Charlie Kirk Was Murdered. Political Violence Is Surrender.

The shooting of Charlie Kirk at a Utah college today is a tragedy that endangers our democracy.

Uriel Epshtein is the CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative, the publisher of The Next Move.

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Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah today. I unequivocally condemn his killing.

I condemn it, not in the vein of milquetoast platitudes about political violence having “no place in our society.”

I condemn this killing as a son who lost his father as a teenager. Kirk’s two children will now carry the same painful void I have carried for many years.

He was shot on a college campus. In broad daylight. In front of a crowd of hundreds of students. The Renew Democracy Initiative, where I serve as CEO, regularly hosts programs in classrooms across the country. We understand that lawless violence at our universities, or anywhere else, shuts down vital forums for free speech and endangers all of us. Speech does not justify violence. Period.

I more than disagreed with Kirk’s actions and statements. I rejected much of his worldview. What happened today does not change my perspective. But my ideological opposition does not in any way qualify my condemnation of this horrendous attack. Violence harms not only the target, but society at large.

I opened this piece by saying that I wanted to go beyond platitudes, but those platitudes do have a point: political violence has no place in our society. However, we don’t always go far enough in explaining why that matters in a liberal democracy.

In a democracy, our rights and our institutions—not bullets—are what protect us from demagogues. Yes, the process is slow. There is no straight line to victory. The protections are not airtight. Still those institutions and norms provide the order to our lives that is necessary for a free society to function. Political violence is a threat to that order. It is a death spiral that some countries never escape from.

I know that our democracy is under unprecedented strain in America. Highlighting that threat is at the heart of what RDI does. But political violence—regardless of whom it targets—is a sign that we are giving up. We are saying that the fight is already over. That our institutions have been 100% eviscerated and that every possible avenue for peacefully resolving our problems has been exhausted.

Then politics becomes a question of survival of the fittest, and that’s very dangerous territory for us to be in.

But tonight, I’m thinking of a wife who was robbed of her husband and two kids who are going to grow up without a dad.