Leadership Thought: Reflections on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Dear Friends,

I share below an excellent article by columnist Peggy Noonan on the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I believe it provides an excellent perspective on our current political divide.

During recent national traumas we’ve heard the side argument over “thoughts and prayers.” Something terrible happens, someone sends thoughts and prayers, someone else snaps, “We don’t need your prayers, we need action.” They denounce the phrase only because they don’t understand it and give unwitting offense. (I always hope it is unwitting.) 

Prayer is action. It’s effort. It takes time. Christians believe God is an actual participant in history. He’s here, every day, in the trenches. He didn’t create the universe and disappear into the mist; his creation is an ongoing event; he is here in the world with you. When something terrible happens and you talk to him—that’s what prayer is, talking to him, communicating with concentration—you are actively asking for help, for intercession. “Please help her suffering, help their children, they are so alone.” “Help me be brave through this.”

It’s active, not passive. Catholics, when they’d pray over and over or with friends, used to call it storming heaven. It isn’t a way of dodging responsibility, it is (if you are really doing it and not just publicly posing) a way of taking it. 

So, pray now for America. We are in big trouble.

We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun. 

But what a disaster all this is for the young. Kirk was a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives, and he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts. He was literally willing to meet people where they are. Mainstream media has understandably presented him as a political person, but he was almost as much an evangelical one, a Christian unembarrassed to talk about his faith’s importance to him. All the young who followed him saw the horrifying video of the moment the bullet hit him. They will remember it all their lives, it will be part of their understanding of politics in America. They will ask: If you are killed for speaking the truth as you see it, are you really free? Is this a free country? 

For young conservatives who have felt cowed or disdained on campus, Kirk’s message was no, don’t be afraid, stand and argue your position. That he was killed literally while doing that—I am not sure we understand the generational trauma there.

The political violence of the 21st century is all they’ve ever known—the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011, of Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017, riots on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, the attack on Paul Pelosi the same year. 

We like to say that something happened gradually and then suddenly. It’s from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”: A character, asked how he went bankrupt, says, “Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” That’s how political violence in America has been growing in this century. I would say the 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and now the assassination of Kirk, are the “suddenly” moments. The reality continues while the dark tempo is picking up.

We know this can’t continue and we don’t know how to stop it. That is our predicament. 

For those of us who remember the 1960s and the killing of Medgar Evers, both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, it feels like we’re going through another terrible round of political violence. It’s tempting to think, “That was terrible, but we got through it.” But the assassinations of the 1960s took place in a healthier country, one that respected itself more and was, for all its troubles, more at ease with itself. It had give. Part of why this moment is scary is that we are brittler, and we love each other less, maybe even love ourselves less. We have less respect for our own history, our story, and so that can’t act as the adhesive it once was. The assassinations of the 1960s felt anomalous, unlike us. Now political violence feels like something we do, which is a painful thought. 

What to do? Every suggestion—“lower the temperature,” “don’t be so quick to judge”—seems necessary but insufficient, and may not be doable. There are 330 million of us. It’s hard to hold us together when times are easy. 

It has occurred to me that when a country stops making things like cars and toasters it turns its attention to making words, endlessly, sometimes brilliantly and constructively, often idiotically and offensively. People on social media think the words have to be sharp and dramatic. It sure would be nice to see us throttle back on the expressions and throttle forward on the reflection, at least for a while. 

In the short term, increase security on everyone in our political life and maybe public life. Spend the money, public and private. Violence multiplies, it wants to increase, it imitates itself. Each incident excites the unstable. When it starts to speed up the first thing you have to do is slow it down. 

We have to force our public officials—including judges—to get serious about confining the mentally ill. 

The night before Kirk’s murder a friend sent a note about where we are as a country. His subject was how people in and around politics now will do anything for money—they even write tweets for money. He said that he kept thinking about the Benicio del Toro character, a prosecutor turned assassin, in the 2015 movie “Sicario.” “This is the land of wolves now,” he says. I can’t get it out of my head.

We’re going to have to be strong, not lose our heads, and not give in to demoralization. William F. Buckley used to say, “Despair is a mortal sin.” You wouldn’t feel it if you had faith that God is living through history with you. Hold your hope and faith high and intact, keep your perspective in the long term.

An assassination is the intentional and deliberate killing of a person for political reasons. It has a purpose: to alter events, to remove a leader, to intimidate and punish enemies.

What we all have to do now is not let that purpose succeed.