The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

What does it mean to value human life?

Sarah and Beth react to both the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk and the response online from people on both sides of the political aisle. If we truly believe every human life has value (and we here at Pantsuit Politics do), what does that mean as we reckon with political violence?

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Episode Resources

• A man was murdered (Jerusalem Demsas on Substack)

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:08] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:11] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. If you are watching this episode, you can see that Beth is in a very different location because we had a very different episode planned. Beth was taking some time off and I had recorded an episode with two of my lifelong friends about male-female friendships. But that is not the episode that we are going to share today. On Wednesday, September 10th, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. In Utah. And we are still processing that and dealing with the fallout of that event. And we didn't think there was any way we could share just a prerecorded episode on a day like today. So Beth is joining us from her car. Her sound's going to be a little different, but we're going to talk about the death of Charlie Kirk today.

[00:01:19] Beth, I guess a good a place to start as any is that they have still not found the perpetrator of this event. A couple of people were detained, but then released. Charlie Kirk was at a planned event at Utah Valley University. Thousands of people where there watching him have a back and forth. One shot rang out, hit him in the neck. The video was instantly available everywhere. And there was a small period of time where I don't know about you, but I desperately hoped he would pull through, but then we heard the news that he had died at the age of 31 from this gunshot. So we can just start there with the facts.

Beth [00:02:09] It's interesting what reaches you when you are trying to unplug. Yesterday morning my friend who I'm traveling with got a call from her brother who said it feels like everything's spiraling out of control. Russia has dropped drones in Poland and Israel and Qatar. And it just feels like everything is crazy. And we said, yeah. And then we tried to kind of detach and go on about our day. And then I started getting texts about Charlie Kirk. And so I didn't have a big window of time between when I heard that he had been shot to when he was confirmed dead. I did feel myself holding my breath thinking surely he will make it through this. He's so young. There's nothing rational about that necessarily, but I think that's where my mind went. He's so young, surely he'll make it through this. And then I started to get into the details and I didn't watch the video, but I read enough to understand that it probably was fatal and it was confirmed very, very soon after that.

Sarah [00:03:25] I was on a Substack Live with Angie Sullivan from I've Had It, and we were talking actually about political violence. I think we maybe even mentioned Charlie Kirk's name in the course of our conversation. Political violence was on my mind because the night before, I had gotten in this very intense conversation with my son and my husband about political violence and about Donald Trump and how long we're going to be caught up in this administration and the stakes and the Jeffrey Epstein birthday book and the, and the... And I was upset. I was like, no, every life is sacred. Violence doesn't beget what you think it will beget. It doesn't feel like you think feels. It doesn't fall neatly into the consequences you want or the lessons you want people to learn. And we got into it because I was like I have to cling to one thing and one thing only, and that is that life is sacred. And if I lose that, I lose a part of myself. I was upset. We got into it.

[00:04:46] So I'm on the Substack Live, I get off of the live, and immediately Maggie tells us in the chat Charlie Kirk has been shot. And Griffin texts me and he's like, "This doesn't feel like I thought it would feel. I don't want him to be dead." I said, exactly. Exactly. And we didn't know officially then. I was doing shit like seeing how close the nearest hospital was. So I was like, well, he's at a university. If there's a trauma center right there, you never know, he is young. And I saw the video against my will because Griffin was saying like, oh my God, he was talking about gun violence when he was shot. I'm like that's not true. I don't believe you unless I see the video. And he was like it's on the New York Times. And he shows it up to me. Usually the New York Times does like a don't click this unless you want to see something horrific, but they didn't. And so I was just watching him answer the question and then you just see it. You see him get shot. And it's so horrific. It's so horrific. I was just horrified. Horrified.

Beth [00:05:51] And it's astonishing I believe the shooter was 200 yards or more away. The precision of this, there were so many people there. So lots of questions. It was dizzying as I was half in it to see they have someone in custody. No, they don't. Yes, they do. No, they don't. And so I just have tried all morning thinking about getting in my car and recording this episode. I keep trying to come back to everything I don't know and the fact that there is a universe of information that I don't know and nobody else does either right now about what happened and why. And I understand it being a big, big reaction because here was a political commentator doing political commentary on a university campus, which is supposed to be a center for this kind of debate, who was clearly very intentionally and very skillfully assassinated. And for that to happen the day before September 11th, the same day that we have another school shooting, and in the midst of all of that chaos, it is unmooring.

Sarah [00:07:15] Yeah. It immediately brought up for me just the personal nature. I think so many people went immediately to his politics, not surprisingly. But I have lost friends, parents of young children in their thirties. And so that's immediately what I thought of. I thought if Rachel Hildevens dying before her baby was even one years old. And here he is with what, a four-year-old and a one-year old? And I'm just devastated for those kids and his wife. So as a person who has experienced the tragic loss of a young parent through the loss of friends, that was the immediate emotional prism through which I saw it. He was 31-years-old. I think, look, I thought of Robert Kennedy immediately. I thought of Caroline Kennedy.

[00:08:18] What must it be like to be a baby and to grow up knowing that at a click of a button, you could watch your parent be assassinated? Like, that is not right. That is really messed up. And that is the reality of those two small children now, that this video exists of their father, that they'll have to decide what to do with. It's so awful. And Griffin and I were talking about all this, like people seeing it and how terrible it is and all these people-- forget about all of us watching it, all the people there, thousands of people whose eyes were trained right on him. And just immediately to have either been celebrating it or calling for heads to roll. The lack of humanity, the black of just basic human feeling. I don't know

Beth [00:09:41] One of the things that I wanted to contemplate during a few days on this gorgeous farm, this place where I'm at right now, is how much ego is involved in what we do and in politics in general. I felt kind of increasingly in tension with how much ego this job takes. That was certainly a part of Charlie Kirk's job too. You have to be confident and you have to believe that you are saying something worth other people hearing and political participation in general invites you to lean into ego, especially right now. Ego is the fuel of our president. There is a sense that shrinking from ego is weak and mealy-mouthed and not up for the challenges that we face. And so I wanted to just spend some time thinking about that and where that leads me right and where it leads me wrong. One of the things that I had kind of come to is how the danger of leaning into ego, even where it has its place and its importance is that it's really disconnecting.

[00:11:01] So I was watching people respond. I wish that I hadn't opened Facebook to see people I know responding. It's one thing to go to Twitter or X or whatever and see whoever, bots, accounts, people with a whole different incentive structure. It's another to open Facebook and see your community respond so fast in so many different ways. So I wish I hadn't opened Facebook, but I did. And all I could think about was like looking at this through the lens of ego and how important it is to each of us to sort of control our public facing response. How important it is for some of us to quickly say like this was one of mine or that was one yours. How tempting it is to start to have hopes about who did this or who didn't do it.

[00:12:02] And I felt like what I kept circling around as I was taking all of that in is just we want all this control because we don't trust each other. We want even to be able to manifest the identity of an assassin because we trust each other to be just able to handle whatever it is. And I think that that is because so much of our politics has become less about how we live together in community and more about how my view of the world wins. And I don't have any answers of what to do about that. And there's nothing particularly revelatory there, but it just felt so stark to me considering those ideas and then watching the reaction to this play out.

Sarah [00:12:58] Yeah, I went on Facebook. I shouldn't have, but I did. And I typed out several things. I was like, I'm going to say this, I'll say that. And then I'm like, no. Right before I went to bed, I thought, I'm just going to type, "Everybody go to bed." And I thought no I'm not even going to do that. I'm even not going to do that. I thought Jerusalem Demsas wrote the best thing on Substack about like don't give in to the abstraction. Don't think that what you're going to fight about or what you going to respond to matters. It doesn't matter. You're not going to catch this killer and you're not going to change any policy through your comments or likes in the next 24 hours. I went to play Mahjong last night and my friends and I gathered and we talked about it and we expressed our horror and we shared like some of the things Charlie Kirk had said that we didn't like either. Like we just had a 20 minute normal exchange about, oh my God, this poor man. His wife, his children, what a job he had, the things he said, but at least he was just debating. And then we moved on and I thought, that's about what everybody needs to do.

[00:14:02] It's a horrific news event. It should occupy some space in your life. We should be affected by the political assassination of a 31-year-old human being because of his views, as only we can assume. We should be affected by that. We should be affected by the fact that millions of us just watched basically a snuff film. Okay, that should affect us. What bugged me the most about being on Facebook is nothing would have been good enough. You could tell. Unless every Republican you ever knew got on Facebook and said, "I have been wrong and I am so sorry. Gun control now," y'all weren't going to be happy. And the opposite. Unless every liberal went on Facebook and said, "Oh my God, I'm the worst, I'm changing my party identification, go MAGA," y'all aren't going to be happy. Like that's the thing, it's a losing game. No one's emotional reaction. If you see a lack of consistency or hypocrisy, how exactly does one human person dig their way out of that on Facebook? I would love to know.

Beth [00:15:13] Yeah, I tried to take all this in cognizant of the fact that people aren't going to respond the way that I want. I'm not going to respond to the way they want. That we can't satisfy each other. One, because however tangential your connection is to this, it is affecting, deeply. It's stressful. And one of the things I try to step back from, that call to ego is personalizing what isn't personal. And so I try and tell myself, I don't know him. I wasn't deeply connected to this, but still I am connected and still it is stressful. And so everybody's operating out of stress, okay? Layer one of grace, everyone's operating out of the stress. Layer two of grace, the sheer number of people who have witnessed something like this now is enormous. Layer three of grace, the president is not going to say what I want him to say about this because, one, that's not who he is and two, he has been shot at twice.

Sarah [00:16:19] Yeah, twice.

Beth [00:16:22] So, while I feel a lot of here's how we should and shouldn't respond, I also recognize that our reserves are low, our resilience is low, the stress and trauma are high, especially for people who have been directly affected by gun violence and there are so many people like that now. And even people who haven't, who have really strong views about gun violence and the second amendment and whatever those views are, a whole lot of us live in a constant state of stress that is real for us even though it is not true to our experiences. And what do we do about that? How do we walk each other through that?

Sarah [00:17:21] I do want to speak as a victim of gun violence to the video everyone put everywhere of Charlie Kirk saying, "Yeah, we're going to lose some innocent lives to protect our Second Amendment rights." Every one of us, including you and I, have made a similar argument about a policy we support. You and I say all the time about systems and protections. It will involve fraud. It will not be perfect. It will involve loss. I have said that about abortion, which many people would find horrific. Some people are going to use it as birth control. I'm willing to protect the right knowing some people will abuse it. We all make those types of arguments and I don't know what that was supposed to prove. He deserved it? And then you think in the democracy and the pursuit of persuasion someone's going to see that and go, "Yeah, that convinced me." I don't know what we're doing.

[00:18:21] And what I kept trying to think about yesterday in particular was the passive news consumer. The growing number of people who probably don't know who Charlie Kirk is, right? You have the two ends of the spectrum that are consumed by American politics in a visceral, emotional, ego-driven, high stakes or are directly affected about it. You're a federal employee, you're a member of the military, whatever the case may be, right? You have those far extremes and you have this very, very, very large number of people, growing number of Americans who are completely tuned out from politics, who don't know who Charlie Kirk is. I would think that this is the type of event that bubbles up large enough that they are aware of it.

Beth [00:19:06] I think so too.

Sarah [00:19:07] For sure. And I wonder if it's just a sense of chaos. I don't think there's a political takeaway for those people. I don't think they go, "Oh yeah, they deserved it. The right's the worst or it's the left's fault." They're not drawing any political conclusions. They're just feeling a sense of increasing violence and chaos, which we all feel because it's true. Because we just had political assassinations in Minnesota. Because we had a firebombing of Josh Shapiro's house because Donald Trump has survived all these. I mean, we all know the list. It's been out there. Everybody's making it. And it's terrifying. It's scary. It's really, really scary. My 16 year old looked at me and said, "I don't think you should do live events anymore." Like, what is this? And I felt scared. When Donald Trump was like, I'm going to go after all the groups and I'm going to go after all the liberals, I felt another wave of fear then.

Beth [00:20:09] It is scary. It is scaring and I worry about my capacity to speak when I'm scared. I was trying to write a little bit about this last night and I wrote down on my work page of the journal that I've been working through this week, like, "Don't be afraid. Nothing good comes when you're afraid." But it's hard not to be afraid. It is very scary. No one deserves to die for their worst opinion. And so, as I have seen those videos or I have seen posts that even trying to express sympathy go out of their way to say what a bad person he was, it just feels really hollow to me. It makes me really sad. Before I took this news in, I had felt really sick about learning that that Venezuelan boat turned around where we sank it. I was already sick about that event because we also don't just blow people up if we think they're doing crime. If we know they're do in crime, we don't blow them up.

Sarah [00:21:26] The sentence for drug running is not death.

Beth [00:21:30] Right. Especially uncharged, untried, unproven. That whole event was already making me feel sick, physically ill. And then to learn that the boat turned around and that there was a decision point where the administration could have said, we did it. We scared them away. We showed them. That if you bring drugs to this country, you will meet the might of the American military. And they turned around. And so that's what we're going to do from now on. We're going to fly our planes there and we're going to keep-- like there were so many ways this could have gone in directions that I still might have objections to, but that could have not resulted in the death of 11 people. And I know that this is a hard thing to talk about because so many people will say, who cares about 11 people who've killed who knows how many people in the name of making profit off drugs.

[00:22:36] But I just really believe that we don't throw people away because we don't know what comes next for them. And so I look at Charlie Kirk and think, no matter what he said or believed or advocated for, and it was a lot, I don't know what was next for him. I don't know what else he contained. I don't know him beyond the clips and the fire brand, but he was more than that, just as we all are. I'm more than I show up in your YouTube box or in a downloadable file. And I just want us to really hold on to that sense with all the news, whenever someone dies. The student who walks into school with a gun is more than that moment and it is a loss. Always a loss.

Sarah [00:23:36] The problem with anyone's assessment of Charlie Kirk is because he is, and primarily was, a media figure. You are going to see him through the lens of your media consumption. So if you spend enough time on the internet like I did last night, which I should not have done, you could have found all kinds of stories about Charlie Kirk if you dug. If you go to X, which filters through one political persuasion, which I'm not usually exposed to. I found a really kind DM that Charlie Kirk sent a, like, center left black man who writes and argues about race politics. He was on The View. Charlie Kirk sent him a really nice DM, like, I respect what you said. This is where I'm at. It was really nice. I also saw a video of Charlie Kirk losing his ever-loving mind and going after somebody off a stage. I watched a lot of videos of him with his children and his wife just being a husband and a dad. For public consumption, worth saying. You know what I mean? You go hard enough, you look long enough, you can find whatever you're looking for. You know, what I means? Like there are thousands of hours of me on the internet. It wouldn't be hard to find something to piss off either side and to justify whatever horrible thing has happened to me.

[00:25:04] It is so cheap and easy to feel empathy and to feel the basic humanity of people who don't challenge you. One of the most profound, pivotal moments of my life was Sister Helen Prejean coming to speak at our college when we were freshmen. It changed who I was. Her speech changed who was. And that's what she said basically. No one wants to be defined by the worst thing they've ever done. Either you believe everyone contains a spark of the divine and is a sacred human life, or you don't. They don't give it away. It doesn't matter if they murder, kill, abuse. Yes, even Hitler was a baby at one point in his mother's arms, as was Genghis Khan, as was Napoleon, as was all these other guys who were the responsible for the death of thousands and millions of people over the course of human history. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, whatever did the worst of the worst, of the worst. I hate to break it to you all. We are still wrapped up in the human experience with those people. They are still human beings. I have to cling to that not because honestly sometimes I think that their story could contain some redemption That's really not even it for me.

[00:26:35] I don't think there was going to be anything redeemable About Hitler had he not put a bullet in his head, okay? It's about me. It is about who I am and what I cling to and what I lose when I decide another human being is less. The other strangely coincidental thing that happened to me is after I had this intense conversation with Griffin and Nicholas about political violence, I went to bed and I had my daily reading of a chapter of War and Peace for footnotes and tangents. And it's this chapter after the Battle of Borodino. It's one of the bloodiest battles in the Napoleonic War. It's of the bloody battles of all time- 72,000 people died in the Battle of Borodino and afterwards Napoleon makes his way to Moscow. He sort of wins. Nobody really won the battle, but he gets to Moscow, it's burning, most of the people are gone. And the general who commanded the Russian army, Rastuchin I think is his name, he's there. He won't accept what's happened. He won't except that he's responsible for not only all this loss, but the destruction of the city.

[00:27:54] And this angry mob presents-- this is a real life event. This happens a lot in War and Peace. It's a fictionalization of something that actually happened during the Napoleonic wars. They present this man to him, and he's basically like for the public good, they need something, they need a villain. And they lynch him. They kill him. They don't want to, he pushes them, they kill them in front of him. And it's like one of the longest chapters in War and Peace. It's this really, really famous historical reflection on political violence. And in the reflection on Substack, Simon talks about Tolstoy was affected. He became a pacifist. He witnessed public executions. And through the reflection of his faith or lack of faith or political values or just life, he came to this place where it's like you lose something in the process. And he wrote in his diary, Tolstoy did, "'A stout, white, healthy neck and breast. He kissed the gospels and then death. How senseless. I have not received this strong impression for naught. I am not a man of politics. Morals and art, I know, love, and understand. The guillotine long prevented my sleeping and obliged me to reflect." I keep going, obliged me reflect. Like it's senseless. It's senseless. And this desire to turn it into the ultimate gotcha? For what? What you lose in the process when you celebrate something this senseless is hard to get back.

Beth [00:29:45] I wrote this on my personal Substack. I want to say it with my voice as well. Another dimension of this that I've been thinking about are all the people I personally know who are sharing that they believe that Charlie Kirk was killed because he is Christian. I go back to first I don't know why Charlie Kirk was killed, but let's assume that that's why. Let's assume we can confirm and know that that's what happened. You talked about how it's not about the possibility of redemption for you as much as it is about you and what it means for you and what it is to be a person who believes in connection to other people. And I feel that, too. And my way of saying it is that what my faith calls me to-- and the Christian faith it contains a lot. It contains even more than our two political parties try to hold, right? And So I don't think that my faith is better than or less than anyone else's. But what my faith calls me to in a situation like this is to know that when Charlie Kirk or anyone else is shot, so am I. And when someone pulls the trigger, so do I. Because my brokenness is in the world and it is in me.

[00:31:20] And so the reason that I try to be extremely careful about what I specifically post in the aftermath, because that is sadly how we first greet each other in these moments now, I try be really careful because I don't want to communicate anything except restoration. And a lot of what gets communicated and the reason that we react so strongly to it and the reason that we quickly move on from as the Jerusalem Demsas' post said, a man was murdered. We quickly move on from that to the symbolism of the whole thing and the discourse about the symbolism. I think we move on so quickly because we read into each other's words. Well if you think he deserved to die then you think I deserve to die because I agreed with him about something along the way. Or if you are sad that he died, you must have agreed with them about something along the way that is very dehumanizing to me. And so you must think that I don't deserve to live. And we just short circuit that whole chain of logic to get right there.

[00:32:42] And all I know to do as a person of faith, whether this was a religiously motivated act or not; and all I know to do as a who cares about and loves politics is to just try to think what heals right now, what mends, what connects, what expresses you just posted that you think I'm a garbage person and I don't think you are one and I still do desire our relationship. I saw someone say something really, really heinous about all Democrats. And it was a person I know, a real life human. I clicked the comments and someone very beautifully came in and said, "Hey, I voted for Kamala Harris. I totally agree this was awful." Like a real effort at outreach. And this person responded and said, "No, I'm sorry if you voted that way. You are the problem." And I have just felt so sad about that because he's not alone or a bad person or a dumb person. You know what I mean? This is what we're doing to each other all the time and what every incentive causes us to continue doing. And I don't want to do it. And so I'm just thinking really hard about how do I not do it?

Sarah [00:34:24] First of all, this idea that we're going to have some rational decision-making that leads to an assassination like this. That's the first thing Griffin and I talked about. Trying to put together even a cohesive political ideology through the lens of so many of these shooters is a fool's errand. Political violence is not a rational act, that's the problem. So trying to find some sort of rational justification for it is ludicrous. We're not dealing in the realm of rationality. It's political violence. It is by definition irrational. And so that quest to find the perfect explanation, it's going to mean what it means to people. I can't control that. I understand the next person who explains that that's what's going to happen, we'll keep reaching out and they'll keep meeting us with anger and fear. Thank you. I do my job on the internet, I'm aware. I'm aware, thank you so much. I get it. I choose this anyway. I choose it anyway.

[00:35:42] I'm not going to meet fire with fire. I read a quote on Substack, "You do not build the beloved community on the bodies of your enemies and you don't build it on the shame of your enemy's either." My faith tells me you don't build anything seeing your fellow human beings as enemies. And you certainly don't build a country when you see your fellow citizens as enemies. Now, look, I don't think this is the end time. We have had times in this country where we have seen each other as enemies. I don't know how we get out of it. I don't. I only know how I get out of it. I only know I just can't do this anger they're out to get me spiral. I can't. I'm going to keep saying what I am going to say. People will probably be mad. People will think that I am an enemy of America. I've been called that since 24 years ago post 9/11 by a stranger on the streets of DC. I'm used to it by this point. But I love this country. I love every person in it because that is what I am called to do even when it's hard, even when it scary because that's how I cling to my own humanity, which is what I'm in pursuit of more than electoral success, policy priorities or anything else.