Who and What to Mourn

At 12:20 PM in Orem, Utah, on the campus of Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.

And naturally, the discourse started immediately.

The conservative activist had long been a target for the ire and criticism of progressives, liberals, and even moderates like me for some time. He regularly espoused positions that I found incorrect, ignorant, or immoral. Many shared my distaste for the flavor of influencer that Charlie Kirk was.

For many, this was enough to not mourn his death — or even to celebrate it. To them, Kirk’s death is the end of a Twitter timeline filled with hate and vitriol. It is the end of anti-science fearmongering and fascistic fawning over totalitarianism in our government. It is the end of Russian state-sponsored talking points and the justification of horrible violence against the marginalized.

But I’m crushed. And in light of some questions that I’ve received from family and friends over the last day, as well as some discourse I’ve seen online, I think it’s worth explaining why that is.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t the best of us. But he engaged in peaceful debate in the public square. He is someone who went to college campuses and debated people he disagreed with. Sometimes he made obtuse or ghoulish arguments; sometimes his interlocutors did the same. But this type of ugly back and forth debate of ideas is exactly what our First Amendment protects. And Kirk’s killing will do more to quell the exchange of ideas than any law could. That is worth mourning.

He was also a father of two. His wife and three-year-old daughter had to watch him die a gruesome, bloody death. Two little girls are going to grow up without a father. That is worth mourning.

Aside from the personal and moral horror, there is immense social pain caused by political violence that directly affects you and me. Michael Fanone, one of the officers assaulted by the pro-Trump mob on January 6, said this:

Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by Democrats. And Melissa Hortman wasn’t killed by Republicans. But that Kirk was (seemingly based on early evidence) killed by someone on the left, and that Hortman was killed by someone on the right are enough to fan the flames of disunion.

The result of this is an America where we trust each other less. An America where we see each other as less deserving of the dignity we all deserve. That’s not an America I want to live in. And that continued progression is worth mourning.

Right now, there are enemies of our country — be they Russian bots, radical accelerationists, or grifters of some other sort — that are trying to capture the rage over Kirk’s death and funnel it to support for their causes. They cry out for revenge, for retribution, and for war.

And each person that condones this killing; that spends this time focusing on all of the things that made Charlie Kirk loathsome rather than mourning the loss of innocent life and the further degradation of the bonds which unite us is doing little more than providing these enemies with ammunition.

In a speech before the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, 22 years prior to his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln said the following:

I’ve seen and spoken to people who are having complex feelings right now. Maybe they aren’t feeling joy at Kirk’s death, but they don’t particularly care to mourn the loss of someone whose existence they felt was antithetical to their beliefs. And I’m not going to shame anyone for grappling with an event like this in their own way; there is no right way to make sense of the senseless.

It is not shameful to feel less than distraught about Kirk’s loss. Nobody is compelled to paint a faux halo over the head of someone they believed to be an enemy of good. Nobody is evil for not mourning Charlie Kirk.

But we should be mourning those two girls’ loss of a father. And we should mourn a wife’s loss of her husband. We should mourn the callousness of our country that leads us to first consider a person’s standing in life before deciding whether to feel distress or schadenfreude at their suffering. We do this regularly — to liberal elites watching their lives turn to ash in the Pacific Palisades; to rural conservatives being carried away by Texas floods; to Jews being raped and murdered at a music festival; to Palestinians being bombed into submission by a genocidal regime.

You don’t need to mourn Charlie Kirk. But he’s not the only one who lost something yesterday. We all did. We as a nation have taken one step further to suicide.

And at the very least, we should agree that’s worth mourning.