In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in 2025, the country has found itself at the center of a storm over the meaning, origins, and consequences of political violence. As the news broke, commentators from across the spectrum rushed to condemn the act as "political violence," with editorial boards and late-night hosts warning that unless the nation brings down the temperature, democracy itself may unravel. Yet, as the debates have unfolded, the responses have revealed starkly different understandings of what counts as violence, what counts as order, and who gets to decide.
According to City Journal, senior fellow Douglas Murray warned Americans that the response to Kirk’s killing exposes a dangerous "gray zone of political violence: not fully condoning it, but not fully condemning it, either." Murray highlighted that left-wing figures with histories of political violence often find sympathetic networks that keep them prominent, offering paid speaking gigs and institutional protection. "There is no such network on the right," he observed, suggesting an asymmetry in how society responds to violence depending on its political origins.
This idea is echoed by Tal Fortgang at the Civitas Institute, who links the "Broken Windows" theory of policing—where signs of disorder invite greater violations of the law—to the treatment of conservative speakers like Kirk on college campuses. Over the past decade, Fortgang notes, conservative voices have been routinely shouted down, heckled, intimidated, and forced to prepare for extra security. "The pattern that culminated in Kirk’s murder reinforces the truism that institutions shape the culture in which individuals act," Fortgang writes. "A college that tolerates harassment signals to students that harassment is within the bounds of acceptable behavior." Over time, he argues, this tolerated disorder can escalate, even to deadly proportions.
Yet, as Boston Review points out, the political response to Kirk’s assassination has been anything but even-handed. The Trump administration and its allies condemned the killing as an exceptional act requiring an authoritarian crackdown on an amorphous "radical left," while seemingly ignoring a near-simultaneous school shooting in Colorado—one of over a hundred school shootings in the United States in 2025 alone. Months earlier, Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota were targeted and shot by a far-right gunman, an event President Trump claimed to be unfamiliar with. This selective outrage, Boston Review argues, reflects a deeper truth: violence is judged not simply by its impact, but by whether it sustains or threatens a particular social order, with those in power shaping the narrative.
This dynamic is not new. Georges Sorel, writing in 1908, argued that violence is more than an act—it is a myth that societies use to interpret force and mobilize communities. "Myths are not descriptions of things," Sorel wrote, "but expressions of a will to act." Walter Benjamin, in his 1921 essay "Critique of Violence," sharpened this point, arguing that law itself is founded in violence and maintains itself through force. "Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence," Benjamin wrote. Thus, what liberal societies call "law and order" is not the absence of violence, but its routinization.
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic insights further explain why people cling so tightly to the myth that the operation of law is always just. Civilization, Freud argued, "obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression" by redirecting it, often projecting it onto an excluded "other." This mechanism, Boston Review notes, is at the root of racisms, nationalisms, and xenophobias, including the white Christian nationalism that Kirk championed. Aggression is dissimulated as the righteous reaction of civilization to a threat, and violence by the state or market is rendered invisible, while disruption by outsiders is cast as a breach of peace.
These competing myths of violence play out in the rituals of mourning and commemoration. After Kirk’s death, bipartisan vigils and congressional resolutions honored his "life and legacy" as a "courageous American patriot." Yet, as Boston Review observes, Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman, assassinated months earlier, received no such honors. "This across-the-aisle mythmaking turns Kirk into a martyr and the far right into a respectable vehicle of reasonable disagreement while erasing the virulence of their rhetoric and the far greater violence that Kirk himself championed." The official story, then, becomes less about mourning and more about stabilizing the prevailing order.
Meanwhile, acts of state violence—whether ICE raids, Medicaid cuts, or overseas bombings—are routinely described as "policy," not "violence." Only when someone disrupts order, as in Kirk’s case, does the act appear as violence deserving universal condemnation. Sorel shows how disruption becomes mythologized; Benjamin explains why the state insists on the distinction, and Freud reveals why society clings to it.
These narratives have real-world consequences. In response to Kirk’s death, President Trump announced a new $100,000 annual fee for H-1B visa applications, arguing that the program had been exploited by employers to displace American workers and create "an economic and national security threat to the nation." Yet, as City Journal analysts Santiago Vidal Calvo and Daniel Di Martino warn, the fee may backfire, closing off access to global entrepreneurs and increasing the U.S. budget deficit. H-1B workers pay about $85 billion in federal income taxes and contribute over $27 billion to Social Security and Medicare annually, reducing the deficit by over $800,000 per worker. If visa issuance falls, the deficit could rise.
Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal highlights another dimension: the poor performance of American students in mathematics, with only 8% scoring in the top tier in 2018, compared to 15% in Canada, 18% in Japan, and 29% in Hong Kong. "If businesses that rely on foreign workers are denied access to them, they may well opt to relocate to jurisdictions that allow them to hire whom they want to compete globally," Riley warns. The reality, he notes, is that the U.S. isn’t their only option.
Elsewhere, Nicole Stelle Garnett and Sean Tehan have released a paper on unconstitutional discrimination against religious providers in American education law. Despite Supreme Court rulings that government must be neutral toward religion, federal education law still contains "secular, neutral, and nonideological" restrictions. Garnett and Tehan recommend immediate cessation of these policies and propose model legislation to ensure government neutrality in both direct and indirect aid programs.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Kelsey Bloom put it, "Don’t tolerate disorder. Deny legitimacy to violence, and those who abet it." Yet, as the debates over Kirk’s death and its aftermath demonstrate, what counts as disorder, violence, or legitimacy is always contested, shaped by myths, political interests, and the shifting tides of public opinion. The stories we tell about violence—and the silences we maintain—matter deeply, not just for how we mourn, but for how we imagine justice, order, and the future of democracy itself.
