On September 10, 2025, public speaker Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at a university in Utah. The best evidence available today says he was shot with an old-style bolt-action rifle from about 200 yards by a sniper on a roof. (I won’t say the probable murderer’s name, as that is giving him too much attention.) Reliable news sources like the Wall Street Journal report that the shooter said he committed this murder because he viewed Charlie Kirk’s ideas as “hate”: “’I had enough of his hatred,’ [the shooter] allegedly responded. ‘Some hate can’t be negotiated out.‘” (Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2025) The shooter thought he could murder someone for expressing what he considered to be “hate”. He shot Kirk through the neck, with Kirk’s blood spurting out like a geyser in front of thousands of people, who will now be traumatized by that event, to say nothing of Kirk’s family and friends. (I had the misfortune of seeing a close up of the video of his death, which sickened and horrified me.)
The response from the more irrational portions of the left-wing mob has been horrific, but not particularly surprising to me. The celebration videos online are awful, but I also think most people behaving this way are just random people on the Internet, not major public speakers or intellectuals. I will not waste time addressing those who are either mentally ill, or moral monsters.
What I do want to spend time addressing is a more subtle way of minimizing or dismissing this murder. How should we think about the murder of Charlie Kirk, if civilization, rationality, and moral decency is our objective? If this is one’s goal, the only thing to be said about Kirk’s murder is: “This is a vicious, unprovoked murder, that I condemn without question, reservation, or qualification, and the murderer must receive the maximum penalty allowed by law.”
If someone says anything like: “I don’t agree with Charlie Kirk’s murder, but I didn’t agree with him on some things.” They are implicitly saying he deserved to get murdered. (Whether the speaker realizes it or not.) It implies that in the speaker’s mind, they are at least entertaining the notion that someone deserves to get killed for expressing their views through speaking or writing. That’s okay if you are not sure about whether force should ever be used to stop someone from expressing their beliefs on politics, religion, morality, or philosophy. But, if you have such doubts, you have no business calling yourself an intellectual, a reporter, a teacher, a lawyer, or a politician. You should not speak on these topics, if you are that uncertain of the baseline value that force should not be used against people solely because of their spoken or written words that express political, philosophical, or religious beliefs. If you do insist on speaking, and say things like I’ve been hearing and reading, about how “…Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to die, but I also disagree with him…” then you should be judged, and judged harshly, as either evil or an ignoramus.
Imagine if someone were sexually assaulted, and someone said: “I don’t agree with how they dressed, but no one deserves to be raped.” What they are implicitly saying is that they aren’t sure in their own head about that issue. That’s okay if they aren’t, but they have no moral business having a forum, such as a newspaper, a television station, or a YouTube channel, when saying such things. Morally, private newspapers and private TV channels should not give them a forum to express such views. (Obviously, the government has no business being involved in censoring people, even when they express bad ideas.)
We wouldn’t rightfully say of someone murdered, who said 100% truth: “He didn’t deserve to die because he spoke only truth.” That would imply his right to life is tied to the truth of the ideas he holds, when it is not. His right to life has no connection to the contents of his mind. One also wouldn’t rightfully say: “He didn’t do enough good things [however you define that] so he deserves to be murdered.”
If we are to live in a civilized society, whether someone states 100% truth or 100% lies must be irrelevant to their right to live. How they live their life, and what they believe, short of your need to act in emergency self defense against force, doesn’t justify intentionally killing them.
In the past, what I’ve heard from people on the left is: “Don’t blame the victim of a crime.” (For instance, when a woman is sexually assaulted.) First of all, I think this aphorism can be used as a verbal club to attack anyone who points out that you should take some care in how you live your life, and who you associate with. If you hang out with dangerous felons or drugs addicts, you’re more likely to end up the victim of a crime. I think what this saying means in a rational context is something like this: We don’t look for trivial rationalizations about the actions of the victim to minimize or excuse the actions of criminals. Even if the victim was imprudent , that in no way excuses the rights-violation by the criminal. The criminal must still receive full moral condemnation, and the full weight of the law. In this case, we can’t even say Charlie Kirk was imprudent. He wasn’t hanging out with dangerous felons, for instance. He was speaking at a college. No one on the left has trotted out the “Don’t blame the victim” line in the case of Charlie Kirk. I wonder why?
I think saying anything but unequivocal condemnation for the murder of Charlie Kirk is what Ayn Rand and her close associates called context dropping:
“Context-dropping is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion.” (The Virtue of Selfishness “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests”, found in Ayn Rand Lexicon)
“Whenever you tear an idea from its context and treat it as though it were a self-sufficient, independent item, you invalidate the thought process involved. If you omit the context, or even a crucial aspect of it, then no matter what you say it will not be valid . . . .A context-dropper forgets or evades any wider context. He stares at only one element, and he thinks, “I can change just this one point, and everything else will remain the same.” In fact, everything is interconnected. That one element involves a whole context, and to assess a change in one element, you must see what it means in the whole context.” (The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Lecture 5, found in Ayn Rand Lexicon.)
The whole context of the murder of Charlie Kirk is this: A man was violently killed while speaking his ideas in public, where the shooter expressly said he did it because Kirk’s ideas were ‘hateful’. You would have to drop the context of: the individual right to life; the right to free speech; and the desire to live in a civilized society, if you gave anything but unqualified condemnation of this shooting as monstrous and evil.
I cannot remember the last time a person was killed solely for expressing ideas in the United States of America. (When they weren’t a politician with political power.) The only historical example I can think of is Martin Luther King. This is the historical, cultural, and moral context of the murder of Charlie Kirk. He was assassinated for expressing his ideas. This must be condemned, without any analysis of his ideas. To do otherwise is to implicitly sanction murder on the basis of belief.
