A Violence-Justifying Movement

And how we can overcome it.

Yesterday, Charlie Kirk— the 31-year-old, founder of Turning Point USA, was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. He was hosting a live event called “Prove Me Wrong,” a forum in which he invited students to debate him face-to-face. He was a fearless advocate for free and civil discourse, a self-motivated scholar, but first and foremost a child of God and a husband and father.

I heard the news as I was preparing to speak on a college campus. Just hours earlier, I had spent the afternoon exploring Cincinnati. My Uber driver, unprompted, warned me about the neighborhoods I should avoid and pointed out the convenience store where he said I would “most certainly get robbed or attacked.” I am generally comfortable walking cities alone in daylight, but I listened carefully and took note, unsettled after seeing the recent, horrifying video of a young Ukrainian girl, Iryna Zarutska, brutally murdered on a train in Charlotte while bystanders did nothing.

Her death was not reducible to a random act of savagery. Her killer was permitted to access her by the pathological compassion that turns an institutional blind eye to serial criminals releasing them with a “written promise” to return to court. Her death was also enabled by an ideology that has long taught that violence is justified if it is done by someone on the “right side of history.”

As I returned to my hotel to prepare my talk, my phone lit up with the news about Charlie. Like millions of others I watched with dread, refreshing my phone for updates and praying for his life and family. It was not lost on me that going to speak on a college campus that evening is a right that is precious and delicate.

For years, the ground has been softening for this kind of act. In 2025, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) published a study titled Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence. The findings were sobering: Nearly 1 in 3 Americans said it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Almost 4 in 10 said the same about President Donald Trump. Those numbers jump dramatically among people who identified as left-of-center: almost half said murdering Musk would be at least somewhat justified, and a majority (55%) said the same about Trump.

Though exceptions can be highlighted and anyone of any belief system can be susceptible to a dehumanizing sort of tribalism, there is simply not an equivalent bloodlust occurring among conservatives. The principles of conservatism are a built-in corrective for such instincts. Free speech, persuasion by reason not coercion, universal dignity of the person, the limitations of the political sphere in deference to things both higher and deeper…all serve as guardrails against the ferocity of tribalism. Principles must constrain our adversaries as well as our allies alike.

But progressivism is not similarly constrained. Its self-understanding is revolutionary. Its moral arc bends toward social transformation by any means necessary. Personal violence can be recast as a proportional response to what is perceived as systemic violence—capitalism, racism, patriarchy. And increasingly, simply holding conservative views is framed as an existential threat and a symptom of fascism. If speech is violence, then silencing it through censorship, force, and even actual violence can be presented as justice.

This revolutionary basis of progressivism has a pedigree. Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance argued that tolerance should be withdrawn from movements on the right, and extended only to those on the left. Theodor Adorno’s infamous “F-Scale” pathologized the conservative temperament itself—respect for tradition, belief in objective moral truth, belief in God—as a precursor to fascism.

Over decades, this way of thinking has turned into the default thinking for many on the left and has often blinded them to see the rising violent authoritarianism in service of their political goals. As I wrote in the Washington Examiner recently:

One example is the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre in the seminal and still widely assigned work by Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre details the process of decolonization, and like every iteration of [revolutionary ideology], it seeks to induce a religious awakening by which members of a marginalized group begin to see in everything evidence of oppression. The psychology of the oppressed must move from contentment to suspicion to rage. In the belligerence of rage lies the revolution, for once captured by rage, a person finds evil everywhere but can no longer see it anywhere in himself.

“When his rage boils over,” Sartre writes, “he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. … When the peasant takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten.” Sartre goes on, “The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt, you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.”

Regardless of whether they have read such literature it’s logic is absorbed like an environmental toxin in universities and well beyond. It is why so many students today find it morally righteous to shout down an invited speaker at the very institutions where open discourse should be most natural. It is why Antifa believes mob violence is self-defense. It is why discrimination against certain identities is justified as right and just. It is why the assassin, Luigi Magione, became a sex-symbol and hero to the point of wild cheers when his name was mentioned on Saturday Night Live. It is why we are so easily seduced to fixating on the evil in the other while blinded to the evil inside and beside us. And it is why ideological disagreements are now justification for permanently cutting off family members, as I write about in my forthcoming book, No Contact: Understanding and Overcoming the Politics of Estrangement (Forum, 2026).

While writing this, a dear friend texted me that her daughter attended her community college class today, where the topic of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was met with sneers from classmates and a professor who dismissed his death as “not a major loss.” To the daughter’s great credit, she packed her belongings and walked out. This anecdote points to an obvious and larger reality: it is simply mainstream to normalize violence against conservatives. It also points to the remedy that I have long said to anyone who asks what can be done to combat ideology in his or her spheres of influence: normalize saying and embodying true things with simplicity, charity, and clarity so that others might follow your lead.

Charlie Kirk’s public life was spent listening to others and entering into dialogue and debate for the sake of what he believed to be true. He was effective because of his great abilities, but he was also effective because ideologies are fundamentally insecure and cannot withstand scrutiny. His death should call us to do the same— and more courageously than before. Real love demands it.

May God rest his soul and comfort his family.