“Our nation is broken,” Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said at a press conference on Wednesday discussing the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative political activist. Cox pointed to the broader trend of political violence, mentioning the recent assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker, the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s governor, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. There were, of course, many more acts of political violence Cox could have mentioned: the 2022 attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh, the 2022 home invasion targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that left her husband severely injured, the 2021 storming of the Capitol, and the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise.
The assassination of Kirk was at once all too familiar yet distinct from the aforementioned acts of political violence.
Kirk did not wield the power of government. He did not decide cases or manage controversies. He only had the power of ideas and persuasion. That’s what makes his assassination so different, and so dangerous. As Cox said, our “very constitutional foundation is threatened” when someone is murdered for exercising the right of free speech.
Here’s a question I posed on Twitter (and pose now to Dispatch subscribers): Throughout history, how many Americans have been assassinated who were both 1) nationally famous at the time of death and 2) political activists, not political officeholders?
The only examples besides Kirk that I can think of are the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 by Nation of Islam radicals and of Martin Luther King Jr. by a racist in 1968. Those are some ominous historical examples—riots erupted across the country after the assassination of King.
There is no reason to expect literal riots following the assassination of Kirk, but there is no telling how the inchoate rage unleashed by the assasination will be channeled. And that’s why Gov. Cox spent so much time on a Friday news conference urging Americans to listen to the better angels of their nature. According to Cox, 22-year-old alleged assassin Tyler Robinson had been arrested, and the bullets in his rifle had anti-fascist inscriptions on them. A family member of the alleged perpetrator told law enforcement that Robinson hated Kirk’s politics. “As anger pushed me to the brink, it was actually Charlie’s words that pulled me back,” Cox said. “Charlie said, ‘When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.’ He said, ‘The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. Welcome without judgment, love without condition, forgive without limit.’ He said, ‘Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.’”
“History will dictate if this [assasination] is a turning point for our country,” Cox said, “but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”
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What will be Charlie Kirk’s political legacy? Unlike most other recent targets of political assassination, Kirk held no political office. He had only the power of ideas and persuasion. And he was killed doing something countless people in media and politics have done: speaking on a college campus, the very place where the life of the mind is supposed to flourish. The main difference between Kirk and so many other political activists and media figures is that he had become so much more successful. He had become a political and media juggernaut.
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