America wasted the lesson behind Charlie Kirk's murder - Newsweek

For a few hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, something unusual happened in American politics. People who had spent years fighting over almost everything seemed to agree about one thing. Democrats and Republicans both condemned the shooting and on the Senate floor the night after the murder, Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock said he had disagreed with Kirk on "just about everything," before defending his right "to speak, to think" and "to argue it out."

Kirk, 31, was shot dead the previous day at Utah Valley University while speaking to students on a college campus.

The irony, if we could call it that, was hard to miss. Kirk had built his career around argument: saying things many Americans admired, many others despised, and then inviting people to challenge him. His murder did not settle any of those arguments but for a brief moment, it seemed to establish something more basic about how Americans were supposed to have them.

Kirk did not have to become a saint and his critics did not have to withdraw a single argument against him. The potential consensus was much smaller and perhaps more useful: political opponents are allowed to speak but disagreement has limits, and murder sits well outside them. Fast forward a year and that narrow bargain looks more like a missed chance.

Kirk’s killing gave political enemies a rare reason to defend the same rule for the same reason: disagreement could be brutal, personal and even contemptuous, but it still had to remain disagreement. Instead, Americans quickly went back to deciding that free expression, political decency and even sympathy depended on who was speaking and who had been hurt.

The test was never whether America could agree about Kirk. Polling after his death suggests Americans already agreed on the most basic rule: political violence was unacceptable. The harder test was whether that agreement could change the way they treated political opponents once the shock wore off.

Unfortunately, as statistics show, none of it looked promising. A Quinnipiac poll released two weeks after Kirk’s killing found 82 percent of voters believed political rhetoric was contributing to violence, yet 58 percent doubted the country could lower the temperature. More than half expected political violence to get worse.

It did not take long for that narrow consensus to widen into something much more contentious.

Within 24 hours of Kirk’s killing, an assistant dean at a Tennessee college and a Carolina Panthers employee had been fired over social media posts their employers considered offensive or insensitive. In the days that followed, the list grew to include workers at universities, government agencies and private companies.

For a day, Americans had been debating whether political violence could ever be justified. Almost immediately, they moved on to debating which reactions to political violence should cost someone a job.

Then the dispute reached Washington.

After Jimmy Kimmel made comments about the political response to Kirk’s killing, ABC suspended his late-night show amid pressure from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who had warned broadcasters that regulators could handle the matter "the easy way or the hard way." Kimmel later returned to the air, while the episode opened a wider dispute over government pressure and broadcasters’ First Amendment protections, one that continues today.

Even Republican Senator Ted Cruz objected to Carr’s approach, saying government threats against broadcasters raised their own free-speech concerns.

Do you see the irony of it all? A man had been murdered while speaking and within days the response to his murder had become a fight over punishing speech.

The country had briefly found agreement on one boundary: do not kill people for their politics. Within days, it was fighting over where the next boundary should be and who got to draw it.

The breakdown did not run neatly along left-right lines.

Some of Kirk’s former allies helped turn his death into a conspiracy industry. Candace Owens, who once worked for him at Turning Point USA, repeatedly suggested without credible evidence that Israel and donors around Kirk may have been involved in his killing. Those claims became prominent enough that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly denied Israeli involvement.

Other figures on the right, including Tucker Carlson, fed a broader climate of suspicion around Kirk’s death and the institutions investigating it. Reporting in the weeks after the assassination described right-wing podcasts filling with competing theories before investigators had established anything resembling those claims.If you're counting, here was another lost opportunity: a killing that might have produced a common demand for evidence instead produced rival stories in search of villains.

Within months, Kirk’s face and death had become raw material for an online genre sometimes called "Kirkification." His face was pasted onto everything from the Mona Lisa to Jeffrey Epstein; other memes placed him alongside Benjamin Netanyahu or turned the circumstances of his death into punch lines. One viral strain paired Kirk with George Floyd, while audio from the shooting itself was repurposed as a TikTok sound.

Even his widow became part of the joke. Erika Kirk’s public appearances after her husband’s murder were clipped, captioned and remixed into memes mocking the way she grieved, including jokes about her appearance and whether her mourning was sufficiently authentic.

There is no requirement to like Kirk in death because he was murdered and his politics remain open to every criticism they faced while he was alive, but there should be a difference between attacking a man’s ideas and finding entertainment in the moment somebody killed him, which is something that will echo beyond Kirk himself—just ask Hunter Kozak.

The self-described liberal student was standing just feet away from Kirk, challenging him on gun violence, when the shot ended their exchange. In other words, Kozak was doing exactly what this article is about: disagreeing with Kirk, publicly and peacefully, right up until somebody else turned that argument into violence. Days later, Kozak said the point of peaceful political disagreement "only makes sense if we stay peaceful."

A year later, Kozak has described how witnessing the killing still intrudes on ordinary life. After footage of his reaction was itself turned into a meme, he wrote that a trip to a carnival for his daughter’s birthday was repeatedly interrupted by thoughts of somebody opening fire.

So online, the assassination has been compressed into a sound, an image and a punchline, but for the man who was actually debating Kirk when the bullet arrived, it remains something he cannot simply scroll past.

In the years surrounding his assassination, the country saw attempts on Donald Trump’s life, the killing of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and an arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence. Congress itself cited those attacks after Kirk’s death while calling for political participation "without fear."

Kirk’s death gave Americans a chance to draw one modest line through all of it: nobody has to surrender an argument, laugh at fewer jokes or pretend to respect somebody they despise but they do have to preserve a country in which losing an argument remains survivable.

A year later, that still looks like unfinished business.