OCTOBER 3, 2025 | OPINION | By Olivia Link
Throughout the Trump administration’s barrage of conservative legislation, his air strikes on Venezuelans in international waters and the illegal arrest of untold numbers of immigrants, nothing has inflamed Americans across the political spectrum like the assassination of right-wing figurehead Charlie Kirk.
The American reaction to Kirk’s death was a telling one, an important indication of whose life matters and of whose death constitutes political violence. I heard many people declaring that, even though they disagreed with Kirk’s politics, political violence is never the answer.
Furthermore, the commonly spouted idea that political violence is un-American is somewhat troubling because of how it seems to have been defined: shooting a political pundit counts, but razing homeless encampments doesn’t.
When we talk about police brutality, we don’t talk about it as political violence. When we talk about institutionalized poverty, sexual assault or ICE raids, it is rarely through this same lens—and I would argue that all of these situations and conditions are violent in some way, and that, in their targeted nature, they are certainly political.
What this tells us, then, is that some forms of political violence are deemed harsher and more un-American than others, and it would appear that determination is based on the identity of the victim.
Comparing two deaths or tragedies is neither a useful moral nor political exercise, but we also cannot ignore the different ways we discuss those deaths. If the theoretical endpoints of these comparisons have a material or political impact on reality, they must be examined as part of our dialogue about proportionality and death.
Because there is so much death every day, we must invent ways to determine the political salience of tragedy, ways to categorize some deaths as culturally significant and others as mere statistics. The way that we do this, largely unconsciously, reveals quite a bit about our political paradigm. In deciding which deaths to grieve or discuss, we decide who is mournable, whose life has more value.
The act of remembrance is always political, and so is the act of silence. Charlie Kirk’s name and face have been plastered on the front of every major news channel and social media site for weeks. And yet, most Americans will not recognize the name Trey Reed, a Black college student found hanging from a tree at Delta State University just five days after Kirk’s death. This chasm of proportionality is not accidental, and it is shaped by cultural mores and biases.
I must admit that I lost a lot of respect for many of my peers the day of Kirk’s murder; people who had been silent on social media through anti-immigrant violence and a live-streamed genocide suddenly chose to speak up for Kirk. Often, this is accompanied by statements about disliking him as a person but supporting the right to speak his mind. Here, I would like to take a moment to address the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show after he made comments about Kirk that the Trump administration interpreted as threatening.
The move to take his show off the air drew wide criticism from all sides, including consumer and producer boycotts, which eventually resulted in Kimmel’s reinstatement. Once more, I take issue with the claim that Trump’s censorship in this case is not novel or different, as I believe he is only making a preexisting trend more blatant.
Repression of dissent, especially coming from people of color, has been a part of the American political landscape since the founding. The only reason we are organizing around it right now is because of Kimmel’s positionality and status quo politics.
It feels dangerous to use the language of political violence so selectively, and while the assassination of a political figure indicates something sinister about American cultural and material conditions, it would be incorrect to depict it as unprecedented or un-American.
We live in a settler colonial state founded on and maintained through continual processes of violence and death against marginalized groups, meaning that political violence broadly understood is the bedrock of our society.
Both Kimmel’s suspension and Kirk’s assassination are not indicative of anything new either, as administrations on both sides of the aisle have been repressing oppositional voices for decades. It simply marks a different kind of silencing, one where the victim belongs to groups normally considered protected.