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Another act of political violence. Another campus left shaken. The assassination of conservative Christian nationalist activist and influencer Charlie Kirk at a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 is yet another headline that begs the question: what kind of democracy are we becoming?
Violence in any form is, at its core, a tragedy. To take another human life is to degrade one’s own humanity. This is true of the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza; of the murder of George Floyd; of the Evergreen High School shooting that claimed one teenage life and critically injured two others, which occurred on the same day Kirk was killed; and of the killing of Kirk himself. To be so apathetic toward the life and well-being of another is to diminish our shared capacity for empathy and trust.
But condemning violence does not require venerating its victims. Charlie Kirk bolstered his platform by using his Christianity as a pedestal to legitimize hostility toward women, racial and religious minorities, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community. This is a contradiction that cannot be overlooked in the rush of conservative politicians and his supporters alike to cast him as a martyr, as has been proclaimed by President Donald Trump, alt-right activist Jack Posobiec, White House Presidential Personnel Office director Sergio Gor, and others at Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona on Sept. 21.
Among Kirk’s convictions was the belief that the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which “prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal” (National Archives)—is a “beast” that has since been turned into an “anti-white weapon” (The Charlie Kirk Show, April 2024). Similarly, he has unapologetically expressed his hostile views toward Islam, declaring in an X post on Sept. 8, 2025 that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” “The American Democrat party hates this country,” he said on his show in March 2024. “They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.”
Kirk’s killing is not an isolated event, but one that belongs to a disturbing timeline: the 2020 plot to kidnap and murder Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; the Jan. 6 insurrection; the hammer attack against Paul Pelosi in his home in 2022; the 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump and subsequent shooting at Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign offices in Arizona; the arson attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro in April; and just this June, the murder of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark, and their dog in their home.
Political violence is not partisan. It is a national crisis.
As Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has argued, political violence is not only an attack on the individual, but an assault on our freedom of expression.
“It’s not just visible public figures who have reason to fear from this season, this era of political violence—it’s every American because every American is harmed by this,” Buttigieg said in an exclusive interview with “Meet the Press” on Sept. 14. “It’s an attack on an individual and an attack on a country whose entire purpose, entire way of being is that we can resolve what we need to resolve through a political process.”
The assassination of Charlie Kirk may be regarded as corrosive to democracy as his platform: it paints him to many as a martyr while undermining the principle of free speech that even his rhetoric depended on.
On the left, a particular contradiction seems to occasionally arise. Many reject violence as a tool of the state—capital punishment, genocide, endless war—yet a few sometimes indulge the fantasy that violence against those we despise might be justified. Some self-identified leftists even took to X after the assassination to insinuate that Kirk deserved to be killed. Why hold empathy for someone who refused to hold empathy for me? But as Harvard lecturer and Christian Christopher Rhodes writes in Al Jazeera, selective empathy corrodes our moral compass: we empathize only with the dead that we agree with. That impulse is understandable, but it is also dangerous.
This is America’s empathy crisis. Some mourn Kirk’s death with a religious veneration, consecrating him because he was a public Christian, while blatantly ignoring his vitriolic views and divisive rhetoric. Others dismiss his death outright, as though these words and actions—however hateful—made him unworthy of recognition as human.
A defense commonly avowed by the latter of the camps is Kirk’s own rejection of the concept of empathy:
“I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage,” Kirk said on his show in 2022. (While he goes on to state he “much prefer[s]” the terms “compassion” and “sympathy,” it seems that he routinely demonstrated little actual desire to understand or concern for the marginalized groups he disparaged.)
I believe that both responses to Kirk’s death miss the mark. The measure of our society in this instance, as for all instances with potential for progress throughout history, is whether or not we can resist replicating past failures. The moral test is whether we can regret a life lost without sanctifying a harmful legacy.
Empathy, contrary to popular understanding, is not an endorsement, but a discipline; it is the refusal to surrender one’s humanity even in the face of hostility. This is the discipline in which I believe America falls behind. We substitute outrage for understanding, vengeance for justice, and martyrdom for accountability. The result is not resolution, but escalation, clearly evidenced by the alarming rapidity with which violence—political and unpolitical—is becoming more acceptable within and with the help of our country.
So what, then, are we to do? Rhodes has suggested (or rather hoped) that had Kirk survived, he might have used the experience to reevaluate his rhetoric. He hoped this despite the counterevidence witnessed in the aftermath of Trump’s—a friend and close ally of Kirk’s—assassination attempt, which only seemed to embolden him.
But he did not survive. The responsibility falls to us. We are the ones left to decide whether this moment becomes another excuse for division, or an opportunity for reflection.
I believe we should reject political violence categorically. We should refuse to deify Kirk and to excuse his bigotry, and we should also reframe and recommit to empathy—not the selective empathy that values one victim over another, but the broader empathy that insists no one’s life should be taken for their beliefs, even when those beliefs are themselves destructive.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was not justice. It was violence. To say so does not sanctify him; to say so protects democracy from the erosion of division and distrust. But we cannot stop at condemnation. The conversation must move beyond asking how we should react, and toward asking what we are going to do about the culture that made this possible.
If death has a lesson to teach, it is not only that life is fragile, but that the living have responsibility for what comes next. The question is no longer how we react. The question is what we choose to build from here.
