The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a grotesque violation of the way a free society conducts politics.
No matter how bad his ideas were, we benefited from their public articulation for the simple reason that bad ideas only reinforce good ideas as long as anyone is willing to think—and if no one is, then no amount of killing will save us.
Kirk was, however, the cause of his own death in the sense that the mysticism he preached demands a violent response to the persuasion he practiced.
Therefore, the answer to this attack on our civil rights—meaning those rights that protect our ability to influence the government, of which the freedom to discuss political issues is one—is to embrace reason.
Sometimes people mean what they say. Often they do not.
When health insurance CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated—an act of even greater evil than the assassination of Kirk, and more widely accepted because of it—mainstream media briefly denounced his murder and then explained at length the understandable reasons that existed to murder him.
Anyone who responded in this way endorsed the murder.
This is because every explicit statement comes packaged with an implicit statement made by one’s choice of subject, and these two statements can and often do contradict each other.
If one responds to a murder by focusing on how the victim was bad, then one is implying that the murder was good even if one made a preliminary, perfunctory statement to the contrary.
Do not refrain from condemning such responses out of a misplaced sense of objectivity. Considering only explicit speech and ignoring context is the opposite of objectivity because it is based on the premise that any process of conscious judgment is really just a game of musical chairs played with one’s feelings. The logical conclusion is that logical conclusions have nothing to do with reality and that sticking to the facts is the only way to be safe.
This safety is an illusion, however.
Shorn of context—which includes their speaker’s language, intentions, etc.—words are noise. Even sensations require context. It is impossible, for example, to be aware of one color without simultaneously being aware of another by contrast. Awareness is contextual.
Therefore, do not reject logic and context in the name of objectivity. Instead, use logic to establish context and thereby achieve objectivity.
This means not to ignore someone’s choice of subject when interpreting his words, but to identify the meaning his choice of subject imparts to his words.