By the time you find this issue of the Political Review in your hands, Charlie Kirk’s assassination will have escaped the national news cycle. I suspect, however, that here in the Provo-Orem area, we won’t be ready to reclaim our ‘Happy Valley’ moniker. UVU’s campus became, on September 10th, ground zero for the slaying of a husband and father in the eyes of thousands of onlookers. The culprit atop the Losee Center blotted out the life of perhaps America’s most effective practitioner of persuasion in an unreservedly despicable act of terror. Much has been said about the grim irony of Charlie’s signature dialogue being cut down at a university, a supposed seedbed of free thought and speech. Though I stood on the opposite side from Charlie on many political questions, I echo others in saying that he practiced politics the right way, through continuous dialogue and respectful disagreement in the marketplace of ideas[1]. I mourn—truly, I weep—for Charlie and his family.
I also grieve for my friends at UVU, particularly those who witnessed that nightmare. Eyes and hearts are never rid of things like this. Even those of us not present who live in otherwise peaceful Utah have learned something jarring: there was at least one person in our community—a friend to some, a neighbor to others—who would pass the sentence of death on the crime of disagreement. Officers have apprehended the culprit, but still at large is a fresh sense that our community is splintered. In the spirit of reconciliation, I offer a reflection on violence—and on our duty to be ‘civic creators’—in the wake of terror on University Parkway.
In this Republic, each of us shares a collective responsibility for the state of our politics. America is a group project; it is the world’s longest-lived experiment in a constitutional order “of the people, by the people, [and] for the people”[2]. If the body politic runs a fever—an affliction of dysfunctional government or media, for instance—the cause is ultimately cellular. In 2025’s America, you and I are still straightforwardly responsible for choosing our leaders, and we get what we ask for. We still have power to speak our minds in the public square, peaceably assemble, and form productive cooperatives. America is the way it is because ‘we the people’ made it so.
A pernicious attitude of blame is choking out Americans’ precious belief in individual ownership for the country. It has become customary in our politics to spend the preponderance of our time and resources assigning to some ‘other’ the responsibility for the evils and challenges—often real, too often imagined—we face together. As someone who never wants to see Trumpian politics in our halls of power again, I will be the first to say that I and those who share my view have been ineffective communicators. The Democratic Party has spent every election cycle for a decade offering little more than fatalism, blame, and fear, and failing to learn that being ‘the alternative’ is not a posture of moral power. Our fixation on the appalling personal character and grievance-driven politics of our President has consumed our messaging and campaigning; our candidates shout “anti-MAGA” but can only whisper “productive progress.” This preoccupation—which has been mine as much as anyone’s—has earned the Party its reputation as one of America’s most dysfunctional institutions and an accompanying hemorrhage of voters[3].
This culture of blame is the fecund soil beneath our burgeoning weed patch of political violence[4]. The ugliest weed of the bunch is political assassination. Assassination is a terrible impulse born out of contrived helplessness. It has given up on dialogue and the ballot box; its perpetrator has relinquished any idea of creating, with two hands, a better world—only destroying, with bullets, the putative sources of his discontents. Its rejection of productive, individual responsibility to create is so complete as to become the opposite: a sickening personal mission to destroy. When its perpetrator is not insane (like John Hinckley Jr.), assassination is the ultimate act of blame—it says “you are irredeemably culpable for personal or national problems, so your death is the only answer.” The assassin fancies himself judge, jury, and executioner as he administers swift injustice.
In the weeks since Charlie’s tragic murder, there have been a few staggering demonstrations of the ‘civic creator’s ethic’; words and works inviting healing, building bridges, rejecting hatred, and setting the tone for a more peaceful future. None has been more stirring than Erika Kirk’s public forgiveness of her husband’s killer at Charlie’s memorial. I am astonished and grateful to see friends from across the political spectrum roused by that courageous, charitable act. Governor Cox’s peacemaking admonition to those conflicted about the murder are also significant: “I would beg you to look in the mirror and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere”[5].
There has also been much that we should recoil at: the President’s declarations of hatred for his political opponents at the very same memorial service, online calls for civil war, and reactionary radicalism are a few among many[6]. These are not right. Peacemakers are needed, not warriors in ever more disparate factions. Creators are needed, and in that spirit I am drawn to Langston Hughes musings on the question, “who makes America great?”
Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again…
We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again![7]
“We the people” is the timeless answer to that question. I submit that there is no one—especially at this University filled with meaningful opportunities to serve, build, and speak our unique message—who is utterly powerless as a civic creator[8]. Things have not gotten bad enough in America for the people to legitimately declare themselves bankrupt of opportunities to move the needle. We have the power to transfer energy spent blaming—whatever our favorite culprits might be—into energy spent preparing for the moments which offer America a transition, and those moments come every day. We have an election for which to be ready, a communication chasm to bridge, and a consensus to rebuild; we have an American project to finish.
