Charlie Kirk’s Killer Was A Progressive Bigot Who Gave Up On Debate

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about it all. Pluralism as an absolute is relativism; a relative pluralism honors the individual search for truth.

Because the Founders didn’t want to live in a theocracy, they at least enshrined the means for a pluralism in the Constitution itself. No religious test will ever be required, and so on.

What they couldn’t conceive and couldn’t sanction was anyone living and thinking so far out of the Jewish and Christian milieu that most moral consensus has been obliterated. We still have the vestigial memory of our religious past, but we’re like Jason Bourne: triggered by something to do something of which we know not what.

It may be that our system could never bear that weight of the most significant moral, ethical, and spiritual questions we could ask. The true risk of self-government has been there all along: to try anyway.

It may be a bad joke to say that the system functions on a firm commitment to political nonviolence, with four murdered presidents, several would-be presidents, and countless others. Yet with the possible glaring counter-example of January 6, 2021, and a civil war prompted by the election of Abraham Lincoln among other things, power has transferred peacefully for over 250 years.

The New York Times reports that the charging documents of Charlie Kirk’s assassin reveal his true motivations and ideology. Rather than give a robust defense of Charlie Kirk — undoubtedly there is bad mixed in with the good, in a life and career built on words — I have a question: Do you want to live in a country where people die for the words they speak?

Many on the extreme Left, like Heather Cox Richardson, have a lot personally invested in Kirk’s killer being on the far Right. To be sure, to wonder if “speech is violence!” as a mantra could have caused this in a person who recognized no difference between speech and violence is too far to travel for some.

In the main and as the mainstream, we must commit ourselves to nonviolence again. We often cringe at the invocation of the word love, but is it not truly love, to will the good of another despite how they might make us feel?

In the face of wretched and repulsive ideas, to go past the momentary passions of fear and disgust? To remember that whoever we encounter, they are loved both in Heaven and on Earth, beyond our capacity to understand. That indeed could change this society, and every society for the better.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may perpetual Light shine upon him. And may all the souls of the faithfully departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

Jason Kettinger is Associate Editor of Open for Business. He writes on politics, sports, faith and more.