Charlie Kirk and the Death of Moral Clarity

On Sunday, I begrudgingly cracked open my phone after a week-long silent meditation retreat to chilling news. Charlie Kirk shot and killed.

It wasn’t the murder itself that awoke moral urgency in me, but the reaction to it.

I took a deep breath and searched Kirk’s name on X. Perhaps a mistake. For I was besieged by videos of enthusiastic support for the killer. Examples too many to name, and for anyone with an internet connection and an interest in the story, redundant to cite. To be fair, many aggressively condemned such support. But the utter lack of consensus moral belief in the wrongness of murder, and, in fact, widespread chest-thumping, upset me deeply.

I live in Eugene, OR. And I have heard from several young people (early-mid 20s) who want more CEOs and conservative figures murdered. One I talked to (about CEOs) said, “I want to watch their blood run in the streets.” This from a twenty-three-year-old woman who is studying political science at the University of Oregon and is saving up money to see the wildebeest migration in Eastern Africa next year.

I have a friend who works as a server at a large restaurant downtown. She told me about a party of thirty that came for dinner after a Charlie Kirk vigil. Every other server refused to attend to the group, despite the promise of a large tip, until she volunteered.

“They were so kind and gracious,” she said, “but every time I would return from serving them, my co-workers would be waiting to check on me and apologize that I had to be exposed to a group of evil racists.”

Since the assassination attempt on Trump last July, the US has played host to increasingly brazen socio-political violence. Brian Thompson’s killing by Luigi Mangione in December, the bombing of Josh Shapiro’s home, the murder of Rep. Melissa Hortman over the summer, and now Kirk.

Social media has long hosted ruthless social condemnation, but never before has it been so bloodthirsty. What disturbs me most is that seemingly rational, well-intentioned, and educated people are now calling for the blood of their countrymen as a just and necessary means to a better end.

Dehumanizing another group is an essential prerequisite for murder. It is a matter of course in these discussions that Hitler’s name will come up. But to use a domestic example, US Marines report being instructed during basic training never to refer to the Vietnamese by that name. Rather, “gook” or “charlie” or some other abstracted, de-personalized slur. To view any group as both less than human and an impediment to a better world is the foundation of all war and genocide. That is to say, hell.

You may believe (as many do) that US society is profoundly broken. That billionaires are immoral, perhaps evil, and that conservatives or liberals are reprehensible. That CEOs are killing people to line their own pockets (as many Luigi supporters believe). But not only is murder not morally justifiable in correcting wrongs, it is counterproductive.

I believe in my soul, and there is perhaps nothing I believe more strongly than this, that heaven on earth is possible right now for all of us. What is preventing it from manifesting for most of us is a lack of commitment to non-violence.

Violence results from not seeing ourselves in our victims. The French say, ‘tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’ To understand all is to forgive all. The more tightly we associate with ourselves and not others, the greater violence we are capable of. And the more we privilege the future over the present, the more reprehensible the acts we can commit today in the name of a better tomorrow.

But the future is not coming to absolve us. For violence always begets more of the same. And every act must justify its own end. The logic of suffering an ugly, bloody means now for a better end is wrong. That is a radical statement, and contrary to the explicit policy of our government and all major world governments. Consider. What does an ideal society look like? Wars are fought over particulars, but definitions more or less follow all the same broad script: A harmonious, peaceful society where everyone uses their time in a manner that promotes the highest level of well-being for all.

Many acts of violence, even terrorism, are conducted by the perpetrator as a means to some version of this end. The US’s wars in the Middle East to (ostensibly) wipe out the malignancy of terrorism. The ISIS caliphate’s fight for a world united under the rule of their God. The Russian Revolution’s war on the bourgeoisie to build a more harmonious, equitable future. The Nazi’s extermination of European Jewry and other impures as a means to a genetically elite, more prosperous social end.

But The Good Society, harmonious and peaceful, will never be born on a bed of blood and guts. Ghandi and MLK have given us real-world examples of how effective non-violent resistance is at enacting real change in the face of real hate and violent opposition.

But let’s return to the killings of Kirk and Brian Thompson. Some of the support is clearly driven by pure rage and a desire for violent justice. A Joker like desire to watch an unjust and unfixable world burn. But more charitably, the logic for supporting the killers goes like this: a society with billionaires and individuals advocating the removal of basic human rights from vast swaths of our population is broken. It may be ugly and even cruel, but it is necessary for the greater well-being of all in the long term to kill them.

Where then does the killing end? And who is to decide who to kill and who to save? The deepest moral truth that exists is that murder is bad. And evil cannot be defeated by evil. The greatest form of resistance in our times is to manifest non-violence. To remember our kindergarten teachers’ lesson, “use your words, not your fists.”