When Some Applaud the Unthinkable: Defending Charlie Kirk’s Courage and the Practice of Liberty

Felled was a courageous voice — a young father and fellow citizen who sought to strengthen democracy by cherishing pluralism and debate, the foundations without which our republic cannot endure. Charlie Kirk was cut down while addressing students in Orem, Utah, in the very arena of discourse he believed essential to civic life. Yet the scandal of his death lies not in the gunshot alone, but in the applause that followed.

Yet the scandal of his death lies not in the gunshot alone, but in the applause that followed.

Before his family had even begun to mourn, uncountable voices rose in derision, minimization, indifference: “One less fascist,” one crowed; another sneered it was “community service.” A student tied to the Oxford Union exulted, “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f—ing go.” Even public figures stumbled into the same current, blurring condemnation with justification until institutions scrambled to retract and apologize. What should have been a moment of shared grief became instead a theater of contempt, exposing how gravely our culture has forgotten the elementary truth: that human beings are more than the ideas they defend.

What should have been a moment of shared grief became instead a theater of contempt, exposing how gravely our culture has forgotten the elementary truth: that human beings are more than the ideas they defend.

Charlie Kirk was a polarizing figure, but his courage and principles were never in doubt. He built a movement by speaking when speech carried a cost. In classrooms and auditoriums, he pressed his case with a confidence many admired and few dared to imitate. Agree or disagree with his politics, he lived by the conviction that debate matters, that dissent and peaceful confrontation are the lifeblood of democracy. In this sense, he was a pluralist: not because he sought consensus, but because he dared to contest. To greet his death with indifference or mockery is to betray not only the man but the civic courage on which democracy depends.

To greet his death with indifference or mockery is to betray not only the man but the civic courage on which democracy depends.

The jeers on social media — the quick shrug that “he had it coming” — are not aberrations but symptoms of a deeper decay. Indifference and mockery now arise so reflexively they risk appearing normal. What has eroded is not civility, the surface polish of manners, but ethos itself. Aristotle taught that persuasion rests on three foundations: logos, reason; pathos, emotion; and ethos, the moral character of speaker and audience alike. Ethos is the least visible of the three, yet the most fundamental. It is the silent ground of argument, the recognition that adversaries share a minimum respect and can appeal to each other’s conscience. Without it, reason becomes sterile, emotion unmoored, and politics slides toward contempt.

When ethos collapses, speech no longer rests on character. It becomes a weapon for humiliation, a performance meant not to persuade but to wound. The shift is subtle but decisive: adversaries become enemies, disagreement hardens into dehumanization. The mockery that greeted Kirk’s death is proof of this descent. It is the sound of ethos dissolving, of civic language hollowed out until it no longer restrains our basest impulses. And once that barrier is gone, words no longer check violence — they invite it.

Some may think it excessive to invoke Hannah Arendt here, yet it is not. She named this kind of moral decay in her account of the “banality of evil.” Eichmann, she observed, was not a monster but a functionary who hid behind clichés — phrases so hollow they shielded him from thought. His danger lay in his refusal to imagine the standpoint of another human being. The reactions after Kirk’s assassination — “karma,” “he had it coming,” “good riddance” — are precisely such clichés. They spare their speakers from confronting reality: the body of a young man, the grief of his wife and children, the wound to civic life. Stock phrases replace moral judgment; abstraction displaces humanity.

This is exactly what the collapse of ethos looks like in practice: speech untethered from character, reduced to reflex and cliché, aimed not at the conscience of another but at dismissal and humiliation. Arendt also insisted, in The Human Condition, that politics rests on “natality” — the recognition of others as beginnings, unpredictable actors who share our world. To rejoice at another’s death is to extinguish that recognition, to see not a person but a cipher of ideology. It is to strip away what Jacques Maritain, writing in the shadow of totalitarianism, called the “primacy of the person,” the irreducible dignity without which democracy cannot endure. That primacy was precisely what the mockery of Kirk’s death denied.

The erosion of ethos makes such inversions plausible. When character is measured not by respect for persons but by loyalty to tribe, violence ceases to shock. It becomes legible, even satisfying, to see the death of an opponent as progress. Kirk’s example throws this contrast into relief. He reminded us that politics is not meant to be comfortable. Pluralism is not the suppression of differences but the willingness to endure them, to press them into the open and test them. To speak unpopular truths, to bear the scorn of peers, to refuse the easy bargain of silence — this is not divisiveness but the practice of liberty itself. Those who mocked his death mistake provocation for violence, forgetting that words, however sharp, are not bullets. His courage lay precisely in his refusal to confuse comfort with peace, or conformity with concord.

To speak unpopular truths, to bear the scorn of peers, to refuse the easy bargain of silence — this is not divisiveness but the practice of liberty itself.

The health of democracy depends less on procedures than on the habits of its citizens. To rejoice in another’s death is to renounce those habits. The applause that followed Kirk’s assassination was therefore not merely tasteless but symptomatic of a civic sickness: the loss of ethos, the unraveling of conscience, the erosion of the moral character that makes politics possible at all.

The applause that followed Kirk’s assassination was therefore not merely tasteless but symptomatic of a civic sickness: the loss of ethos, the unraveling of conscience, the erosion of the moral character that makes politics possible at all.

Arendt’s question confronts us still: will we think, or will we allow thoughtlessness to govern our politics? To think is to resist the clichés that protect us from reality. To think is to recognize that every opponent is also a human being, not reducible to the slogans we attach to them. To think is to acknowledge, even in death, that dignity endures.

Charlie Kirk’s death is tragedy enough. The indifference and mockery that followed threaten something larger: the very foundation of pluralism. If we cannot resist the temptation to celebrate when those we despise are slain, then we have already betrayed the principle politics was meant to preserve: that human beings are ends, never means. To recover that principle is to honor not only Charlie Kirk’s courage but the fragile promise of freedom itself.

If we cannot resist the temptation to celebrate when those we despise are slain, then we have already betrayed the principle politics was meant to preserve: that human beings are ends, never means.