A man was murdered

Refuse to play the game of abstractions

Charlie Kirk poses at The Cambridge Union on May 19, 2025. (Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union)

Shortly after learning Charlie Kirk had been shot, I watched a video of his 3-year-old daughter running to her father, first haltingly, then at full toddler speed, calling “Hi Daddy!” straight into his arms. I watched this video several times, trying to erase the mental residue of the other one that I’d just seen of Kirk being shot in the neck on a college campus.

“The tragic, iron law of our species is that human beings living together will differ in ways that they are willing to die over; differ in ways that they are willing to kill over.”

I wrote these words mere weeks ago when I launched The Argument with a founding essay that asked “How do we live with each other?” From the European Wars of Religion that killed millions to the colonial project of the Belgians in the Congo that brutalized millions, to World War II that exterminated millions, to the murder of this one man, a few weeks after his daughter’s birthday.

I don’t know why Kirk was murdered. I don’t know if the shooter was a political assassin, a lunatic stewing in bizarre ideological spaces, or just a deeply disturbed individual in a country with too many guns. Most likely, some combination of all three. Kirk’s perch as the “youth whisperer of the American right” — and murder during a public event by a single gunshot — suggests he was carefully targeted.

There’s going to be a lot of dooming in the next few weeks. People on the right will blame left-wing political rhetoric for turning up the temperature. People on the left will point out the many political murders that targeted Democrats. Professors will solemnly note the threat of escalating political violence. The opinion pages of prestigious media outlets will tell you that now is the time to fight for democracy.

The best advice I can give to you is that you should tune all of it out.

Refuse to play the game of abstractions. Reject the pull to detach from the concrete into larger themes about social media or guns or political violence or “what it all means.” Repel the impulse to pop off about how the right shot first, about how a left-wing activist called Kirk a Nazi, about how Republicans made this inevitable because they refused to pass gun legislation, or about how it’s unfair that Kirk is receiving adulation in the wake of his death when others get so little. All of that is worse than useless.

If you are worried that the President could seize on this opportunity to go after his political opponents – a sort of a modern-day Reichstag Fire – making any joke or flippant comment about Kirk’s death is at best, meaningless, at worst, counterproductive. These people look insane all on their own, never interrupt your opponent when he is in the middle of making a mistake.¹

You are not advancing your cause. You are not convincing bystanders. You are not working to get legislation passed. You are not writing a dissertation on the root causes of political assassination. You are just making everything worse. Please stop talking. Go outside. Turn off your phone.

Obviously, if you are a police officer in Utah, an elected official with the power to enact legislation, or a reporter looking to find out the truth about the murderer or report on the political weaponization of this tragedy, you have an important democratically prescribed role. But for 99.99% of people, your role is to resist the “rational” impulse to turn a man’s murder into a battle of whose side is culpable. To play is to lose.

Just take a step back and ask yourself: Is sending this tweet, posting this insta story, issuing this inflammatory text like a press release to my right-wing Dad or left-wing aunt putting us on the path to passing comprehensive gun control legislation? Or achieving universal mental health care? The cost of getting a tangible policy win is often making other people uncomfortable. But there is no tangible policy win to be had right now. There’s just the question of whether this moment will further pull us apart from one another and threaten to destroy the very tenuous bonds that bind us, or whether we can look at a video of a young girl who will never again see her father and express a normal human emotion.

Refusing to run to abstraction isn’t abdicating your moral or democratic responsibilities. It is recognizing that any of the changes you want to see in our political or legal systems are built on a simple truth that is crumbling right now: You are my neighbor. That’s how we live with each other. By refusing to be drawn into this hypnotic game where every event becomes a contest for political supremacy.

The only way to win is to stay grounded in truths we can all agree on:

A man was murdered. That is horrible. A man was murdered. I hope the police catch the killer. A man was murdered. I wish things like this didn’t happen here. A man was murdered. I’ll pray for his family.

1. I can’t find a reputable source for who first said this but I’m going to go with Napoleon.