Charlie Kirk woke up this morning and went to Utah Valley University to talk about whatever it is Charlie Kirk is talking about these days — trans people, wokeism, the evils of the Left. Beneath an awning emblazoned with the slogan “Prove Me Wrong,” Kirk delivered the last speech of his life. During the Q&A, just as he began to answer a question about gun violence, a high-caliber bullet hit him with enough force to spin him in his chair. Dark blood gouted from the hole in his neck and soaked into his white shirt as the audience screamed and ran. That he made it to the hospital at all is a miracle, but that’s as far as it went. Charlie Kirk bled out. Charlie Kirk is dead.
That paragraph should read like bad fiction. It should feel surreal. It should shock, it should disorient: it does none of those things. We already lived in the kind of world where political figures get shot. They got shot in Minnesota very recently, though Trump forgot to deliver an Oval Office statement or put the flag at half-staff or even attend the funeral.* This violence didn’t start today, or yesterday, or days or even weeks ago. We walked here, or were dragged here, as a nation.
I am not going to pretend to mourn Charlie Kirk: I will not debase myself or insult your intelligence by pantomiming sadness. I believe that every living soul is crafted in the image of God, each with its own universe of thoughts and feelings that cannot be replaced. I also believe that sometimes, in this world, you reap what you fucking sow. Sometimes, when you do your part to build a brave new America in which the whims of some strongman mean more than the laws that undergird our entire political system, when you work tirelessly to foment hatred and erode our ability to even speak to each other, when you dedicate decades of your miserable life to dividing a nation against itself — well, sometimes you succeed. Sometimes, you end up living in the world you worked so hard to create. And in that world, the bullets are flying.
It’s very similar to the way I felt when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson bled out on a New York City sidewalk:
Yes, I condemn the killing. Extrajudicial murder is wrong.
I would also like to condemn the trees that fall on power lines and cause electrical outages. I condemn earthquakes that destroy cities and kill thousands of people. Wildfires, famines, floods: I condemn them all. Yet these things happen regardless.
Charlie Kirk’s troubles are over. Ours have just begun:
At time of writing, the suspect is still at large, which means there’s plenty of time to tell a story about the person who did this before reality catches up. They’re already working overtime.
Things do not happen in vacuums. We are not, in fact, unburdened by what has been. Charlie Kirk lies dead in a world he helped create, and his ghoulish fellow-travellers are already using his corpse to push us further into the mouth of hell. For MAGA, the true enemy was never really immigrants; it wasn’t even trans people. It’s the left. We are the ones, allegedly, who inflicted these great evils upon our once-great nation. We are the ones who cackle and unmake society, we are the ones who wanted this future: so the story goes. Immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community are the weapons; the amorphous, evil Left are the ones who wield them.
In the next 24-48 hours, we will have a better idea of how the Trump administration plans to play this. We will know who they decide to blame and what actions they intend to take. We will know whether this assassination will be the spark that sets our world on fire or another tanker of nitroglycerin parked beside the rest.
This is a very good time not to post dumb shit or jeopardize yourself for a bit of engagement. Good time not to sound off in group chats. Good time to pour yourself a nice cup of tea, with or without bourbon, which is what I’m going to do right now.
I wish I didn’t feel so cold. It’s adaptive, but it sucks. I wish human life felt as valuable as it did before COVID, before the election and ASMR deportation videos and military force against the American people: before the world went mad. I wish I was more worried about the abstract sanctity of life than the concrete safety of me and mine. I wish I could go back to CPAC 2022, when I paced outside the venue and wondered how I’d be able to stand it if things got to the point they’re at now. My whole Thing is writing about why the right believes what it does, trying to help build the kind of bridge that Kirk and people like him dedicated their lives to setting ablaze. I like getting to know conservatives, enjoy our conversations, live for those moments of clarity when I understood a piece of the thought process that leads them to the horrendous conclusions they’ve reached. If the chasm between us grew unbridgeable and understanding no longer mattered and the blood began to flow, what then?
I wish I could go back and say: don’t worry. By the time we reach that point, you’ll be a different kind of person.
And I wonder if she’d look back into my own eyes and say: bullshit. Your heart is breaking. You don’t want this. You’ve found a way to live with this, because you have to. And you’ll pay a price for it, when all of this is over. But I’m glad you’re where you are. And I’m sorry it’s come to this.
*The original version of this article stated that Trump did not mention or condemn the assassination of Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their golden retriever. Trumps did in fact issue a brief, boilerplate statement condemning the murder and then never mentioned it again.
Thank you for expressing what so many of us are feeling. Your words help us better understand where we are and how we got here. Please be well.
I feel like you have again captured my inner monologue and thoughts and encapsulated most of my feelings about Kirk getting shot today. I would add that the likes of Gavin Newsome and even J.B. Pritzker making comments as if they have no idea what a truly rotten person Charlie Kirk was makes me MORE concerned about how things will play out now. Stay safe Lady and keep doing the excellent work you do IMO.