The Assassin's Veto
What the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk tells us about the dangers facing the American Republic.
Political violence descends over the land like a heavy curtain falling at the end of a play.
A shooter wounded Donald Trump, and killed an attendee of his rally, in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024.
A shooter killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in midtown Manhattan on December 4, 2024 (and was widely celebrated for this cowardly act).
A shooter killed two attendees of a gala at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, on May 21, 2025.
A shooter killed Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota state representative, and her husband, and wounded John Hoffman, a state senator, and his wife, in the suburbs of Champlin, on June 14, 2025.
A shooter killed two children, and injured about twenty others, in an attack on a Catholic Church in Minneapolis on August 27, 2025.
Today, on September 10, 2025, a shooter killed the political commentator Charlie Kirk in an attack at Utah Valley University.
David Foster Wallace was fond of telling a joke about fish and water.
Two young fish encounter an old fish.
“How’s the water?” the old fish asks.
“What the hell is water?” one young fish asks the other, once the old fish is out of hearing.
Our most important freedoms are like water.
Most people in the United States, for example, do not fully understand how remarkable it is that they can freely go about their lives, eating in ordinary restaurants and popping into a local coffee shop for their morning granola, without fear of being kidnapped and ransomed and possibly murdered. But as any moderately rich person in Latin America can attest, that is a remarkable civilizational achievement, one that many countries sorely lack.
The same goes for our ability to engage in political debate, and stand up for our views, without fear for life and limb. In many places, and in many periods of America’s own history, it was physically dangerous to say things that might be deeply unpopular among some of your fellow citizens. If you displeased the wrong person, you might have been arrested by the state or beaten up by a mob or assassinated by your political enemies.
It has over the past fifty years been one of the remarkable achievements of liberal democracies to render that fear relatively remote. Though presidents have always had to be closely protected, and the risk that some individual madman might get it into their head to kill some famous public figure for some idiosyncratic reason could never fully be ruled out, most could speak their minds without any rational fear that they may be courting death.
That is now changing.
It is trite in these moments to call for political unity. But sometimes, in response to a sufficiently horrible event, trite is right.
Charlie Kirk had great gifts as a communicator. His political activism also earned him a lot of enemies. Those enemies will now be tempted to affix “buts” and “howevers” and “at the same times” to the wave of shock elicited by his assassination. Indeed, some Democrats already seem to have fallen into that trap, objecting to a Republican motion for the House of Representatives to observe a moment of silence in Kirk’s honor. But this is a time to “but me no buts”: to close ranks, across the ideological spectrum, without any hint of hemming or hawing.
Defenders of free speech often worry about the heckler’s veto. Some protestors believe that the First Amendment gives them the right to disrupt the speech of those they do not like. But this is a misunderstanding of the logic of free expression. For if hecklers had the right to disrupt any speech, they would quickly come to be in control of what can and cannot be said. While everyone must be free to peacefully protest forms of expression they do not like, they do not have the right to stop such speech from taking place.
I share those concerns over the heckler’s veto. But the danger which now faces the American Republic is deeper still. As violence descends on the land, and the price of engaging in political speech grows and grows, we are increasingly faced with something even scarier, both for the individual and for our political culture: the assassin’s veto.
Violence as a means of politics must always remain unacceptable in a democracy, whether it targets outspoken conservative podcasters or progressive politicians or senior judges or corporate executives. For we all stand to lose when the price of sharing one’s ideas, right or wrong, left or right, radical or milquetoast, becomes incalculable.
I got into pointless arguments online after Brian Thompson was murdered and so many were quick to celebrate because they viewed it as just. Just making the basic argument, “we don’t settle policy differences with violence in this society, and if that became routine, it wouldn’t be a society any of us would want to live in.” But so many pushed back and argued that, essentially, it’s ok to kill as long as you feel strongly enough about something, and it doesn’t hurt if you’re also photogenic like Saint Luigi (this argument could defend abortion clinic shootings as well, but it’s gauche to notice that). This is where that leads. Is this what anyone wants?
The moderate left pays way too much attention to the extreme right, and the moderate right pays way too much attention to the extreme left. If moderate Americans of either stripe don't wise up to this dynamic, and how it distorts our perception of where our society's dangers lie, we will cede our political system to destructive extremists. We could lose it all.