Jonathan V. Last, The Assassination of Charlie Kirk:
Charlie Kirk’s murder was not just a murder. It was an assassination. That’s the crucial point.
We often forget the philosophical underpinnings of criminal law. Rightly understood, we view crimes as being committed not against individuals, but against society itself. Thus, when someone is murdered, the offense is not against the victim and his family, but against everyone. All of us. It is an offense against nature, heaven, and man.
Assassination goes a step further. In addition to all of the above, assassination is, like terrorism, an attack on our body politic. An attack on how we choose to live together. On our system of government. Which in America’s case, means an attack not just against all of us, but against liberal democracy itself…
Pray for Charlie Kirk. For his wife and his two young children. For his extended family and his friends, his colleagues and fellow parishioners, that they would all find comfort and peace. Pray for our leaders, that they would be wise, prudent, and charitable in the coming days. When you see people being neither wise, prudent, nor charitable—and you will—pray that they are given grace and offer them yours as a down payment. Pray equally for those you love most and for those you like least.
Cameron Cummins-Smith,Not All Victims Should Be Martyrs:
It is bad that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. That does not make him a good man. You don’t have to make him into a martyr just because he was a victim. Painting Kirk as a role model for political discourse requires either a staggering ignorance or intentional neglect of what he actually stood for.
Elizabeth Spiers, Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning:
[Kirk] was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct…
Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long you dress them up in a posture of debate… The man who said, “Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist…
[It is] particularly galling to see him cast by some as a free-speech warrior. He created a professor watchlist explicitly designed to get academics fired who dared talk about the right’s usual assortment of verboten topics—anything to do with race or gender, in particular.
