Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated. That sentence has been echoing in my head for five days now. No matter what I think of him, no matter what you think of him, assassination is not the answer. Debate, yes. Disagreement, absolutely. But violence? Never.
I’ve wrestled with this all week. I knew who Charlie Kirk was, mostly because I follow politics as a kind of strange hobby. I listen to podcasts, scroll through endless feeds, and read way too many articles. So, yes, I knew of him. I knew some of his thoughts, some of his “performances” on campuses, some of his clips. But many on my side of the aisle didn’t know his name until it flashed across the headlines tied to the word “assassination.”
That’s not surprising. We’re all in our cocoons. Social media feeds us what we already like, validates our own viewpoints, and conveniently hides the people who challenge them. Conservatives may not know Matt Iglesias or Jon Favreau. Liberals may not know Charlie Kirk. And so the bubbles stay intact.
But this tragedy ripped a hole in the cocoon. It forced me to think about how much time we spend listening only to people who sound like us. A friend of mine, who’s on the right, wrote a post about why he was grieving so hard. He said he spent 45 minutes a day with Charlie Kirk in his car. That made sense to me. If you listen to someone daily, they become part of your life even if you never meet them. He stated this as a defense on why he didn’t have the same emotions about the assassinations of the Minnesota lawmakers – he didn’t know them. They and that topic didn’t penetrate his cocoon, at least not much. While I didn’t agree with some of the word choice in his post, the general theme of his post made me stop and think (and change some of my thoughts).
I don’t agree with much of what Charlie Kirk said. I don’t agree with how he staged debates with college kids who were outmatched in experience and articulation. But I can still admit this: he was articulate, charismatic, and probably someone I could have enjoyed arguing with over lunch. He did not deserve to be killed.
(My wife disagrees with me about whether I’d actually “like” him if we worked together. She says no. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she knows me better than I do. Marriage: the eternal debate.)
The bigger point is this: assassination is not debate. It’s not persuasion. It’s not the marketplace of ideas. It’s the destruction of it. If we want to create an environment that allows success to happen – for our politics, for our country – we need to resist the cocoon. Click beyond your comfort zone. Read the other side. Listen to perspectives you don’t agree with. Because when we don’t, we dehumanize. And when we dehumanize, tragedies like this become easier for some people to justify.
Charlie Kirk should have been debated into irrelevance, not killed. His ideas should have been challenged with better ideas. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.
These thoughts aren’t fully baked. I’m sure they’ll shift by tomorrow or the next day. And that’s okay. We should all allow our thinking to evolve. For now, I’m going to turn off the heavy stuff and flip on the Eagles-Chiefs game. Because sometimes the best debate is whether or not the ref blew that call.
One Win: I didn’t scroll Twitter during this rant.
One Question: What cocoon are you still sitting in and what’s one source outside of it you could read this week?
MattMunnell.com 