The Permission Structure of Grief

I've been marinating on something that might be hard for some to hear, but I think it's worth saying out loud. I've been wondering why this tragic event has galvanized so many within Trump's base and (largely white) conservative media ecosystem—especially those now driving the narrative from Fox News hosts to Republican officials to Trump supporters on social media—and why they're showing such an outpouring of empathy for someone who publicly refused to see the humanity in others.

It's not lost on me that Charlie Kirk was connected to powerful figures, including the president, and that explains some of the high-level response. But the level of sympathy from so many others who never knew him personally is striking. He's receiving a kind of response from the federal government that's usually reserved for high officials or those who've made a significant positive impact on the world.

Meanwhile, this follows a pattern where conservative outrage seems calibrated not to the severity of violence, but to the political identity of victims. There have been so many other acts of violence—like the horrific event in Minnesota where a white man murdered political officials—that barely registered a mention from the White House. There's a stark difference in how these events are acknowledged, and it's worth asking why.

What also stands out is the ferocity of the anger we're seeing. Anger can be an easy emotion to access, especially if you're not deeply in touch with other feelings. But the level of outrage and the refusal to see that this was the act of an individual—acting alone, as most of these perpetrators do—is telling. Yes, the graphic nature of the footage likely intensifies the response, but that doesn't fully explain the disproportionate institutional reaction compared to other political violence. Political violence is never acceptable, but there's a pattern of ignoring the broader context of right-wing extremism, even when evidence shows it's far more common than left-wing violence. It's all bad—none of it is justified—but we have to recognize the reality.

I understand that people who knew Kirk personally are grieving. He was someone's son, someone's husband, and his children are now without a father, which is a tragedy. But to elevate him as a righteous figure is deeply problematic. His debating style wasn't true debate—it was performative, loud, and often devoid of real substance. But that's exactly what made him effective. In our current moment, confidence often gets mistaken for competence, and certainty for truth. He was, in many ways, a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less someone knows, the more confident they sound. That misplaced confidence gave him influence. It's telling that he was 31 years old specifically choosing to debate college students—who likely knew more than him but were less confident because the more you actually know, the more you realize you don't know. He structured these encounters to maximize his advantage: pitting his ignorant certainty against their informed uncertainty. It says something troubling about our society that people cheered for his absolutism instead of questioning whether he actually knew what he was talking about.

And that leads me to what I think is really going on beneath the surface of all this mourning. The pattern suggests that perhaps part of the reason for this mourning is a fear of losing a voice that articulated things they secretly think but cannot say. Among those most vocally grieving Kirk - predominantly his white conservative supporters - I suspect many found in him someone who gave language and legitimacy to their quiet prejudices. When he spoke out loud what others kept hidden, he gave them a sense of permission. Now that he's gone, some of the mourning is really about them. It's about the fear that if his words could be condemned, then perhaps their own unspoken thoughts are not as safe as they believed.

This is how white supremacy works. It creates figures who act as mouthpieces for what can't be said "politely." When those voices fall silent, people aren't just mourning a person—they're mourning the loss of protection, cover, and affirmation for their own biases.

In the end, we need to look at why we respond to violence and grief so differently depending on who is involved. We need to ask ourselves what it means that certain voices are mourned so publicly while others are ignored. And there's a bitter irony here: Kirk positioned himself as a champion of free speech, even hate speech. Yet his death is already being used by those in power, including the president, to attack free speech on the left and silence dissent against our MAGA-controlled government. The very freedoms he claimed to champion are being dismantled in his name. Perhaps that tells us everything we need to know about whose speech was ever really meant to be free