First, the only thing that should be easy to say
I don’t condone political violence from anyone, toward anyone. A man was killed while speaking, a family lost their person, and that is a human tragedy before it is a headline. Full stop. It deserves grief, not grift. It deserves time to breathe, not instant weaponization. And yes—my sympathy to Charlie Kirk’s family and the people who loved him.
Now for the part that’s never easy, because honesty never is: the right-wing outrage machine is already busy turning a funeral into a fundraiser and a crime scene into content. While the investigation unfolds, partisan influencers have declared a culprit: “left-wing bias.” Elon Musk throws in the deepest two words he owns—“Left are murderers”—and the chorus swells. The narrative is decided before facts congeal, because grief is just a stage; the real show is grievance. (Kirk’s death is real; the rush to blame “the left” without evidence is, too. It happened in minutes, not months. See any feed.) The assassination is being used to sell the same old storyline: your neighbor is your enemy, and your enemy wants you dead. That’s not mourning; that’s marketing.
The speed of certainty, the convenience of enemies
There’s a pattern here. A grave act occurs, and within hours the talk becomes existential: “They’re trying to silence us.” “This is war.” “We told you.” The goal isn’t understanding; it’s escalation. Turning one killer into millions of accomplices. Taking one bullet and minting a moral currency to spend for months. It’s useful, this purity play—because it allows you to skip the part where you check if your own house is on fire.
Here’s the uncomfortable inventory: the same faction that is already declaring universal guilt is also the faction that shrugs at slow, preventable deaths—so long as those deaths come wrapped in policy instead of headlines.
“Pro-life,” in air quotes you can see from space
If “pro-life” meant what they say it means, we’d see it in budgets, benefits, and the boring paperwork of care. We’d see it protecting life when it’s poor, brown, pregnant, disabled, hungry, rural, uninsured, or simply unlucky. Instead, we get a maxim with an asterisk: life is sacred inside the uterus and situational once it’s breathing.
Let’s walk through the receipts they hate because they can’t wave them away with a viral post:
- Food on the table. Republicans pushed through or championed the deepest cuts to food assistance in modern memory—nearly $300 billion over the coming decade if their package stands, with added work requirements and cost-shifts to states. That’s not “fiscal prudence.” That’s hunger policy. People can and do get sick when food runs out, kids’ growth is stunted, elders deteriorate, and families break under stress. This isn’t abstraction; it’s the pantry and the checkout lane.
- Health care when you’re broke. Decade after decade, the party of “life” tries to rip out the one program that reliably lowers the death rate among adults who can’t afford coverage: Medicaid expansion. Study after study shows expansion states do better on mortality trends than non-expansion states—less dying when life gets precarious, which is the entire point. Refusing that is not a difference of opinion; it’s a difference of outcomes measured in funerals.
- Infant lives after their birth certificates. Post-Roe bans and extreme restrictions correlate with higher infant mortality—hundreds of babies who would otherwise be alive. If “pro-life” applied to born infants, the policy would move to save them. It hasn’t. Because for too many lawmakers, the moral concern ends the moment a cry begins.
- Guns everywhere, grief everywhere. The same voices crying “murderers” at an entire ideology fight tooth and nail against even the gentlest gun safety laws. Meanwhile, 46–48 thousand Americans die by firearm in a typical recent year—suicides, homicides, accidents, kids shot in schools and living rooms. When the right talks about freedom here, they mean the freedom to look away.
- Pandemics aren’t culture wars. But they were treated like one. Mask theater, vaccine nihilism, performative defiance—then cemeteries and empty chairs at dinner. More than 140,000 U.S. children lost a parent or primary caregiver within the first fifteen months of COVID’s spread. Those kids are still living with it; we all are. Personal responsibility didn’t adopt them, fund their therapy, put food in their fridges, or pay their rents. Policy could have done more; ideology did less.
- Storms, floods, poison, heat. The climate and environmental docket reads like manslaughter with committee hearings. Loosen the rules, gut the enforcement, litigate the science, pretend the smoke is normal, and watch the same counties drown first and rebuild last. The casualties don’t always hit in one day; they accumulate like debt—and interest is due.
- Katrina, forever. A template of abandonment: late help, blame-shifting, and an afterlife of “lessons learned” that never seem to apply before the next siren. If you saw “life” as sacred, you wouldn’t triage by zip code and skin tone. You’d ask, “Who’s most likely to die when we delay?”—and the budget would answer.
This is the quiet arithmetic of “life when convenient.” The bodies don’t trend; they tally.
“But now it’s a civil war?” Give me a break.
We hear it every time the right suffers a high-profile attack: the language jumps straight to apocalypse. “They want us dead.” “This is the beginning.” “Arm up.” It’s a script written for dopamine, not democracy. Political violence is rising in this country, and the assassination of a prominent conservative is part of that nightmare. But to leap from horror to war-talk is to turn grief into gasoline. (Gun deaths remain staggering overall; the environment is primed for panic and opportunists know it.)
What gets lost in the war-drum thunder is the basic, boring consensus most Americans share: we reject political violence. We don’t want shootouts at universities. We don’t want mobs in legislative halls. We also don’t want kids practicing ballistic geometry in math class, or parents rationing insulin, or infants dying because prenatal care became a legal hazard.
January 6 belongs in this conversation, whether you like it or not
You can’t sermonize about political violence while memory-holing a mob that battered law enforcement officers and hunted elected officials inside the seat of government. Roughly 140 officers were injured—eyes gouged, heads crushed in doorframes, lungs scorched with chemicals. Some officers died in the aftermath; others ended their own lives in the months that followed. The GOP apparatus spent years minimizing it, laundering it with euphemisms: “tourists,” “misunderstood,” “peaceful.” Spare us. If you want to be a consistent opponent of political violence, start by telling the truth about the one you cheered until it became inconvenient.
The police murders you don’t post about
If a conservative celebrity is harmed, timelines flood. When police kill civilians—especially Black and brown civilians—the same loud accounts pivot to “What did he do?” and “Comply and you won’t die.” There’s a reason communities don’t trust reforms that begin and end with a press conference. Accountability is not anti-police; it’s pro-human. And if “law and order” were truly about life, the order would include not killing people over traffic stops and the law would include a right to survive encounters with the state.
The military kills people. That’s not a smear; it’s the job they’re sent to do.
We ritualize it because the raw phrasing is unbearable. Civilians die. They die in drone strikes and raids and miscalculations. They die in the fog of war and the clarity of policy. We call it collateral to keep living with ourselves. The right will cheer a blast radius as long as it happens far enough away to make the screaming theoretical. “They” are allowed to be numbers. “We” are always names.
If you want to have a national argument about the legitimacy of force—state, police, military—have it honestly: why is death righteous over there but unthinkable over here? Why is a child’s life precious in a sound bite and expendable in an omnibus bill?
Trump literally just condoned a hit on 11 Venezuelans this week.
The hypocrisy engine
Here’s how the machine runs:
- A singular, visible tragedy—center it, amplify it, assign the broadest possible blame to the broadest possible target.
- An ongoing, diffuse catastrophe—minimize it, call it complicated, cloak it in “freedom,” and deny causal links between your votes and other people’s funerals.
- Repeat until nobody can remember what a consistent ethic looks like.
That is why Musk’s “Left are murderers” line lands like a bad parody: not because murder is a joke, but because the accusation is a mirror that only points one way. If your politics produce more preventable deaths through neglect than any assassin could rack up in a decade, maybe sit the “who loves life” Olympics out. (Yes, this is also where the gun numbers come back to haunt the “good guy with a gun” bedtime story.)
“Thoughts and prayers,” but make it policy
If the right actually believed what they say in the first twenty-four hours after a conservative is killed—“This must never happen again”—we’d see action beyond hashtags:
- Universal background checks, red flag laws that actually flag, storage rules that keep kids alive.
- Funding for mental health that is more than a fig leaf.
- A public safety approach that doesn’t confuse cosplay with protection or swap training for swagger.
- Real standards for police use of force and real accountability when those standards are violated.
- Reproductive health and maternal care that keep mothers and infants alive.
- Medicaid expansion where people are dying because a governor wants to posture.
- Food benefits structured around human nutrition, not the thrill of “tough love.”
That list is bipartisan if you care about life. It’s controversial only if you care more about brand than bodies.
What consistency would sound like
Condemn the assassination. Demand a real investigation. Reject conspiracy mad libs. Tell your own base to stand down on the civil-war cosplay. Then, if you want to talk about murder, talk about it where it lives: in budgets that take food out of kids’ mouths, in roll calls that keep care out of reach, in gerrymandered districts where a politician’s safest vote is the one that shortens someone else’s life.
If you want to talk about culture, talk about the culture that turns every mass shooting into a price of admission for “freedom,” every police killing into a Rorschach where some people always see “deserved it,” every dead soldier into a halo we use to avoid asking why they were sent. Talk about the culture that tells poor families their survival is a moral failing and wealthy families their hoarding is a virtue. Talk about the culture that equates masculinity with muzzle velocity and patriotism with refusing to care.
What happened at that campus was monstrous. What happens quietly is policy.
Both kill. One gets sirens; the other gets committee notes. One gets a podium; the other gets a shrug. One becomes a cudgel to beat your enemies; the other becomes a spreadsheet line you learn to stop reading. The same people screaming “murder” at a political opponent will vote next week to starve a program that keeps your kid fed, then sleep fine.
If you really believe life is sacred, your sacredness has to survive contact with the boring details: logistics, eligibility, reimbursement rates, environmental limits, labor protections, zoning, transit, clinics, pharmacists, caseworkers, social workers, public defenders, shelters, schools. All the unsexy pipes through which dignity flows.
For once, let’s try grief without theater
You want to honor Charlie Kirk? Start with sanity. Don’t conscript strangers into your battle fantasy because it feels heroic. Don’t use a family’s worst day to write a script in which you’re the endangered protagonist and everyone who disagrees with you is an accomplice to murder. Stop auditioning for a civil war. You won’t like the part you land.
You want to honor life? Put your vote where your mouth is. Feed people. Heal people. Protect people. Cool the planet that cooks them. Pass the laws that make guns less omnipresent and despair less fatal. Tell the truth about January 6. Stop valorizing state violence abroad while laughing at harm at home. The scoreboard you keep pretending doesn’t exist is already lit up in red.
Summary: The Uses of a Death
- I condemn political violence—always—and extend sympathy to the victim’s family. That’s non-negotiable.
- The right’s instant “left are murderers” framing turns grief into content and enemies, while ignoring policy choices that quietly kill: massive SNAP cuts, refusal to expand Medicaid, abortion bans linked to higher infant mortality, and a perpetual veto on gun safety as tens of thousands die by firearms each year.
- January 6 belongs in any honest conversation about political violence: roughly 140 officers injured; years of minimization by many who now demand universal sympathy only when it’s their side harmed.
- Calling this tragedy the opening act of “civil war” is posturing that dodges the harder, life-saving work: food, care, safety, climate, and accountability that don’t depend on who pulls the trigger or which flag they claim.
If “life” isn’t just a slogan, it has to survive the budget markup—and the news cycle.