I’ve been trying to think about what to say about Charlie Kirk’s murder. The internet is overflowing with reaction and commentary, some of it good, much of it not. As I try to digest the murder itself and its larger implications, I am stuck in a place between human reaction and political fear. 

Let’s start with the most basic truth: he was a human being whose life was wrongly taken, from himself and from his family, criminally and apparently by a young man acting on the misguided belief that an act of hate, of evil, was the appropriate response to the sort of hate that Kirk spouted — all such spoutings protected by the 1st Amendment. (That’s another issue for future discussion.) In any case, I am deeply sorry.

Kirk’s murder has been labeled an assassination, and I think that is appropriate: he was a public political figure. Jonathan Last has this to say: “Assassination goes a step further [then ordinary murder]. 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.” This is perhaps the most critical point: Kirk’s assassin has added to the “attack on our body politic.”

To be clear, Charlie Kirk was no saint. The New York Times has published a piece on his comments on various issues. This is not good. His politics were hate-filled and anti-democratic, and in an earlier age he would have been a marginal figure. But there is no denying that he was a key force in bringing us to the age we are in, where a person like him is not marginal. And, for me his one and only redeeming quality is that he was prepared to debate all comers. (See Ezra Klein;s piece in the Times, about which I have mixed feelings.)

So maybe we have to love the sinner but hate the sins?

Still, we are in a terrifying moment. Trump and MAGA want to use this murder to justify all kinds of attacks on democracy. And that, frankly, is the scariest part of this.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, immediately after the assassination of Caesar, Marc Antony seizes the moment to grab control, using the assassination to mobilize forces in Caesar’s name and on his behalf:

And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge
With Atè by his side come hot from hell
in these confines with monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc,” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men groaning for burial.

“Havoc” was a military order in the middle ages and early modern period that amounted to, “Let the plundering, pillaging begin.” This seems precisely to be what Trump and company are doing with Kirk’s murder.