As a wave of insurrection crashed against the United States Capitol four years ago, I received a text from a friend of mine in Egypt asking if I was okay. I wasn’t, I told him. He'd witnessed Tahrir Square in 2011 and wrote back, “Once political violence infects a country, it’s very hard to get it out.”
In Orem, Utah earlier today, the flywheel of violence claimed its latest victim: Turning Point USA founder, Charlie Kirk. Speaking to a crowd of about 2,000 students at Utah Valley University, a single shot rang out, knocking Kirk backward and off his stool.
Around the same time, one state over in Evergreen, Colorado, there was another school shooting, the ninth of 2025 where students were killed or injured, according to Education Week. Three students are in the hospital, two in critical condition.
I’ve written a fair bit on the scourge that is gun violence in America, and I won’t repeat my raw feelings here.
After driving my 15 year old home from school today, though, my soul is worn thin. “Why are we okay with children dying or people being killed for their political beliefs?” She asked me. “What is wrong with us?”
She looked over at me. “Are you going to answer?”
I don’t have an answer for her or myself, or anyone reading this. That she has to ask that question both enrages and crushes me. That she told me that the new wing of her high school features bullet proof glass in the class in the classrooms makes me scream at the wind.
To say “There’s no place for political violence,” is necessary at moments like this. However, the words belie the reality of our time: There is political violence in America, and we’ll see more of it.
Per Reid Epstein in The New York Times:
Violence against political figures was once the sort of thing that happened in unstable democracies far away. Now it is a fact of life in America, like the school shootings that once shocked the national conscience. (Emphasis mine.)
Before Charlie Kirk, a right-wing political activist, was fatally shot on a college campus in Utah on Wednesday, there were two attempts to assassinate Donald J. Trump last year while he was the Republican nominee for president; a Passover firebombing at the residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania; middle-of-the-night shootings of Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota; and a man officials said was fixated on the coronavirus vaccine who killed a police officer in a shootout at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.
That is all just since last summer.
From the Oval Office, President Donald Trump deemed Kirk a ‘martyr for truth and freedom.’ He expressed outrage that anyone would threaten Americans simply for their political beliefs before blaming “radical left extremists that has hurt too many people and taken too many lives.”
Elon Musk, not to be outdone, tweeted: “The left is the party of murder.”
History is replete with reactionary violence in the wake of political killings. The killing of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jew was the predicate for what would come to be called Kristallnacht.
In coming days and weeks, the Trump administration and its allies will use Kirk’s death as an excuse to blame Democrats and ‘the left’ for any and all crime, disturbances, and violence. The actions will range from the strange, as in flying American flags at half-staff, to the extreme, calling on Democratic governors to freely allow federal officers and troops into their states without complaint.
Trump will use Kirk’s death as a means to an end for his own political benefit. After weeks of trying to get his repellent relationship with Jeffrey Epstein out of the news and off the minds of his most fervent supporters, the president will enrage his base with screams about Antifa and other leftist violence. It will probably work.
As we commemorate the 9/11 attacks, yet another act of political violence, we’ll be hard-pressed to find the better angels of our nature let alone listen to them. We are in a dangerous, upside down era in America and around the world. The natural instinct is to keep our heads down and our mouths shut: To preserve our personal safety, and those of our loved ones.
That is the easy way to go. But we do not live in easy times. We live in difficult days with incredible challenges ahead. Now, we must look within ourselves and dig that much deeper for grace, patience, and forbearance. These traits should not be conflated with capitulation. Quite the opposite. We require cool heads, full hearts, and strong backs for the struggle ahead.
Only after we’ve navigated these rocky shoals will we be able to look at our children and answer the questions whose answers today escape us.
Our children deserve both an answer and a future. Thank you.
Thank you for the piece. You really spoke to me. I frankly cannot explain how a country this rich in natural resources and intellectual capital can descend into this level of decline. But here we are and it may take divine intervention to climb out of it.