
The death of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday, Sept. 10th, 2025, is an event that will reverberate through the fabric of our nation for many years to come. His death is the latest in a worrying trend, whereby the number of politically motivated acts of violence in the United States has skyrocketed exponentially over the past five years.
Starting with the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, all the way to the murder of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman in June, this new era of politics has brought more and more senseless and politically motivated attacks to places across the nation. From our schools to baseball fields, from our homes to state capitol buildings, from our governors’ mansions to the U.S. Capitol Building, and many more places in between, political violence has become a terrifying norm within American democracy.
There is nothing, nothing at all that justifies any form of political violence. And yet, we’re seeing it more and more everywhere in the U.S. No state or town appears to be safe. From Butler, to Charlottesville, and Lansing to Provo, it doesn’t matter who you voted for or what policies and ideas you support, because our very way of life is now under threat.
The ability to make our voices heard through argument and peaceful free speech is now under threat. Our nation, the United States of America, has been built on a promise, a promise that the democratic process will always continue. It’s based on a belief in the Constitution that means losing one election or one debate isn’t the end of the world, because we can always win the next one. This idea isn’t uniquely American, but it’s fundamental to American democracy. The death of Charlie Kirk, along with every other instance of political violence over the past few years, has put that all at risk.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was just the latest in a long line of acts of violence going back years now, but his death has struck a chord in a way that no other politically motivated attack has in quite some time. The anger over his murder has reverberated across America, and particularly across the far right. Everyone watched live as someone they all either loved or hated, but nonetheless knew, died tragically and brutally in front of them.
Many of us here at Hamilton probably fall on the latter side of that crowd, as most people who go here likely disagreed with Charlie Kirk and every word that came out of his mouth. I know that as an avowed progressive democrat who’s worked on numerous political campaigns and in multiple politicians’ offices, I’m one of those who despised the rhetoric Charlie Kirk often used at his events. But these disagreements do not justify his murder; nothing justifies it.
But the reason why this hits so close to home is that at Hamilton, we’ve seen our share of hateful speech or violent acts over the years. In April of 2023, when I was a first-year, a Hamilton College student at the time posted a shooting threat to Jodel that led to a school-wide lockdown for hours, and prompted another debate on gun violence at schools. And last year, another former student painted neo nazi inspired messages on an art mural in the old mail center. All of that is to say that many of us have seen hateful speech and violent threats on this campus in recent years, and to be reminded of that yet again by the death of someone so many of us know so well hits deep for all of us. In many ways, it makes his death oddly and tragically personal.
We do not know the motives for why the man who murdered Charlie Kirk decided to go to Utah Valley University that day. But we know that whether or not we agreed or disagreed with Charlie Kirk, he was, at the end of the day, like so many of us. He was passionately motivated by his beliefs, truly engaged in the democratic process, and was working with others to find happiness in life by serving a cause greater than his own self-interest.
