Charlie Kirk’s murder was one of the worst moments in recent American history. By Graeme Wood, The Atlantic.  

(Posting Note: let's hope so.)

Yesterday afternoon, at a Utah Valley University political event, hundreds of attendees watched the murder of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, a conservative movement-builder and itinerant controversialist. Within hours, millions more had seen the gruesome video of the moment when, in mid-sentence, a bullet pierces Kirk’s throat and streams of blood issue forth. It did not look like a survivable wound, and I am sorry to say that it was not. As a combat medic in Afghanistan once told me, “You can’t put a tourniquet on a neck.” No motive is known, and authorities have named no suspects.

The public reactions have been, to my relief, generally nonsociopathic. Opponents of Kirk who have in other instances celebrated the murder of their enemies have, for the most part, remained decorously mute this time, and I suppose from some people the most precious gift one can hope for is total silence. Until recently, I would have assumed revulsion from everyone at the murder of a political figure at a public debate. Now the expressions of sympathy, condemnations, and gestures of humanity land differently from how they used to. They are in one sense a relief, given the outright glee with which other recent acts of murder have been received. In a paradoxical other sense they are worrisome, because each time one arrives, I remember that just a few years ago these minimal acts of grace would not have been in doubt.


From working on previous gory beats, I have seen horrible images. Ubiquitous doomscrolling now grants others the same awful privilege. In No Country for Old Men, a sheriff fresh from a grisly crime scene is asked whether he thinks one of the massacre’s survivors knows the type of men he’s dealing with. “He ought to,” the sheriff replies, with a dryness only Tommy Lee Jones in West Texas can produce. “He’s seen the same things I’ve seen, and it’s certainly made an impression on me.”

I am too much a pessimist to believe that seeing this disgusting scene of high-definition murder—as opposed to the grainy video, say, of the shooting in the back of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson—will restore the moral senses of all those who have hitherto been casually pro-violence. But I think many people have convinced themselves, at some level, that violence is virtual and that the dead either never lived in human form, or would respawn after their death, after taking the L for the day. The cult of Luigi Mangione surely has at least a few such delusional sociopaths, people who laugh at the thought of an execution but would barf at the sight of one. Now and then I see public stencil art of Hamas commandos, hang gliding into the Nova Music Festival on October 7. A bolder graffitist might have depicted what happened after its pilot landed: Bristling with tactical gear, he stood over the body of a half-naked 19-year-old he had just shot in the head as she begged for mercy. But passing over the violence itself is the point, because many who celebrated that slaughter could do so only because they suppressed their sense of Israeli humanity, not because they had no notion of that humanity in the first place.

Political Violence Could Devour Us All