Charlie Kirk Didn’t Deserve To Die

It’s okay to scream at our opponents, but it’s not okay to justify or normalize shooting them.

Charlie Kirk. Image via NBC.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – It might not surprise you to learn I didn’t like Charlie Kirk. Given the opportunity I would’ve argued against him – to his face – until I couldn’t speak. I repeatedly called him the dumbest man in politics, and that’s saying a lot. His well-financed crusade to indoctrinate young people into the MAGA cult was one of the most sinister political endeavors of this era.

But as I write this I feel nothing but profound sadness and empathy for Charlie, his wife, and his two kids. If you have a problem with that, I really don’t care. I refuse to apologize for or jettison my humanity. No one deserves to be murdered just because you think they were wrong.

I also feel intense sadness for our nation during these dark times in which political disagreements too often end in frivolous defamation lawsuits or, worse, deadly violence.

Contrary to some of the reactions I’ve seen – gratefully few and far between – there’s zero moral or political justification for kicking an opponent after he’s been shot to death, especially when those scolds claim to be compassionate and anti-gun. “He deserved it,” indicates that gun violence is justified as long as the victim is an opponent of gun control. That’s some moral relativism right there: the proliferation of firearms and the prevalence of gun violence is wrong… unless the victim liked guns or said horrible things, then so be it? Sorry, no.

It’s difficult to prove that cruel or cynical reactions to violence directly manifests more violence, but I worry that it helps to normalize and justify it. I worry that if we contort our values to rationalize it, we begin to lose our moral compasses at a time when we ought to be holding fast to our values, our empathy, and our democratic ideals during a particularly harrowing chapter in our national history.

I’ve called it the American Nervous Breakdown.

Political tensions have never been higher in my lifetime. Democracy is critically endangered. We’re all justifiably worried about the daily annihilation of American values and institutions. We suffer from a kind of societal PTSD due to injustices like a deadly pandemic, mass shootings, economic meltdowns, income inequality, terrorist attacks, and a worsening climate crisis. Certain disreputable podcasters, cable news shriekers, YouTubers, and social media algorithm-gamers are deliberately scrambling our priorities and inflaming the political climate for likes, shares, profit and clout.

Given all of this, it won’t take much goading to trigger a ceaseless exchange of violence from those among us who’ve reached their breaking point. Then, given the existence of a fascist dictator in the White House, the curtailment of civil liberties might ensue, and as we’ve seen, it doesn’t take much prodding for such a thing to occur.

To be clear: we don’t know why Charlie was killed, but reckless and irresponsible assumptions about the “why” are being injected into impressionable minds. And that’s all it’ll take for someone who’s been stockpiling weapons to open fire.

Moments after the shooting, Fox News Channel’s Jesse Watters accused liberals of being at war against MAGA, irresponsibly abusing his platform on Fox News to encourage violent retaliations rather than being reasonable and lowering the national temperature. Elon Musk posted on X: “The Left is the party of murder.” “The Left” isn’t a political party, but you get the idea. Elon posted this without any clue as to the political motives of the shooter, who hadn’t even been apprehended at the time.

Clearly, there are certain players who don’t need facts on their side in order to stir the shitstorm. Even if it turns out that the shooter’s politics are all over the map, as is often the case, or even if his motivations had nothing to do with politics, it’ll be framed as a leftist attack against a MAGA celebrity, and more violence will surely follow.

We should condemn this eliminationist rhetoric at the loudest possible volume, but we need to resist the temptation to roll out our own version of it. Democracy is supposed to be about words, votes, and non-violent activism. It’s okay to scream at our opponents, but it’s not okay to justify or normalize shooting them. If we truly cherish democracy and want it to both survive and flourish, we have to talk the talk.

Ken White, a prominent voice on social media, wrote on Wednesday:

Political violence disproportionately hurts people with less power, not people with more power. Political violence will disproportionately hurt people of color and women and LGBTQ people. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. Celebrating political violence means at best indifference to that.

Amen.

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