To those of you who laughed when Charlie Kirk was gunned down:
You may think your reaction is righteous. It is not. It is cowardice. It is the abandonment of principle in favor of spite.
Charlie Kirk spent his career demeaning empathy, dismissing suffering, and treating gun deaths as the acceptable price of liberty. For that, he will be judged by history. But when you respond to his death with mockery, you are not judging him—you are indicting yourselves.
Every laugh emoji you clicked told the world you believe murder is a punchline. Every smirk you posted said you would rather mirror the very cruelty you claim to despise than rise above it. That is not justice. That is not progress. That is barbarism wearing a mask of defiance.
Violence is not a trophy to be paraded around on social media. It is a toxin that seeps into every part of our political life. If you cheer for it today, you give permission for it tomorrow. What you normalize now will not stop at the grave of someone you loathe. It will circle back to the people you love, and you will have helped open the door.
Understand this: laughing at a man’s assassination does not make you brave, clever, or uncompromising. It makes you part of the problem. If you are incapable of empathy for a human being you opposed, then you have become exactly what you claimed to resist.
Empathy isn’t mourning, sympathy, forgiveness, or revisionism. It isn’t rewriting a man’s record to make him gentler in death than he was in life. It isn’t about shedding tears for someone who openly mocked the very idea of compassion. Selective empathy—reserved only for the people we like—isn’t empathy at all, it’s tribal favoritism. When people laugh at assassination and call it justice, they’re not wielding power, they’re surrendering to cruelty. That’s not resistance—it’s rot.
Empathy is resistance. It’s the refusal to let violence dictate the terms of our humanity. It’s the steel in the spine that says: we don’t celebrate murder, no matter who is in the casket. Empathy is not softness—it’s discipline, strength, and defiance. It’s proof that cruelty doesn’t win unless we agree to play by its rules.
History does not remember the sneering chorus. It remembers the people who refused to let cruelty dictate their morality.
Stop applauding bullets. Start demanding better. Or admit that your principles were never real in the first place.
Let’s be clear: we’re not asking anyone to mourn Charlie Kirk. We’re not handing him sainthood or rewriting his record. What we are saying is that celebrating assassination corrodes us. It’s not justice, it’s not progress, it’s cruelty wearing a mask.
Empathy here doesn’t mean tears — it means refusing to mirror the sickness we fight against. If Kirk spent his life mocking empathy, then every laugh at his death is his ghost saying he was right. We refuse to prove him right.
Take from this what you will, but that’s where we stand.
Thank you so much for the clarity of your thinking. I would say I was 95% of the way there with a little bit of hope that maybe this death would trigger a reckoning on gun laws, etc. etc. Obviously the climate is way too charged for that to happen and no one gains anything by taking pleasure in this tragedy. It’s absolutely awful. I’m going to post your essay far and wide Thanks again.