Joanna Pennyfeather
The tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk is more than the death of a man. It is a symbol of a growing divide in how political opponents are seen and why political discourse in the West is breaking down.
The right, broadly speaking, view their political opponents as well meaning but wrong. The assumption is that everyone wants what is best for society, but that some people are simply mistaken about the best way to get there. In this view, your opponent is not your enemy: they are not evil; they are good, but misguided. And if they are misguided, then the proper response is reasoned discourse. You explain your beliefs, they explain theirs and, through reason, persuasion and free debate, truth can be uncovered and common ground discovered.
Charlie Kirk embodied this principle. He was never afraid to talk: he debated, he discussed and he argued his points openly. He believed deeply in free speech, which is the cornerstone of any truly free society. And he lived that belief by engaging anyone who would listen.
The left, however, have a very different view. For at least the past decade, propaganda has painted political opponents not as mistaken, but as malevolent. Oppose their agenda, and you are not simply wrong – you are a fascist, a Nazi, even ‘literally Hitler’. Their assumption is not that you misunderstand, but that you understand perfectly well and have chosen evil over good.
And once someone is cast as evil, discourse is no longer desirable or even possible. You do not debate with Nazis. You do not reason with Hitler. You fight evil, you silence evil and you destroy evil. This worldview inevitably leads to violence.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned in The Gulag Archipelago:
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good … Ideology – that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
That is precisely the danger here. Once convinced their opponents are ‘literally Hitler’, the left believes violence against them is not only justified, but righteous.
And so we see leftists online openly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder, the same way they excused or ignored the repeated assassination attempts on Donald Trump.
History, too, is littered with examples of the left using violence as a primary tool to achieve political ends. From the Bolshevik Revolution, to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to the Khmer Rouge and Holodomor, the pattern repeats: utopian rhetoric, followed by blood on the streets.
This is no accident. The central flaw of socialism is that it does not reject violence as a means to an end. Indeed, for many, violence is not just an option but a necessity. This is why socialist experiments throughout history collapse into riots, repression, purges and worse.
The violence is not a bug of the system, but a core feature. It is baked into the ideology itself.
What then are we to do? If the left views us as evil, discourse becomes impossible. But that does not mean we should respond in kind. A functioning society must defend itself; violent criminals must be restrained and people have the right to protect themselves.
But to initiate violence is to descend into the very darkness that socialism breeds. Instead, we can treat the radical left as a force of nature: something to be on constant guard against, something to protect ourselves from, but not to mirror.
For Christians, this duty is made even clearer. Jesus commanded us to love our enemies. As C S Lewis explains it in Mere Christianity:
We must not hate them…We are to hate the bad man’s actions, but not hate him. We may wish he were not bad, and hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured.
In other words, loving your enemy does not mean we excuse their actions or feel affection for them. It means we wish for them to repent, realise the error of their ways and ultimately their salvation. Whether or not they turn back is beyond our control, but our command remains.
The truth is that Charlie Kirk’s death struck me deeply. I think about his wife and children, his family and friends. Anyone with a functioning heart would feel the same and if you don’t then it’s time for some serious self-reflection.
To honor Charlie Kirk, we must not surrender to the darkness that took his life. We must keep speaking, keep debating and keep standing for truth, even when the world hates us. Let’s recall the words of Jesus:
If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.
