What Charlie Kirk’s Murder Reveals About Historical Amnesia

The Enlightenment dims

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Last month, I met Charlie Kirk for the first and last time. Our 90-minute podcast conversation went better than I could have hoped. Charlie was kind, curious and sharp. He asked tough questions and listened closely to the answers. I could see right away why so many young conservatives admired him.

Now Kirk is dead. Police have uncovered a high-powered rifle in the woods where the killer, who has now been apprehended, ran.¹ The ammunition had symbols carved into it linked to anti-fascist causes and transgender rights.

The fact that Kirk was killed at a college campus while speaking his mind shows how dangerous it has become to share your views in public. Kirk’s life and his death will be felt far beyond his own movement.

What will endure is Kirk’s example — particularly his belief in debate, free speech and challenging prevailing orthodoxies with words rather than violence.

As Ezra Klein pointed out in The New York Times, Kirk did politics the right way. He believed in dialogue. He believed in debate. He believed in persuasion rather than coercion.

But more and more people no longer trust the Enlightenment ideal that words can resolve disagreements. Their view goes something like this:

“Everything you believe was invented by someone. Your ideas, the books you’ve read, even the words you speak, were all made by powerful people with their own interests and blind spots. The values of speech and open inquiry carry the soiled fingerprints of the societies that championed them.”

From this, they conclude that nobody can give an objective account of reality. There is no neutral truth. Every political system, they say, was designed by someone with a hidden agenda.

It is one thing to admit that we are all biased but still try to be fair. It is another to give up on truth entirely and simply impose your will on others.

Once we can no longer agree that truth exists “out there”, all that remains is power — the power to force others to accept your view of the world.

The Enlightenment produced what the late literary critic Paul Cantor has described as “historical amnesia”. Living in a world with free speech, we have trouble imagining how bad things were before. We forget that people once had to lie, scheme, or fight simply to survive under oppressive rulers.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, broadly speaking, held that every person has worth. Western nations have often fallen short of this ideal, but we forget how radical it was that this idea took hold at all. Beliefs about human dignity have become so common that we now take them for granted.

The easiest way to attack these ideas is to mock them. The goal is to chip away at our confidence in reason, science and debate. The attacks don’t even need to be accurate — they just need to introduce doubt.

Using reason and argument has always been risky. For most of history, asking the wrong question could get you punished or worse.

An unlikely victim of this was the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes. The Catholic Church banned his books, even though he wrote arguments in favour of God’s existence. The problem wasn’t his conclusions — it was that he treated faith as something that could be examined and debated. For the Church, that was unacceptable.

For most of human history, this is how debates ended: with prohibitions, threats and force. Only when Enlightenment ideals like free speech took hold did we begin settling arguments with words instead of coercion and violence.

People forget that a peaceful society that allows disagreement about important issues is a deviation from the historical norm. And it can be lost quickly.

That is what is being chipped away right now. And those tearing it down may not like what comes next.

Violence as a response to disagreement is natural — which is precisely why it must be repeatedly condemned.

A 2023 study from psychologists Christopher D Petsko and Nour S Kteily uncovered something troubling about how Americans see one another. Conservatives tend to view liberals as “immature” —irresponsible, gullible and irrational. Liberals, in turn, tend to see conservatives as “savage” —aggressive, cold-hearted and barbaric.

The researchers also found something even more revealing: liberals overestimate how dehumanised they are by conservatives (they think conservatives view them even more negatively than they do). But conservatives underestimate how dehumanised they are by liberals (they think liberals view them more positively than they actually do).

This gap matters. Seeing someone as immature leads to contempt — you laugh at them, dismiss them, refuse to take them seriously. Seeing someone as savage leads to rage — you want to punish them, even hurt them.

A 2025 report from the Network Contagion Research Institute shows where this can lead. Nearly one third of Americans now say that killing certain public figures can sometimes be justified. About half of left-leaning respondents agreed with that statement.

The breakdown is alarming: 41 per cent of Democrats said assassinating a political leader could be at least somewhat justified. Only 29 per cent of Republicans said the same. That means Democrats were roughly 40 per cent more likely to endorse political assassinations.

This should unsettle everyone. It suggests that a growing share of progressives have built a world view that sees political violence as acceptable. Right-wing extremism is real — but the left-wing version is just as dangerous, and far less studied. It also appears to be getting worse.

This trend is not happening in a vacuum. It is being shaped in the very places where young people learn what is acceptable, including college campuses. Universities are meant to teach students how to argue, persuade and think critically. Too often they now teach students that shouting down, harassing or even physically confronting opponents is justified.

Indeed Kirk was killed on a college campus, where silencing controversial ideas has become increasingly common. He died doing what he believed in: engaging young people, defending his ideas and refusing to be silenced. His killer ended his life but not what he stood for. He believed Americans must settle their differences with words, not bullets.

The alternative — a country where political violence becomes normal — is a grim future to imagine, yet well within the realm of possibility. Kirk’s voice is gone, but his message remains. A free society depends on all of us having the courage to speak and to defend the right of others to speak, even when we disagree.

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A version of this article was originally published by The Times under the title “What the death of Charlie Kirk means for the American left.”

1. This killing reflects a broader pattern: men between the ages of 18 and 24 are the most likely to commit murder, while their victims are most often slightly older men, typically between 25 and 34. Tyler Robinson is 22 and Charlie Kirk was 31.