Charlie Kirk’s Assassination and the Moral Crisis America Ignores

Exploiting his murder for partisan gain threatens free speech, fuels authoritarianism, and erodes the respect for human life our democracy depends on.

Following the news and commentary on the assassination of Charlie Kirk leaves me deeply troubled because we’re missing the important moral issues. That, in turn, poses grave risks to our liberties. 

Far too many partisans, across the political spectrum, are exploiting this monstrous crime for gain, damaging our democracy in the process, none more so than Donald Trump, who lowered the White House flag to half-staff.

When a Trumper assassinated a Democrat in the Minnesota legislature leadership and her husband in June, and shot two others in their homes, Trump did nothing.

Many people who detest Kirk posted on social media that the TurningPoint USA founder had it coming, receiving a fatal dose of a Second Amendment idea he preached. Schadenfreude is understandable, but still despicable.  

While Kirk’s messages were odious, he had every right to speak his mind and try to sell his often not-so-subtly racist, misogynist, and ahistorical beliefs in the marketplace of ideas. 

This includes Kirk advancing ideas showing his utter disregard for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Consider the statement below, one of many similar comments.

“It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights…That is a prudent deal,” Kirk said in April 2023 at Awaken Church in Salt Lake City.

Wrong, in my view. Indeed, indefensibly wrong on moral grounds.

But the problem here is not with Kirk’s disgusting and immoral views which elevate abstract ideas over human life. It’s with anyone justifying his murder or even making light of it or using it to oppress, as Trump clearly is seeking.

Donald Trump immediately seized on an opportunity to further cement his position as America’s first dictator. In a video address from the Oval Office, he declared a “dark moment for America” and lashed out at news organizations he calls “radical left” for their coverage of Kirk’s career.

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”

This from a president who said nothing when those Minnesota Democrats were shot by a Trumper. This from a president who eight years ago called Americans chanting the Nazi “blood and soil” slogans “very good people.” This from a president whose statements drip with racism, hatred, and claims of unlimited power including to murder suspected drug traffickers as he ordered a few days ago.

Mike Lee, the far-right senator even for deep red Utah, labeled Kirk’s killer a terrorist and suggested the killing was part of a larger scheme. “The terrorists will not win,” Lee said.

Kirk’s anti-human ideas weren’t selling all that well. Survey after survey shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans—in some polls close to 90%— oppose weak gun laws and favor serious controls or outright bans on civilians owning military-style assault rifles. 

Strong opposition also applies to open carry laws that allow people to walk into grocery stores, public parks, and down the neighborhood sidewalk with a loaded handgun on their hip or a military assault-style rifle slung over their shoulder. 

This week a Florida appeals court struck down Florida’s ban on open carry, saying it was inconsistent with the “tradition” of American gun laws. 

In Dodge City, the iconic Old West outpost, and most other frontier towns, you had to check your guns with the local sheriff. Indeed, the very first municipal law in Dodge City, enacted in 1878, prohibited walking around with guns. Strict gun regulation was the norm, but sadly and infuriatingly Florida appeals court judges Stephanie Ray, Lori Rowe and M. Kennerly Thomas are ignorant of those facts.

Most Americans have always favored gun regulation. That’s because, unlike the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court and those three ignorant Florida 1st Appellate District judges, the American people appreciate and understand that the “well-regulated” part of the Second Amendment is crucial to both the right to bear arms and to their own safety.

The deeper problem we fail to recognize is the growing movement on the right to venerate objects—guns in this case, but also money—over the right of every person to live their life.

We should remember (or learn) from how another assassination opened the way to strip freedoms away from advocates of unpopular (and in my view horrible) ideas more than a century ago, especially for noncitizens. It can happen again and if Trump and his ilk have their way it will.

Those limits on liberty followed the 1901 murder of President William McKinley in Buffalo. 

The New York legislature soon adopted laws limiting political speech, which eventually led Congress to approve the Smith Act (formally the Alien Registration Act of 1940) which made it a crime to advocate overthrowing our government, forced noncitizens to register with the federal government and to carry identification papers. As a practical matter it made it a crime to be a capital C Communist. 

In 1951, at the height of the Red Scare, the United States Supreme Court, voting 7-2, upheld the Smith Act and the convictions of communists for speaking their minds. This was when naked and mostly false claims that Soviet agents infected our political, diplomatic and military leadership flowed from Capitol Hill. 

Justice William O. Douglas, in dissent in Dennis  v. United States, wrote that the First Amendment makes no exceptions for odious ideas. Justice Hugo Black, in a separate dissent, agreed.

“Communism has been so thoroughly exposed in this country that it has been crippled as a political force,” Douglas wrote. “Free speech has destroyed it as an effective political party. It is inconceivable that those who went up and down this country preaching the doctrine of revolution which petitioners espouse would have any success.”

But he went on with observations we should ponder today as the vast majority of Americans struggle in an economy rigged to subsidize and insulate the already rich.

Douglas, referencing the Great Depression, wrote, “In days of trouble and confusion, when bread lines were long, when the unemployed walked the streets, when people were starving, the advocates of a short-cut by revolution might have a chance to gain adherents. But today there are no such conditions. The country is not in despair; the people know Soviet Communism; the doctrine of Soviet revolution is exposed in all of its ugliness, and the American people want none of it… some nations less resilient than the United States, where illiteracy is high and where democratic traditions are only budding, might have to take drastic steps and jail these men for merely speaking their creed. But in America, they are miserable merchants of unwanted ideas; their wares remain unsold. The fact that their ideas are abhorrent does not make them powerful.”

If you don’t support the free speech of people whose views you detest you don’t really believe in free speech. Instead, you believe in free speech for people like yourself. That’s not free speech. That’s Donald Trump’s vision of free speech for him and Trumpers, but not anyone else.

Today, many Trumpers advocate for the Russian dictator to prevail in Ukraine. Also, hunger stalks America and the Trumpublicans revel in making it worse as they cut food, cash, and medical benefits for the poor as well as children, the disabled, the elderly and the sick.

Are we as resilient today as in 1951 given the latest literacy research? The 2019 study found that more than half of Americans read at fifth grade level or below and more than a fifth read at the level of third graders.

These American adults lack critical thinking skills, unless you think what sixth graders say in class shows adult sophistication. They are prey to Trump’s masterful con artistry and his openly expressed desire to take any action he chooses under the false claim that our Constitution grants him unfettered power.

But even with our serious decline in language comprehension and the appalling ignorance of Americans about our history, there is no reason to suppress any ideas, even those advanced with a smug smile by Charlie Kirk.

Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama professor of tax law, who also holds a divinity degree from a conservative evangelical divinity school, has long taught that venerating objects, especially money, over humans is a widespread error among those who consider themselves Christians or even just believers in Judeo-Christian morality.

“The Bible commands that the law promote justice because human beings are not good enough to promote justice individually on their own,” she told me nearly two decades ago. Hamill was speaking of taxes, but her point is that legal systems, which is to say governments, have duties to care for people.

“Wait a minute,” some of you may be saying to yourselves, “what about automobiles and trucks which killed 39,000 Americans last year?”

It’s a false analogy, an indication of the poor quality of civic debate in America. Cars and trucks are not built for the purpose of killing or even intimidating. 

The number of traffic deaths reflects the safety features, or lack thereof, in automobiles and trucks as well as less than optimal design of roads, poor driving skills, drinking before or while driving and other factors which, over time, are slowly being addressed. 

Even when used to hunt, guns are designed to kill. Military style assault rifles, which can fire numerous rounds in a matter of seconds belong only on military training camps and the battlefield because their sole purpose is to kill as efficiently and effectively as possible. No civilian has any need of such a weapon. To argue otherwise is to venerate a killing machine over human life, a moral position I find indefensible even as I respect the right of people to make such a despicable claim.

The way to counter Kirk’s appeals to implicit violence is not to kill him or even block him from speaking. The antidote is more speech, smarter speech, better speech.

That speech will ultimately prevail, assuming it is not suppressed, because it is based in what Kirk mocked: respect for the sanctity of human life.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

Create a PDF