Dear Progressives: If All You're Doing Is Condemning the Violence, You're Making Things Worse

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Photo by Eyasu Etsub on Unsplash

The responses to Charlie Kirk's assassination have followed a sadly predictable script. That is no less the case now that a suspect is in custody. On one side, Donald Trump and his allies blame liberal rhetoric for creating a climate that made violence inevitable. On the other, progressive voices offer generic condemnations of political and gun violence—statements that are technically correct but feel hollow given years of characterizing Kirk's ideas as dangerous and harmful.

Charlie Kirk was the embodiment of everything that progressive activists stand against. For starters, he was pro-life, he supported the police, he questioned systemic racism, and he believed there were only two genders. Not only that, but he made his career bringing these views directly into the spaces where they were least welcome: college campuses, where he would set up tables with signs reading "Prove Me Wrong" and invite students to debate him.

The responses to his killing from the left and the right display the kind of glib certainty that has poisoned American political discourse, both on college campuses and off. For starters, conservative responses that blame liberal rhetoric for Kirk's death risk making any criticism of conservative positions no different than a call to violence.

Still, the progressive response to Kirk’s death reveals something particularly troubling: when you condemn violence against someone like Kirk while remaining silent about the way those views have been characterized, you're essentially saying those views deserved to be silenced—just not through assassination. Through this, conservatives will see their fears confirmed that their views don't truly belong on campuses or in polite society, while some progressives may even quietly view Kirk's death as a form of rough justice.

The context here matters. Kirk wasn't killed in some random act of violence—he wasn't shot down while walking his dog or in a convenience store robbery. He was assassinated while doing exactly what he was known for: defending conservative positions in the precise setting where those views face the greatest institutional and social hostility. The irony is visible—someone expressing ideas that campus communities routinely characterize as dangerous has now been literally silenced while expressing them in the very environment that has rejected them most forcefully.

The problem isn't that progressives are celebrating Kirk's death—thankfully, most aren't. The problem is that their condemnations ring hollow because they're only objecting to the method, not defending the legitimacy of what Kirk was trying to do. A response that condemns violence while remaining silent about the way those views were vilified sends a clear message: "We agree these ideas should be silenced—we just prefer institutional and social methods over bullets."

This matters because Kirk wasn't just any victim of political violence. He was killed precisely for engaging in the kind of campus discourse that institutions of higher education claim to value—open debate and the free exchange of ideas. If campuses truly believe in intellectual pluralism, Kirk's assassination will prompt them to explicitly defend not just his life, but his views as worthy of engagement and thought rather than demonization as racist, sexist, and transphobic.

Many people will say that we have arrived at the current moment because of the right’s polarizing and bellicose political rhetoric. Others will focus on our too-lax gun laws. The reality, however, is that we’re here in large part because campus communities, progressive activists, and liberal institutions have spent years treating certain conservative positions not just as wrong, but as inherently harmful—dangerous ideas that cause real damage to marginalized communities. When someone expressing exactly those ideas gets assassinated while expressing them in the very space that has most aggressively rejected them, the natural response is to lament that the non-violent methods of suppression have been abandoned. But this ignores the broader context. Charlie Kirk was killed advocating for views that institutions had already labeled hateful and dangerous.

The tragedy is that both sides are now retreating to positions that make future violence more likely, not less. When progressives condemn the violence while maintaining that certain ideas are inherently hateful and bigoted, and conservatives argue that any opposition to those ideas constitutes incitement, we create a political environment where violence becomes the logical endpoint of disagreement.

Breaking this cycle requires something more difficult than simply condemning violence or blaming the other side's rhetoric. It requires progressives to do what many will find genuinely challenging: defend the legitimacy of Kirk's views even while vehemently disagreeing with his message. And it requires conservatives to acknowledge that vigorous political opposition—even when it includes harsh characterizations of their views—is not the same as incitement to violence.

Kirk's assassination presents a test of whether American political culture can still distinguish between "your ideas are wrong" and "your ideas are racist, sexist, bigoted, and harmful." If we fail that test, if we retreat further into our respective corners armed with glib certainties about the other side's moral failings, then Kirk's death will have accomplished exactly what moral condemnation and political violence are designed to do: make democratic discourse impossible by making it too dangerous to engage with our opponents' arguments.

The alternative requires something much harder than the satisfying clarity of moral condemnation: it requires the left to defend the voice and views of people whose ideas we might find abhorrent, not because we agree with them, but because we understand that a democracy depends on the possibility that any of us might be wrong. And because words are better than violence.

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