Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah today, just a few short hours ago. As of this writing, the suspect is still at large. We don't know anything about their politics or their motivations.

Kirk's body is not yet cold, but virtually everyone has already made up their mind about what this is. As Matt Pearce astutely puts it:

Information environment has reached its grotesque conclusion in that there is a very real killer out there who has not been identified, apprehended, or investigated, a detail practically inconsequential to nearly every commentator’s purposes.

And so too, my purposes.

Nearly all national politicians have already condemned the violence. None other than Barack Obama has quickly delivered what is a humane but standard line on the episode:

We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.

These appeal to the humanity in Charlie, to the loss and grief of his wife and children. Charlie was just a human being, and human beings should not be the subject of violence simply for their political opinions.

We will find out in time if this was the reason why Charlie was killed, but assuming it is, I want to state the point that is the title of this post very clearly: politics is real life.

I think this gets lost sometimes. We treat it like a game, like theatre. The media does too. But that's not what it is.

Having an opinion is harmless, but spreading it can have consequences. Not universally bad of course, and often unpredictable. It can start a religion, end a war, or spark a genocide.

I don't want it to seem like I am trying to chill the free expression of one's politics. I'm not. But while the free expression of your opinions should not carry with it a summary execution, it is not consequence free.

But that's not how it has been at the highest level of our government and institutions. Elites in government and at our largest news institutions are utterly captured by politics as theatre. The president is a Reality Show Host, after all. He can direct a coup against the government, but if he can run a good campaign and win re-election, well I guess it's no big deal. That's yesterday's edition, get over it.

They cover the horse race and the polls like CNBC covers the Stock Market, observing its ebbs and flows while only very rarely picking around the edges to understand whether or not the reality it is meant to be modeling is still there.

Through this framing, presidential debates are won and lost on optics, regardless of whether anything the candidate said bears the slightest resemblance to things happening in reality.

But politics cannot ignore reality forever. As Carl Sagan once remarked, "reality must take precedence, because nature will not be fooled." In this case, nature is hopelessness and despair.

So it's worth reiterating in the wake of this terrible incident what politics is. To paraphrase the great Bill Shankly, some say that politics is a matter of life and death, but I can assure you it's much more serious than that.

As is probably obvious by my inability to lionize Kirk, I found his politics to be insidious. I think him and his Turning Point USA group, whose motto is "We play offense with a sense of urgency to win America's culture war", have been part of a movement that done a great deal of damage to the lives of many people, not just in the US, but globally.

People like Porsha Ngumezi who bled out at a hospital in Texas because doctors were too cowed by their draconian laws to perform an emergency abortion. People like trans kids who self harm or worse due to Charlie's "culture war" taking place in and around their genitals.

Was your loved one laid off by DOGE? Did your child catch measles? Husband caught in an ICE raid at Home Depot and detained without contact for months? Were they blown to pieces in Gaza? Or in a boat off Venezuela? Were they run down at a political protest?

These are all direct results of politics. It's life or death. The things that people with prominence and power say, and especially the dehumanizing rhetoric that they employ, have consequences on others.

Charlie was not a politician in the sense that he did not hold any political office. Some people are pretending that this means this wasn't an assassination. Those people are wrong. John Lennon wasn't a politician. Let's be real.

Charlie did not have direct political power. He didn't call in missile strikes. He didn't sell weapons to regimes that were committing atrocities. He didn't instruct governments to stop requiring the MMR vaccine. He had soft power.

Soft power is real power, just like politics is real life. It's not something we should just be fucking around with. Charlie was a real person with a wife and kids, and the people whose lives he has helped destroy are no less real.

I am finding it personally difficult to extend to Kirk in death the charity that he refused to extend toward others in life. Maybe I can't quite live up to the standard of my own principles.

But he didn't deserve this. The consequences of his killing will be felt in a ricochet of blowback and hurt countless more.

When JFK was shot and killed, Malcolm X famously said it was the "chickens coming home to roost." I'm older now than Malcolm was when he died, and have less fire and less anger in my heart.

The core message, extrapolated and with some additional grace, is that this isn't what should happen, but it is a foreseeable consequence of a politics of fear and division.

People like Kirk are almost always sheltered from the consequences of their rhetoric, but it's worth remembering as we denounce this killing that the common American is not. They lose their neighbors to it, lose their children to it.

And now, if our assumptions hold, Charlie has lost his own life to it.

Sep 11