Killed for Words

The Murder of Charlie Kirk

I did not expect to write about Charlie Kirk. Most of my work here has remained within the world of medicine, policy, and the doctor–patient relationship. Yet the assassination of Charlie Kirk has shaken me in a way few public events have, and I find myself compelled to reflect on it. The event is political, cultural, and moral all at once, and although not directly medical, it touches on themes of language, truth, and power that pervade every modern institution, including medicine.

Kirk was killed because of words. Not his actions, not some alleged crime, but words. He was targeted because he spoke convictions that many now consider intolerable to utter. That is the chilling message of this killing and of the responses that followed. His alleged assassin was not seeking vengeance for robbery or fraud. He was not a disgruntled employee or a neighbor angered by quarrel. He was a deeply online ideologue, a gay man with a transgender partner, immersed in far-left chat rooms where he denounced Kirk as hateful. Whatever else was in his mind, he acted within a culture that insists Kirk’s words were violence and therefore justified a violent end.

This logic has become a recurring feature of the modern left. Movements have taken hold that treat opinions as violence and disagreement as existential harm. One need only consider the language that dominates the transgender debate. It is not merely that dissenting views are considered rude or insensitive. The movement holds that anyone who utters a contrary opinion is committing violence. To say that sex is immutable is to “erase” or “deny the existence” of transgender people. To question transition practices is to drive them to suicide. In this framework, disagreement itself is violence. More than that, it is described in the most extreme moral terms: “genocide.” If words are a genocide in progress, then what kind of response is justified? If you believe that millions are being erased, then violent reprisal is not just righteous but necessary.

The redefinition of speech as violence is inseparable from another modern conceit: the idea of “my truth.” Truth, once understood as an objective reality that all might perceive imperfectly, is now treated as a private possession. To question another’s claim is not to dispute but to invalidate. If one’s “truth” is bound up with one’s very identity, then disagreement is not merely contradiction but annihilation. To deny “my truth” is to destroy my reality. In such a framework, words are not conversation but violence, and those who utter the wrong words are not opponents but assailants.

But “my truth” does not permit “your truth.” The same logic that declares disagreement to be violence also denies reciprocity. If my truth casts you as an existential threat, then your truth cannot accuse me in return. I am righteous by definition. You are guilty by definition. What this really means is not that I have my truth and you have yours, but that my truth is the truth and must also be yours. If you refuse it, you are committing violence against me. There is no acknowledgment that you, who disagree, might regard my truth as violence against yours and feel similarly justified to act violently in preemption. The presumption beneath this creed is twofold: I alone possess certainty, and you, knowing yourself to be a sinner, must accept my judgment in silence.

It is a strange paradox. Those who speak most loudly of “my truth” and “your truth” do not tolerate any truth but their own. They deny the existence of a single truth, yet what they demand is nothing less than the substitution of their own untrue truth in its place, imposed not by persuasion but by moral coercion and, failing that, violent force.

When truth itself is made arbitrary, every disagreement becomes an attack, and every unwelcome word an act of violence. This logic reaches across modern culture. The use of the “n-word” is widely treated not simply as offensive speech but as an act of aggression that invites physical retaliation. Elon Musk’s decision to associate with Trump provoked not just criticism but a spree of vandalism against his company’s products. The cars were slashed and keyed because the man who made them had become politically unclean. In each case the underlying logic is identical. The speaker, by speaking, has committed violence, and violence in response is thereby justified.

This same attitude suffused the reaction to Kirk’s assassination. A chorus of voices on the left openly celebrated the murder, dancing on TikTok, posting feverishly on Bluesky, and wishing the same fate upon other conservative pundits. Politicians and mainstream pundits restrained themselves from open celebration, but they did not mourn either. Some limited themselves to a general condemnation of all violence, only to pivot quickly to a condemnation of Kirk himself, suggesting that his words had brought this on. The refusal to condemn murder without qualification is not neutrality. It is permission. Matthew Dowd explained on national television that Kirk’s hateful thoughts and words brought about hateful deeds. Ilhan Omar quipped that Kirk was Dr. Frankenstein shot by his own monster. The implicit threat is unsubtle. Say these words, speak these thoughts, and you too will deserve what comes.

It is difficult to overstate the danger of this redefinition. If conservative speech is violence, then the half of the nation holding to traditional views of sex, family, and faith are violent aggressors by virtue of their convictions alone. Those who keep silent may avoid notice, but those who dare to speak risk the same treatment that Kirk received. The moral logic that leads from words to violence requires no conspiracy or direct incitement. It requires only the belief, sincerely held, that speech itself can kill. Once that belief takes root, assassination becomes not a crime but a reprisal, not a tragedy but a reckoning.

I cannot separate this from what I see in medicine. The profession I serve has been steadily reoriented around the same cultural conviction that speech must be reshaped to avoid offense, and that deviation from the new vocabulary is itself a moral failing. Euphemism reigns where clarity once did. We do not say that a child was abused; we say there was “non-accidental trauma.” We do not say that a patient’s convulsions are psychiatric; we call them “non-epileptic seizures” or “functional disorders,” cloaking the absence of organic pathology in words that suggest the opposite. We no longer describe sex as an observation of biology but as something “assigned at birth,” as though the obstetrician were flipping a coin and handing out arbitrary designations. Each phrase is a small surrender of precision to the fear of offense. In these small surrenders the same principle is reinforced: that words are dangerous.

It was Tyler Robinson’s bullet that killed Kirk, but the permission came from a culture that, like my profession, has traded candor for the conceit that truth itself can wound. Just as society now treats disagreement as violence, medicine now treats the truth as harm. The physician’s task once began with naming reality as clearly as possible. Today it begins with managing sensitivities. A diagnosis must not bruise; a description must not offend. We are no longer expected merely to heal the body but to protect the patient from language itself. In both culture and medicine, truth has been demoted to a threat that must be concealed or reshaped.

The murder of Charlie Kirk reveals the endpoint of this progression. When speech is violence, clarity is aggression, and disagreement is genocide, then violent retaliation no longer appears disproportionate. Language has been twisted into a weapon, not by those who spoke the words, but by those who declared that words themselves kill. What began as euphemism in medicine and academia has metastasized into a cultural creed that justifies murder.

The lesson of Charlie Kirk’s death is not limited to one ideology or one issue. It is the consequence of a society that has surrendered truth to the tyranny of feelings, and clarity to the fear of offense. If words are violence, then debate is war. If disagreement is genocide, then every opponent is an enemy combatant. A nation cannot endure under such a creed.

We will not reclaim sanity by speaking more softly or by wrapping our words in layers of euphemism. The only answer is clarity, spoken plainly and without apology. Medicine must recover it. Politics must recover it. Culture itself must recover it. To speak the truth is not violence. To kill a man for speaking it is.