Thoughts Prompted by a Lengthy 9/28/25 New York Times Exchange Between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi-Coates on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk, and a general consternation about this matter among people of good will.

.

Preface

There is now a great deal of confusion among people of integrity about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I believe many ideas voiced against his killing give him a legitimacy and respect he does not deserve.

To cut to the chase

The country and world are better off without Charlie Kirk’s poison rhetoric.

His assassination has had the effect of giving his ideas a bullhorn for wider dissemination and was, therefore, a politically mistaken thing to do.

It also gives MAGA a martyr, another political mistake.

Whether it was an immoral thing to do is a separate question to which I will return in my conclusion below.

He should not be treated with the dignity of  having a “different point of view.”  He was a political foe of democracy who, and whose ideas, need to be democratically defeated,  not murdered.

The “isms” of race, gender, nationality and others are outside the framework of legitimate debate in a democratic society because they deny the humanity of a category of people that is based on nothing that group of people have said or done to harm anyone else.

For at least two reasons, spokespeople for these ideas should not be denied First Amendment rights.

Protecting the First Amendment requires the creation of an unbreakable wall between it and “politics” as the term is usually understood.

This wall has nothing to do with the validity of bigoted ideas; it has to do with a suspicion of state power and an understanding that if it can be used for “our side” so can it be used against us.  Indeed its suppression has far more often been of radical democratic ideas than of authoritarian anti-democratic ones.

The public, political, societal question for those who disagreed with Kirk and continue to disagree with those who share his views is how to defeat their power—that might or might not involve “responding” to them—which is a tactical question carefully to be evaluated by those who want to marginalize Trump, MAGA and its spokespeople.

The essence of that evaluation is to determine why those ideas have appeal, the answer to which is to be found in cultural, social and economic realms not in the realm of rational debate.  Mitigate and remove the underlying conditions that make a Charlie Kirk appealing and the support of his ideas will substantially diminish if not evaporate.

Is That All?

No.  It saddens me that a wife has become a widow; that parents have lost a child; that children have lost a father (I lost mine when I was 13; it still haunts me); and that others grieve the loss of a family member, friend, colleague or team mate.

These are personal reactions; they extend to the entirety of humankind.

Don’t confuse the private with the public.

Conclusion

There are times when assassination is warranted.  

This was not one of them.

They are rare.  The July 20, 1944 attempted assassination of Adolph Hitler was one.

The sacredness of human life does not mean everyone has an absolute right to it. In Hitler’s case, tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved had the assassination attempt succeeded.

Nonviolence is not an absolute.

…