Unless you’ve been (perhaps wisely) deliberately ignoring the news over the past week, you’ve probably seen the news that Charlie Kirk – founder of Turning Point USA and right wing provocateur extraordinaire – was shot to death at a Turning Point USA event in Utah last week. And if you’ve read my work in the past, you can probably surmise that I do not agree with most of the things that Kirk said throughout his relatively long and, yes, successful career as a political commentator and organizer. 

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to qualify the fact that, even though I disagreed with Kirk, I still consider his death a tragedy, and that while he has said things that I think were borderline disgusting, none of that in any way justifies taking his life and denying his loved ones of a son, a husband, and a father. But the political tenor of our times is such that the minority of people who applaud violence against those they disagree with (and I do believe it is a minority) get a disproportionate amount of attention. We live in the attention economy, and as long as that’s the case, cruelty and “ragebait” will be more lucrative than calls for calm and understanding. It’s a sad state of affairs. 

I don’t think it’s out of bounds to say that Kirk was an enthusiastic and willing participant in the attention economy – his entire business model seemed to depend on taking his brand of arch conservatism and trimming it into digestible, Gen Z-sized portions on social media, all in the interest of triggering the libs and galvanizing the right. But to give credit where it’s due, Kirk wasn’t a mere keyboard warrior – he took his message to college campuses and other “hostile” territory, inviting debate with skeptics in an open forum. Whether or not he engaged in these debates in “good faith” or not (and I certainly have my doubts) is almost beside the point. Whatever Kirk’s motives, his events were functionally exercises of the First Amendment, providing young people with an opportunity to disagree in public and, if they were lucky, persuade someone to their side.

As of this writing, it’s still somewhat unclear what, exactly, may have motivated 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who is the only suspect in Kirk’s killing. Early indications are that he was not a committed leftist or conservative, and that, consistent with many assassins, his purported thought process and ideology are nihilistic and incoherent. But I am fairly certain about what the actions of people like this rob us of – namely, the notion that we are safe debating our ideas in America, that unless we say something very specific, we are free from prosecution and retribution, and that debate is actually worth it.

Many people (myself included) lament the incendiary nature of modern political rhetoric. And, as I mentioned already in this piece, there’s a clear economic explanation for this continuously rising temperature keeps rising. But I also can’t help but wonder if the vitriol of the last decade or so is – in a counterintuitive way – indicative of the safety we all take for granted in expressing ourselves in America. The words we used to describe our opponents and their ideas have gotten so extreme because we know that, in America, it’s our legally protected right to do so. For better or for worse, there has always been a sense of detachment to even the most hair-raising rhetoric, like jeers at a sporting event. After the whistle was blown and the result was decided, we figured everyone would go home, go to sleep, and go back to work like nothing happened. There was an element of theater to it, because we all agreed not to cross the line into actual violence. 

Even if the alleged motives of Robinson – or Vance Boelter, who shot Minnesota state legislators Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman earlier this year; or David DePape, who assaulted Paul Pelosi in 2022 – were not politically coherent in the traditional sense, they still have the potential to have a chilling effect on American political speech and culture. To the layman, they make the potential cost of speaking out or running for office seem much too high. If you can become the target of a madman almost by accident, then putting yourself out there and advocating for something you believe in no longer becomes worth it. 

In many ways, we have already seen this chilling effect underway, albeit not in the way the modern political assassins may have preferred. Instead, dozens, if not hundreds, of social media users who have posted comments about Kirk’s death have been reported by conservatives to their employers and fired, a McCarthyist crusade that’s been encouraged by Vice President JD Vance himself. As in other moments of national shock, the biggest threat to free expression in the wake of these latest bursts of public violence isn’t the timidity of the American public, but the overzealousness of the government and its supporters. If an employer wants to fire someone who mocked Kirk’s death, that’s between them, their employee, and the courts. But public officials who overtly encourage such naming and shaming are betraying their own supposed values, and the values that they claim that Kirk stood for.

Imbued within the First Amendment is the sense that (barring certain exceptions) our communities, not our government, provide the feedback loop that determines whether one has gone too far in exercising their free speech. This is a good thing – America is richer not only when people disagree, but when they do so publicly and stridently. Nonviolent ideological conflict is a catalyst for both change and understanding. It is an extension of the great American ideal of meritocracy – it doesn’t matter who is saying what, but how convincing they are. You have to work to make your ideas matter, but you are also afforded every opportunity to make them work. Unless you do something really stupid, no one can haul you into jail or court for daring to disagree.

Unfortunately, when they’re angry or in pain, many people decide that it is their duty to help make it easier for the government to quash dissenting speech. It happened after 9/11, it happened during COVID and the George Floyd protests, and it’s happening now. It’s an understandable impulse. But it’s the same impulse that Kirk’s killer and other bad actors hope to exploit. They know the only people who can truly silence us are ourselves. Don’t let them win.