Don’t Become the Monster You Pride Yourself on Fighting Against

The precocious Charlie Kirk during an lawsuit astatine the University of Tennesse, May, 2025. The outspoken blimpish podcaster and President Trump’s adjacent state was changeable and killed connected September 10, 2025 during a ‘Turning Point USA’ lawsuit astatine the Univesity of Utah.

Opinion By Dimitris Timpilis*

It is profoundly troubling erstwhile radical respond to Charlie Kirk’s execution by saying, “He had it coming.” That operation is not lone cruel; it undermines the foundations of ideology itself.
The rule of escaped code is not conditional. We cannot assertion to support unfastened dialog portion justifying unit against those whose words offend us. The close effect to rhetoric we find unsafe is counter-speech, debate, dialectics, voting, and ineligible challenge. Not bullets.

Charlie Kirk “Had it Coming”

To accidental idiosyncratic “had it coming” is to confuse code with violence. It collapses the favoritism betwixt words we tin rebut and actions we cannot undo. Once that bound erodes, governmental execution becomes thinkable, and each national is made much vulnerable.
Even those who vehemently opposed Kirk’s authorities should affirm this: his sidesplitting was wrong, not due to the fact that we agreed with him, but due to the fact that we judge successful quality dignity and the regularisation of law. To warrant the enactment is to surrender the motivation precocious crushed and unfastened the doorway to cycles of vengeance.

And present lies the bitter irony: Many connected the governmental near pridefulness themselves connected tolerance, compassion, and the rejection of violence. Yet erstwhile immoderate of them cheer Kirk’s decease oregon motion arsenic if it is of nary consequence, they uncover a heavy cognitive dissonance. In celebrating the silencing of an hostile by violence, they reflector the precise intolerance they assertion to fight. In their haste to condemn the monster, they person go the monster they assertion to combat against.

In a pluralistic democracy, nary 1 ever “has it coming” for what they say. Our reply to atrocious code indispensable stay amended speech, oregon we hazard losing the precise strategy that allows america to argue, disagree, and unrecorded unneurotic without fear: Democracy.

*Dimitris Timpilis is simply a Mathematician, pedagogue and researcher. 

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