There is a point at which a society stops arguing about ideas and starts arguing about people. You can measure that turn by the way we mourn, the way we condemn and the way we suddenly discover (or discard) principles depending on who is in the headlines.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Sept. 10 at an event at Utah Valley University. This single incident serves as a test of what we believe. It exposes a political culture fluent in slogans about free speech and nonviolence yet reluctant to apply those standards evenly when emotion and calculated outrage take the wheel.
Free speech absolutism sounds noble in classrooms and courtrooms. In practice, it’s inconvenient. Absolutism means defending the right to speak even and especially when the speaker repulses you. It means resisting the reflex to criminalize rhetoric you dislike simply because you find its social effects harsh.
The market test comes precisely when a figure you oppose is targeted or harmed. Do you apply the same rule you demanded for your allies? Or do you reach for a bespoke exception, “Yes, but this case is different,” and call the exception moral clarity?
Modern progressivism has become great at teaching that your righteous feelings are a reliable compass. But emotions are weather and not maps. A culture trained to prioritize feeling over principle becomes tribal. Fast. If your side feels harmed, speech is violence.
If your side feels virtuous, violence becomes speech. This is how the vocabulary of justice gets weaponized: The words remain the same, but the target determines their meaning.
Religion once supplied a stronger counterweight to this drift, not because religious people are immune to mobs, but because religion at its best insists on two hard truths: 1: There is a moral law above our inclinations, and 2: The image of God in the person you despise is not erased by your dislike.
A society that keeps those truths near finds it harder to slide into selective empathy. Yet even religious language now bends under the pressure of herd mentality. We have not lost religion. We have relocated it.
The Kirk episode has already become a Rorschach test. In one set of responses, people rush to condemn political violence universally, apply the standard they would want applied to their own and then wait for facts.
In another, the reaction is transactional: Blame the victim’s speech for “creating the conditions,” frame the harm as a kind of karmic inevitability or treat the claim itself as theater that deserves mockery rather than examination. Both political sides have practiced versions of this over the past decade. It is the habit of selective empathy: grief for us, malicious enjoyment for them.
Free speech absolutism does not sanctify threats or violence. But neither does it spin with the prevailing sentiment. If you are an absolutist on Monday and a censor on Tuesday, you were never an absolutist. You were an opportunist with a dictionary. The same goes for anti-violence commitments. If your condemnation sharpens and softens with the identity of the target, you aren’t against political violence. You’re against losing.
Why is consistency so rare? Because consistency is costly. It asks you to hold the line when your friends boo and your enemies gloat. It demands that you distinguish between speech and force even when speech wounds your pride or your cause. It requires acknowledging the humiliating possibility that your opponent’s rights must be protected today so that yours exist tomorrow.
There’s another layer: the information fog. In the first hours of any attack, rumors harden into screenshots, which harden into identities. People share before they think. They react before they verify. Misinformation is a demand problem. We want confirmation dressed up as news.
That appetite then becomes an alibi: “I reacted to what I saw.” But the moral standard cannot be “I believed it in the moment.” If you demand that your opponents wait for evidence when the story cuts against them, you owe the same discipline to yourself.
What would a principled response look like in moments like this?
First, universalize your rules. If political violence is unacceptable, it is unacceptable regardless of party, personality or past rhetoric. That doesn’t erase context or responsibility. No. It limits the moral license to retaliate in kind. If you believe speech should be countered with more speech, keep that belief when the speaker is your adversary.
Second, recenter moral agency. The person who commits violence is responsible for it. Blaming ideas for acts can be a polite way of absolving actors.
Third, separate person from position without erasing either. You can oppose a public figure’s program with every fiber and still refuse to celebrate or minimize harm against them. That is the difference between politics and vendetta.
Finally, expect more tests like this. The only workable antidote is character: the quiet stubbornness to apply the rule you would hate to apply but know you must.
In the end, free speech absolutism and nonviolence are not slogans to be flaunted when convenient. They are constraints that pinch hardest at the moment your tribe’s blood is up. Selective empathy will always feel good in the short term.
But it will also destroy your credibility and eventually your freedom. The measure of a just culture is not how fiercely it protects the voices it loves, but how stubbornly it upholds the dignity and safety of those it can’t stand.
If we cannot do that across our divides, we will discover too late that we have trained ourselves to mistake passion for principle and revenge for justice.
