A Dangerous Moment

Political Murder and the Death of Truth

Honestly, my heart sank when I saw the notification come in on my phone that Charlie Kirk had been shot. A sense of dread washed over me—not because of my political agreement or disagreement with Kirk, but because of what this represents for American democracy. In a conversation I had in New York City last week, I predicted that we were bound to see an increase in political violence, as well as more geopolitical destabilization. It is a time of monsters, as Gramsci said, when the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.

Political violence is incompatible with democracy. The entire point of democratic governance is settling our differences through deliberation rather than force, through ballots rather than bullets, through argument rather than assassination. When political disagreements escalate to physical attacks on speakers, we’re witnessing the breakdown of democratic discourse itself. Civil war—political violence taken to its most extreme form—becomes more likely when democratic alternatives get systematically eliminated. I worry our nation is heading in that direction.

Charlie Kirk has died from injuries sustained in a shooting at Utah Valley University while speaking to students. A political assassination has occurred on American soil. This follows the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, along with the attempted murder of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. We are witnessing an escalating pattern of political terrorism that represents a catastrophic breakdown in democratic governance. No one should be murdered for expressing their political views, however controversial those views might be.

But as right-wing figures move to blame Kirk’s assassination on “the left,” we’re witnessing the same dishonest attribution pattern that has defined their response to political violence for years. When a neo-Nazi chanted “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville and ran over Heather Heyer, conservatives insisted those were “fringe figures” unconnected to mainstream politics. When January 6th rioters stormed the Capitol following Trump’s explicit encouragement, conservatives dismissed it as overblown. When Vance Luther Boelter—a registered Republican and Trump voter—assassinated Democratic legislators in Minnesota, right-wing figures immediately spread false information claiming he was a leftist before pivoting to “false flag” conspiracy theories.

Now with Kirk’s murder, the pattern repeats with systematic precision: conservative violence gets minimized or falsely attributed to the left, while any violence that can be blamed on progressives becomes evidence of inherent liberal extremism requiring aggressive government response.

This dishonest attribution serves a purpose beyond partisan point-scoring: it creates the permission structure for using state power to eliminate political opposition while claiming to protect democracy from extremism. When only violence from the left counts as political violence, when only progressive rhetoric gets treated as incitement, when only liberal politicians get held responsible for individual extremists—you’ve created a framework where authoritarian crackdowns become necessary responses to terrorism that somehow never applies to actual right-wing terrorism.

Kirk’s assassination will become an opportunity to seize more control, to eliminate more democratic constraints, to expand surveillance authority to combat “left-wing terrorism” that excludes actual terrorism committed by right-wing extremists like Boelter. Watch how quickly the narrative shifts from mourning Kirk’s death to demanding new powers to combat systematic opposition extremism. The same movement that has spent months deploying masked federal agents to harass American citizens will now use Kirk’s murder to justify even more systematic elimination of democratic opposition.

This pattern repeats throughout history whenever democratic institutions come under authoritarian assault. Individual acts of violence get amplified into evidence of systematic threats requiring extraordinary responses. The Reichstag Fire enabled Nazi consolidation through exactly this logic: one act of political violence becomes evidence of opposition extremism requiring the elimination of democratic protections.

The gaslighting must be resisted, especially when emotions run high and the temptation to accept false narratives for unity becomes overwhelming. Kirk’s assassination and Hortman’s murder both demand justice. But dishonest attribution of this violence to serve authoritarian power grabs makes more violence inevitable by eliminating democratic alternatives to force.

When democratic opposition gets systematically blamed for individual extremism while authoritarian rhetoric gets systematically excused, you create the conditions where violence becomes the only remaining form of political expression. The real test of democratic commitment isn’t whether you mourn these deaths—that should be automatic. The test is whether you resist the dishonest exploitation of political assassination to serve authoritarian advantage.

Charlie Kirk and Melissa Hortman deserved to live, to speak, to advocate for their beliefs without facing violence. Democratic discourse deserves protection from those who would exploit their assassinations to eliminate the democratic protections that make peaceful disagreement possible.

Violence is the enemy of democracy. But so is its dishonest exploitation. To defend democracy now means not only mourning the dead but resisting those who would use their deaths to destroy what remains of our republic.