right last week was the equally horrific murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee fresh from her job at a pizza joint in Charlotte, North Carolina. On August 25, Zarutska sat down on a commuter train, one row in front of a disheveled man with a knife. I have seen pigs slaughtered with more dignity than that man afforded to Zarutska, as he slashed her throat from behind, before leaving the scene and (according to Newsweek) announcing that he “got that white girl.” The attack inspired outrage on the right, some but not all because of the killer’s apparent motive—which, if the races were reversed, would have rightly prompted a great national mourning, introspection, and ceremonial taking of knees. I can see why the left would refrain from highlighting the video of this incident—which is not only racially incendiary but also threatens, by its implications for public order, any concept of shared space or tolerable urban living. Zarutska’s murder is also so awful that a viewer can be psychologically transformed just by watching, and be left staggering around for minutes or days afterward, wondering whether the world is a place different from what he thought.
In those periods of disorientation, people are susceptible to political shifts, to discarding their cherished beliefs and picking up others they previously considered vile. These periods (and we are in one now; I can feel it) are therefore both useful and dangerous, because sometimes changing one’s politics is good, and because acute emotional overload is not conducive to rational realignment. I hope Kirk’s killer is caught fast. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the killer left ammunition “engraved with expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology.” The last words Kirk ever spoke were about transgenderism, and if that is indeed the killer’s motive, it will probably narrow discussion of the crime.
For now, while the motive is unconfirmed, it is better, and more respectful to Kirk, to reflect on his death generically, and the fact that this father and husband was murdered for expressing his opinions, rather than to dwell speculatively on whatever pet issue the assassin might have had. The lessons from yesterday, one of the worst moments in recent American history, are worth learning. And they are, mercifully, bipartisan, because they are human and universal.
After Trump’s near-assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, I wrote about America’s great luck in being a country with astonishingly low levels of political violence. The killing of journalists and politicians, the busting of heads by political rioters—these are all historically commonplace in most of the world, including the developed world. Even after the recent uptick in the United States, political violence remains rare. But it is difficult to appreciate a run of peace and good fortune, if only because peace itself lulls us into forgetting that the run of good fortune is happening at all. A few years ago, when a subset of the American left lost its collective mind and seriously considered the possibility that looting and incinerating poor neighborhoods in the Midwest might be fun and socially productive, I could not help but notice that those most enthusiastic about political violence lacked experience in places where rioting was common, and where the fruits of that pastime were most painfully felt. Similarly, the blasé attitude of Donald Trump, when he suggested that protesters at his events should get roughed up a bit, reflected our now-president’s lack of knowledge of places where dissent is managed by truncheon and billy club.
In the past day, some have murmured that we are returning to the 1960s, and a norm of political assassinations. Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers then, Kirk now. The old joke about the ’60s is that if you claim to remember them, you were not actually there and were instead having another ’50s while the counterculture passed you by. The playwright Sam Shepard (who was definitely there) had what I take to be a clear and unromanticized memory of that time. “The reality of it to me was chaos, and the idealism didn’t mean anything,” he told an interviewer in 2000. He said it was an emotional drain he could not wait to escape. “I was on the tail of this tiger that was wagging itself all over the place and was spitting blood in all directions.” The loss of Kirk is immeasurable for his family and for conservatives. His legacy will be great for all if his death persuades more people that political violence, like riding tigers, is a sport of fools, and that the beast will devour us all if not confined again to its cage, and soon.
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