We took a breath before weighing in on the assassination of conservative organizer and activist Charlie Kirk. On Wednesday, Kirk was shot by a long-range rifle as he spoke at an event at Utah Valley University as part of his American Comeback Tour, promoting his political and cultural views but also encouraging students to disagree with them.
Kirk was killed. As we write, the shooter is still at large. Thursday morning, the authorities said they were looking for a suspect who appeared to be of college age.
Kirk, a son of the Chicago suburbs who had a young family, built a wildly successful political movement and became one of the leading voices of the modern conservative movement. He was a lightning rod, but he was willing to engage in legitimate discourse with folks regardless of their political views, and he was willing to hit the road to stand up for his beliefs.
Our breath was a consequence of our long-held view that anyone who attempts so heinous an act likely is mentally ill; we’re all sadly familiar with the active profile of the heavily armed American assassin, and we view them as more like each other than ordinary Americans whose views they claim to represent. In their rush to assign blame, political partisans on both sides typically fail to note this. As has been the case this time around.
Nonetheless, this is a horrible moment for our country. We are all lessened by Kirk’s death, whoever the shooter turns out to be.
We’re not here to stand up and defend all or even most of what Kirk said. But we’ll stand here and defend his right to have said it, and if it turns out that he was killed for speaking his mind, that’s something all Americans should decry.
We should not physically hurt other people because of their politics. We cannot hurt people for disagreeing with us.
We are not soldiers in a holy war. We are fellow Americans. And we need to figure out a way to renew goodwill toward one another. Otherwise, things are going to get worse.
This moment calls first and foremost for our leaders to de-escalate and shift the tone of political discourse back to sanity.
This board has urged all our politicians, from the president on down, to tone down their rhetoric for quite some time now.
“Political violence, unfortunately, has ramped up in this country,” Gov. JB Pritzker said after the shooting. “I think there are people who are fomenting it in this country. I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it.”
That’s true: It sure does. Even after the shooting, President Donald Trump was partisan. His mouth apparently is incapable of mouthing unifying words. That said, he knew Kirk personally and clearly admired him. In this instance, that deserves some consideration.
We have been saying political leaders should abstain from such rhetoric. When Pritzker said, at an April speech in New Hampshire, “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” that was not a good idea. To be clear, the governor was referencing speech, not violence, but the rhetoric still was incautious. Aside from the volumes of Trumpian rhetorical provocations, we could fill this editorial with examples from other elected officials.
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Our leaders cannot even crack the door open to inviting political violence. Because, increasingly, more people are willing to accept their invitation. When you frame the other side as evil, and their words as violence, violence raises its head as a logical response.
Just this summer, a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were shot dead. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro faced an attempted attack in April. And Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts on the campaign trail.
Moments before Kirk was shot, our inboxes lit up with a newsletter from The Argument detailing the results of a nationwide survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse, which found that more than 1 in 3 college students think violence is sometimes justified to shut down a campus speaker.
This shooter did just that.
Others victim-shamed. Before we knew whether Kirk would live or die, a talking head (now fired) on MSNBC implied it was Kirk’s fault he was shot. Bluesky was replete with people posting with glee over Kirk’s murder.
But California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X, “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.”
He’s right, and what Newsom did not choose to say is just as important as what he did. (Newsom and Kirk teamed up for a podcast in March.)
There can be no “freedom of speech” if people feel emboldened to kill you for exercising it.
We call, once more, upon our politicians: Listen to your better angels and stop setting the stage for violence with supercharged political rhetoric.
Former President George W. Bush also struck the right chord in a post on social media Wednesday.
“Today, a young man was murdered in cold blood while expressing his political views,” he said. “It happened on a college campus, where the open exchange of opposing ideas should be sacrosanct. Violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square. Members of other political parties are not our enemies; they are our fellow citizens.”
We hope more leaders can follow the former president’s lead.
We also hope Kirk’s shooter is brought to justice. And our hearts are with his family.
“If you believe in something, you need to have the courage to fight for those ideas, not run away from them or try and silence them,” Kirk once said.
He was right. Anyone who thinks Kirk and his movement will be silenced by these kinds of act is mistaken — on the contrary, they have turned the young man into a political martyr and will only make his ideas more popular.
Political violence has a chilling effect on public discourse. If Americans cannot speak without fear of being shot, democracy dies.
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