CIVILIZATION IS NOT BUILT BY VIOLENCE.

Yesterday, Turning Point U.S.A. founder Charlie Kirk was shot while tossing red ballcaps into a crowd at a Utah university.  My title quotes Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux, who posted excerpts from several of the more restrained reactions to the news.  There's plenty of less restrained stuff circulating.  You won't find any of that here today.

Ezra Klein, who probably agreed with very little of the Turning Point policy plans, also writes wisely.

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.

We’ve been edging closer for some time now.

Yes.  At least for today, the "edging closer" is still in the form of invective on social media.

Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was gunned down during a speech at Utah Valley University.

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.

I submit, dear reader, that the "shifted sharply right" among younger voters might have been more about applying the brakes on the corona tyranny and the Student Affairs curriculum than a ringing endorsement of Trumpian populism; and yet, tossing red ballcaps around and inviting people who disagree to make their case is exactly what persuasion, nay, what the academic enterprise, is supposed to be about.

Violate those norms, though, and buckle in for the punishment cycles.

American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that.

Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project.

And as the punishment cycles evolve, breaking out is harder. "What If We Acted Like Political Violence Was a Problem?"  That's Reason's Matt Welch, who surveys the invective on social media and despairs, concluding, "But for those who are tempted to throw more hands, for those playing the "yeah, but" game about Kirk's allegedly beyond-the-pale beliefs, for those LARPing about some imagined future where the Virtuous side of this struggle manages, through force, to defeat the Bad—ask yourself honestly: Is this how the political violence ends?"  His colleague Robby Soave continues, in a similar vein, "There would be no better way to honor Kirk's love of debate than to remind everyone that Americans should settle their differences with words, not violence."  Yes, dear reader, there is a "speech is violence" allusion in that quote, and yes, that contributes mightily to the invective on social media.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education applies the corrective.

At their best, America's colleges and universities provide a unique venue to discover truth, talk across lines of difference, and develop a deeper and fuller understanding of the world. Over the years, students and student groups have invited Kirk to speak at hundreds, if not thousands, of campuses. At these events, he would share his opinions and invite others to do the same. America must be an open society where this sort of debate can take place, where we feel safe to share our ideas in the public square, not just from behind bulletproof glass and bulletproof vests.

Sigmund Freud once said civilization started the day man first cast a word instead of a stone. He was right. Words are not violence. Words are what we use instead of violence to resolve our differences. We must not lose sight of this civilization-defining distinction.

Unfortunately, since 2021, we've seen a steady rise in support for violence in response to speech on campus. Earlier this week, we released our finding that one in three students express some support for the use of violence to stop a campus speech. That's up from 20 percent only three years ago. While we do not know the identity of the gunman, what happened yesterday is indicative of a broader cancer in our body politic that we must address.

But it must not be addressed with censorship.

Turfing out the deanlets responsible for the Student Affairs curriculum might be a good start.  I mean, who thought of Utah Valley, located not far from Brigham Young, as a smaller version of Wisconsin or Minnesota?

Your alternatives?  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner suggests we've seen "A shocking, but not surprising, event. I fear it's a harbinger rather than an outlier."  Perhaps there is a trend already in progress.  Power Line's Scott Johnson is thinking along similarly gloomy lines.  "If we did not represent the forces of constitutional order, it feels like it could be the opening salvo of a civil war. It provokes us to wonder what might have happened if the assassination of President Trump had succeeded during last year’s campaign."