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The evening of the day on which Charlie Kirk was murdered — a week ago today — I read an editorial about it in The New York Times that said everything that needed to be said about that appalling event.
Sorry to take so long posting it. The headline was “Charlie Kirk’s Horrific Killing and America’s Worsening Political Violence.” The link on that headline is one of those “gift” links the NYT offers, so you should be able to read it. Let me know if you can’t.
In the meantime, I’ll share some key paragraphs:
The assassination of Charlie Kirk — the founder of a youth political movement that helped revolutionize modern conservatism — at Utah Valley University on Wednesday is a tragedy. His killing is also part of a horrifying wave of political violence in America….
Such violence is antithetical to America. The First Amendment — the first for a reason — enshrines our rights to freedom of speech and expression. Our country is based on the principle that we must disagree peacefully. Our political disagreements may be intense and emotional, but they should never be violent. This balance requires restraint. Americans have to accept that their side will lose sometimes and that they may feel angry about their defeats. We cannot act on that anger with violence.
Too many Americans are abandoning this ideal. Thirty-four percent of college students recently said they supported using violence in some circumstances to stop a campus speech, according to a poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression published a day before the Kirk shooting. Since 2021, that share has risen from 24 percent, which was already unacceptably high. Surveys of older adults are similarly alarming….
The intensity of our political debates will not disappear. The stakes are too high, and the country disagrees on too many important questions. But we Americans have lost some of our grace and empathy in recent years. We too often wish ill on our political opponents. We act as if people’s worth is determined by whether they identify as a Republican or a Democrat. We dehumanize those with whom we differ….
That was the penultimate graf. Since I’ve quoted so much, I might as well give you the last one:
…This is a moment to turn down the volume and reflect on our political culture. It is a moment for restraint, rather than cycles of vengeance or the suspension of civil liberties, as some urged on Wednesday. It is also a moment to engage with people who have different views from our own. When societies lose the ability to argue peacefully and resort to violence to resolve their political debates, it usually ends very badly.
(When I read that editorial that night, I retweeted it with this comment: “NYT ably describes the violent tip of the iceberg of hostility that is sinking America. But we’re all too busy despising each other to bother trying to find a way to save our ship. “)
As for the excerpts above — if the NYT lawyers call, I’ll just have to ask them how much I have to cut to suit their definition of Fair Use. But I just thought it was too important not to share. It was a grown-up editorial. It seems to me to have been written by someone mature enough to remember when this country was healthy enough that we could disagree strongly and vehemently, and then shake hands and walk away as friends — or at least as people who recognized each other as fellow Americans, and not as “the enemy.”
Of course, maybe it was written by a younger member of the board. If so, we have someone to thank for providing that person with an excellent education, and a firm understanding of what made America great, before our country’s recent tragic decline.
Evidently the faculty members who were suspended from teaching at Clemson were not the kind who provide such intellectual enrichment. Their grotesque fulminations are an embarrassment to anyone with. conscience. Doubt me? Here are some quotes from their outbursts. If that link doesn’t work, I’ll be happy for you, because you’ll be happier for not having read them.
Should they have been fired for it? Let me pose a different question. Should people who would have deliberately published such remarks at such a time have been employed in the first place, in jobs that involve shaping young minds? Such irresponsibility is inexcusable. They weren’t courageously outspoken; they were stupid, cruel and hateful.
You would think that in an atmosphere in which more than a third of college students believe violence can be justified to stop speech they don’t like, anyone who teaches them would understand that their responsibility is to model productive speech and behavior. And the responsibility of college administrators is to make sure they hire people mature enough to understand that.
At this point in our increasingly ones-and-zeroes country, we will now start hearing the “what abouts.” What about those GOP politicians who have demanded their firings? Are you defending them?
Are you nuts? Those people are cheap opportunists, trying to make themselves heroes to an angry crowd. Or, worse, they’re trying to make a merely grieving crowd… angry. Stir things up. Because they seek higher office, and Donald Trump has taught them that the approach taken by every president before him — striving with all their mights to pull us together in troubled times by invoking the values we hold in common — is for chumps. You can win by feeding division, by pouring gasoline on the embers, he has taught them. And they’re acting upon those lessons.
Just as others have learned that if you post something stupidly inappropriate — the more hateful the better — on social media in response to any news event, there are thousands if not millions of people like them who will regard them as brave and witty, and clap them virtually upon their backs in congratulation. A certain needy type eats that sort of thing up.
Both categories are unacceptable in a rational society. But they are so richly rewarded — in the currencies that matter to them — that they just keep doing it.
One final word: If you actually believe that anything those disgraced faculty members said about Kirk was justified by his rhetoric, you are just as much a part of the problem as those hungry GOP pols.
Personally, I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before the news of his murder. But I went and looked at a couple of videos of him speaking. The entire thrust of what he said, even in the milder comments, was wrongheaded and objectionable to me. In others, he was utterly offensive. But all that was what I expected, since Trump is trying to canonize him. And all of it is beside my point.
Y’all know I don’t believe in capital punishment. But even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t support summarily executing a man for saying things that offended me. I could never support that. And I could never support or worse, applaud anyone who mocks a human being who has died that way.
