There is nothing wrong with admitting that Charlie Kirk was controversial. I disagreed with some of his beliefs, just as I disagree with plenty of other political figures. People should be able to criticize his arguments, rhetoric, and politics as strongly as they want. The reaction to his death, however, involved more than mere criticism.
People celebrated his assassination, joked about the shooting, and a year later, celebrated “Kirkaversary.” There were Charlie Kirk lookalike contests, Halloween costumes of a wounded Kirk, prom transitions that used the audio of his shooting, and people who laughed and danced to the AI-created “We Are Charlie Kirk” audio. On Fizz, someone posted the following: “putting a hickey on her neck where they shot him for [K]irkaversary,” and it received nearly a thousand net upvotes.*
Taken together, these examples show how quickly political violence can become political entertainment. A man who was killed while expressing his political beliefs became a costume, sound effect, and dance trend. Once someone becomes a political symbol, it becomes remarkably easy to forget his or her personhood. Kirk was reduced to “a Republican,” “a provocateur,” “a Trump supporter,” to some remote figure on “the other side.” His politics became so closely associated with his identity that, for some people, his death made those politics the only matter worth remembering. This casual dehumanization should concern us: it teaches us to see our political opponents as something less than human and inures us to cruelty.
This is not evidence that Americans broadly support political violence. In fact, the numbers suggest the opposite. Researchers at Dartmouth’s Polarization Research Lab surveyed more than 45,000 Americans between September 2022 and October 2023 and found that support for partisan violence remained below 4%. Support for politically motivated murder was just 1.7% overall. The overwhelming majority of Americans still recognize there are limits that political disagreement should not cross.
But the way society responds to political attacks may influence the small minority already inclined toward violence. Copycat violence suggests that highly publicized attacks can sometimes become models for vulnerable individuals. A 2024 study of 205 documented copycat mass shooters found that attackers were significantly more similar to their chosen role models than to other perpetrators. The evidence for a broader “contagion” effect is mixed, but we should be careful about turning violence into something that can be imitated, celebrated, or used as a script. When political violence becomes a joke, we risk making the act itself seem less shocking and therefore less inconceivable.
Moreover, we should recognize that political violence strikes at the heart of our republican culture. A 2025 PNAS study examined 1,855 assassinations and 468 attempted assassinations of Colombian local politicians between 1980 and 2023. The researchers found that municipalities where a politician was targeted experienced lower voter turnout, with effects persisting across multiple electoral cycles. According to their full model, turnout was 2.5 percentage points lower on average following an assassination. The United States is obviously not Colombia, so the comparison has its limits, but the finding points to a broader chilling effect. Political violence can discourage citizens from voting, stepping forward as candidates, and publicly participating in politics at all. When entering political life involves exposing oneself to genuine danger, it becomes much harder to sustain an effective and functioning democracy.
Social media, where young Americans increasingly encounter politics, bears a large share of the responsibility for the reactions to Kirk’s death. Pew Research Center found that 70% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 discover political news because they happen to come across it, rather than because they looked for it intentionally. 76% of adults under 30 receive their news from social media at least sometimes, compared with 28% of adults 65 and older. Young adults are also about twice as likely to trust information from social media as older Americans. Political content therefore increasingly reaches young people in the same context as jokes, memes, and entertainment. The distinction between learning about a current event and consuming it for entertainment has become very thin.
Increased social media usage has also accompanied a broader tendency to exaggerate the hostility of our political opponents. Research by Moore-Berg and colleagues found that Democrats and Republicans report similar levels of dislike and dehumanization toward each other, while substantially overestimating the degree to which the opposing side does the same. At least 79% of Democrats and 71% of Republicans overestimated the other party’s prejudice, by 50% to 300% across the study. These exaggerated perceptions were associated with greater alienation from the opposing side and an increased willingness to support actions that harmed the opposing side or flouted democratic norms. This has produced a feedback loop in which we think the other side hates us more than it does, increasing our hostility toward the other side and giving them more reason to believe we hate them.
The danger of these trends is that we stop understanding disagreement as something that can exist between fellow citizens. We can believe someone’s ideas are wrong, harmful, or even dangerous while recognizing that the person who holds them is an equal member of our political community.
This is why I believe the reaction to Kirk’s death should concern conservatives and liberals alike. If a conservative celebrated the assassination of a prominent liberal because they hated that person’s politics, I would find it morally repulsive. I hope that liberals would have the same response if it were the other way around. The standard should not change depending on whose name appears in the headline.
We do not need to pretend that Kirk was a perfect person, agree with his politics, or even believe he was a particularly good political commentator. We only need to recognize that his political beliefs did not make his life worthless. The same principle should apply to everyone.
A healthy democracy cannot be built upon universal agreement. Americans have always fought bitterly over religion, slavery, war, immigration, economics, and the proper role of government. Our achievement was learning to disagree with each other without treating our fellow citizens as enemies. Charlie Kirk’s death should have been an easy moment to understand that. We do not need less disagreement, but better disagreement. And we need to remember that the person on the other side of the argument is still a person — and still an American.
* The Fizz numbers should be taken with some caution. Questions have been raised about whether Fizz’s engagement numbers accurately reflect genuine student activity, or if upvote figures are artificially inflated. It is therefore difficult to treat the number of upvotes as a precise measure of how many students actually supported the post.
Image Credit – Wikimedia Commons
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