It has become almost trite to write an op-ed condemning political violence in American life. That is not what this essay is about. This is about how we talk about the victims of such violence. We like to say it is always wrong to kill our political opponents. But do we really believe that? And if we did, if we genuinely thought it was morally abhorrent to strike down an ideological enemy, how would we sound?

Well, we would sound very different from how we do now.

When political violence claims the life of someone we dislike, notice the formula that emerges with depressing predictability: “I think [insert name] was a terrible person, but killing them is inexcusable.” Always the qualifier. Always the hedge. Always the compulsive need to prove our disapproval of the victim before we can manage to disapprove of their murder. That tiny rhetorical tic betrays a larger moral failure: our supposed commitment to human dignity is hollow.

If you genuinely believed that killing an innocent person is wrong in itself, you would not feel compelled to preface your condemnation with a character indictment. The victim’s politics would be as irrelevant to your judgment as their shoe size or favorite football team. You would simply say: “This is wrong.” Full stop.

But perhaps you think some victims deserve what they get, that they said or did things that justified their death. What, precisely, would those things be? And could that same reasoning be turned against you by someone who finds your views repugnant? If so, you have not only justified political murder, you have built a precedent for your own.

At a more basic level, these responses reveal something disturbing about American public morals: we do not actually believe human life is valuable in any unconditional sense. Instead, we have constructed a crude, self-serving spectrum of dignity, a sliding moral scale that increases as a person’s politics begin to approximate our own.

Watch how this double standard plays out in our language. When someone who shares our worldview is killed, our condemnation is absolute: “This is a tragedy.” “An innocent person has died.” “This violence is unconscionable.” No qualifiers. Their humanity is assumed, their right to life unquestionable. But when the victim held views we despised? Suddenly, we discover nuance. Suddenly, the principle that murder is wrong must be hedged, contextualized, rebalanced against their ideological sins, even if we eventually arrive at condemnation.

This reveals not moral sophistication, but something far more troubling: we have placed ourselves at the center of the moral universe, measuring the worth of human life by its distance from our own beliefs. The closer the alignment, the more human they appear. The further the distance, the more their murder becomes “complicated” instead of plain evil.

This failure becomes even more pronounced when we consider how ideological distance affects our capacity for empathy. The further we grow apart from others, whether through political segregation, social sorting, or simple geographic separation, the more their faces begin to blur in our moral imagination. They become abstractions rather than people. Political opponents we’ve never met become even easier to dehumanize because they exist only as ideas in our heads, not as flesh-and-blood human beings with families who will mourn them.

In other words, it is harder to qualify your condemnation when you can picture the victim’s children attending the funeral. It is easier to hedge when the dead person is just a name attached to opinions you despise. As Charlie Kirk himself once observed, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” When we lose the ability to see our opponents as fully human, we have already taken the first crucial step toward accepting their destruction.

If this describes your reaction to political violence, to the murder of Charlie Kirk, ask yourself honestly: why do I feel compelled to declare that someone was terrible before I can say their murder was wrong? What matters more, signaling to my political tribe that I haven’t gone soft, or affirming a fundamental truth about human life?

None of this means you cannot simultaneously condemn murder and disapprove of someone’s actions or beliefs. Instead, this is a call to examine why you structure your condemnations the way you do. Because perhaps the operative phrase in “He was terrible, but killing him was wrong” isn’t the condemnation at the end. Maybe it’s the contextualization at the beginning. Here, the “but” isn’t connecting two equal thoughts; it’s a fig leaf covering what you really believe: that the killings of some innocent people are less tragic than others, that some murders are more understandable than others, that some victims had it coming.

If that describes your thinking, then you are not reasoning from principle. You are only condemning murder to signal to your allies that you, too, despise the victim. It’s a way of maintaining tribal membership while preserving plausible deniability about your true feelings. When you lead with “He was terrible, but…” you’re not saying that murder is always terrible. You’re performing loyalty to your political group. You’re saying, “Don’t worry! I’m still one of you. I hate him as much as you do. I’m only condemning his murder because I have to, not because I want to.”
This is why the qualifier comes first and carries far more emotional and intellectual weight than the condemnation. It’s the part you actually mean.

The solution to this quagmire is not complex. We must strive for consistency in how we condemn political violence, especially when we feel the strongest pressure to apply different standards. When someone you despise is murdered, that is precisely the moment your principles matter most. Anyone can condemn the killing of people they admire; moral consistency is measured by how you respond when the victim is someone whose views you find reprehensible. This means resisting the tribal pressure to hedge your condemnation. It means recognizing that your discomfort with offering an unqualified endorsement of the salvation of someone’s eternal soul and the provision of their family is precisely the test of whether you genuinely believe what you claim to believe. It means accepting that defending universal principles will sometimes put you at odds with your political allies, and that this discomfort is the price of moral integrity. Because, to be quite frank, politics doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.

“But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”