On Wednesday, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was killed while speaking at the Utah Valley University. His assassination is a horrific tragedy, especially for the wife and two children he leaves behind. 

A cycle of violence is plaguing this nation. Events like Kirk’s killing crystallize the unacceptable situation in which our republic finds itself. The price of speech in this country should never be one’s life. That anyone’s life would ever be jeopardized for exercising their constitutional rights is profoundly anti-American — and anti-human. 

We have more to say on the heightened state of politically motivated violence in this country — please read the excerpt from Media Matters’ Matt Gertz below. But first, I wanted to take this opportunity to express something personal to you. 

I’ve been following Charlie’s career for nearly six years. As he became an increasingly more dominant figure in the conservative media sphere, tracking his radio show and speeches became a larger and larger part of my work at Media Matters. I profoundly disagreed with almost every single thing Charlie said, and I rarely liked how he conducted himself. You can find my condemnations of his ideas in plenty of places. 

And then on Wednesday, I watched him being shot to death. In that moment, and in the days since, all I have felt is grief and sorrow. The violence of his end was shocking and wrong. His death doesn’t change the facts of my disagreements with him, or that I continue to oppose the ideas he advocated. There’s no reason to pretend it would. But it did make clear that, for better or worse, Charlie was a daily figure in my life. And he was also a father and husband. My heart is broken at the thought of the loss his family is going through, and for the mourning his fans, friends, and admirers are feeling.

On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response

Below is an excerpt from Matt Gertz's column on Kirk's killing.

Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy. 

Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed. 

Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.” 

Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.

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Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination. 

There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.