Assassination Is a Direct Attack on Democracy Itself [View all]

Charlie Kirk’s assassination yesterday was an abomination. Political violence is poison. It is anti-democratic to its core. No matter who the target is, killing someone for their politics is not justice, not progress, not righteousness; it is murder, full stop. And murder has no place in a democracy.

I will not sanitize what Kirk represented. His ideology was toxic, divisive, and cruel. He spent his career punching down, spreading falsehoods, and stoking resentment for profit and power. Society is better off without his corrosive influence. But that truth does not diminish the fact that his assassination is an outrage.

Here is the distinction that matters: his family and friends have suffered a tragic loss, and they deserve empathy in their grief. That empathy, the ability to feel the pain of others even when we despised the man they loved, is what separates us from the callousness Kirk himself so often displayed.

We cannot allow political assassination to become normalized. If we do, no voice is safe, no dissent survives, and democracy collapses into fear and blood. Political killings are not acts of resistance; they are acts of destruction. And we must say so without hesitation, without exception.