This week, the political landscape was shaken by an act of horrific violence: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The commentator and founder of Turning Point USA was a fiery and influential voice, a figure who inspired fervent support from some and strong opposition from others. But the news of his killing is not a political event; it is a human tragedy. It is a stomach-churning, devastating act that represents a catastrophic failure of our civil discourse and a descent into the darkest form of political violence.
To see any human life ended in such a way is an abomination. It leaves a family in mourning, a movement in shock, and a nation grappling with the reality that the rhetoric of division can, at its most extreme fringe, manifest in brutal action. In this moment of grief and anger, our first duty is to acknowledge the profound human loss.
And yet, as we hold this specific, acute horror in our minds, we are called upon by our conscience to hold another, much larger one simultaneously. We are required to engage in the painful, necessary practice of moral consistency.
Because while we process the shock of one violent death that feels close to home, a genocide is unfolding in Gaza. The death toll, as of this writing, has surpassed 34,000 Palestinian lives. Each one was a Charlie Kirk to someone. Each one was a person with a name, a family, dreams, and people who loved them. They were parents, children, artists, and students. Their deaths, too, are an abomination.
The juxtaposition is not meant to compare grief or to diminish the profound wrong of Kirk’s assassination. It is meant to highlight a disturbing fracture in our collective empathy: Why are we often more viscerally horrified by violence against those in our immediate orbit than by industrial-scale violence against those we’ve been conditioned to see as “other”?
Modern political Zionism, in its most extreme and dominant form, has relied on a framework that places the value of Israeli security above all else, often at the explicit expense of Palestinian humanity. This is not a commentary on Jewish people or their historic right to safety, but a critique of a specific political ideology that enables a military campaign. The language used to describe Palestinians—“human animals,” collateral damage, existential threats—is designed to make their deaths seem inevitable, justified, or even necessary. The violence is outsourced, distant, and sanitized by political talking points.
This same poison of dehumanization is what fuels domestic political violence. The rhetoric that reduces complex political opponents to “evil,” “traitors,” or “vermin” is a gateway. It strips away shared humanity and makes violence thinkable. The mindset that can justify the obliteration of a city in Gaza for “security” is a cousin to the mindset that can justify pulling a trigger for “the country.”
There is a terrible, echoing logic to violence. The principle you endorse for your enemy, you ultimately welcome into your own world. When you normalize violence as a tool—whether through state military power or the language of hate—you break a sacred taboo. The monster you unleash does not care for your personal labels of “good” and “evil.” It only knows that violence is now an acceptable currency.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a stark, terrible warning. It is a warning that the fires of hatred we stoke abroad, or against our domestic political rivals, cannot be contained. They will spark and spread, finding oxygen wherever division thrives.
In this somber moment, our mourning must be universal. Our condemnation of violence must be absolute and without exception. We must grieve for Charlie Kirk and the 34,000+ in Gaza with the same human heart.
The fight is not left versus right. The true fight is for the principle that no human life is disposable. If we abandon that principle for anyone—whether through assassination or genocide—we erode it for everyone. In honoring the value of one life lost too soon, we must recommit to honoring the value of all.
