Charlie Kirk woke up this morning and went to Utah Valley University to talk about whatever it is Charlie Kirk is talking about these days — trans people, wokeism, the evils of the Left. Beneath an awning emblazoned with the slogan “Prove Me Wrong,” Kirk delivered the last speech of his life. During the Q&A, just as he began to answer a question about gun violence, a high-caliber bullet hit him with enough force to spin him in his chair. Dark blood gouted from the hole in his neck and soaked into his white shirt as the audience screamed and ran. That he made it to the hospital at all is a miracle, but that’s as far as it went. Charlie Kirk bled out. Charlie Kirk is dead.
That paragraph should read like bad fiction. It should feel surreal. It should shock, it should disorient: it does none of those things. We already lived in the kind of world where political figures get shot. They got shot in Minnesota very recently, though Trump forgot to deliver an Oval Office statement or put the flag at half-staff or even attend the funeral.* This violence didn’t start today, or yesterday, or days or even weeks ago. We walked here, or were dragged here, as a nation.
I am not going to pretend to mourn Charlie Kirk: I will not debase myself or insult your intelligence by pantomiming sadness. I believe that every living soul is crafted in the image of God, each with its own universe of thoughts and feelings that cannot be replaced. I also believe that sometimes, in this world, you reap what you fucking sow. Sometimes, when you do your part to build a brave new America in which the whims of some strongman mean more than the laws that undergird our entire political system, when you work tirelessly to foment hatred and erode our ability to even speak to each other, when you dedicate decades of your miserable life to dividing a nation against itself — well, sometimes you succeed. Sometimes, you end up living in the world you worked so hard to create. And in that world, the bullets are flying.
It’s very similar to the way I felt when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson bled out on a New York City sidewalk:
Yes, I condemn the killing. Extrajudicial murder is wrong.
I would also like to condemn the trees that fall on power lines and cause electrical outages. I condemn earthquakes that destroy cities and kill thousands of people. Wildfires, famines, floods: I condemn them all. Yet these things happen regardless.
Charlie Kirk’s troubles are over. Ours have just begun:
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