Charlie Kirk, one of the most prominent conservative voices in America, was assassinated on September 10 while delivering a speech to students.
He was a husband, a young father, and the founder of the largest conservative student organization in the nation.
His murder should have been met with silence, mourning, or at the very least human decency. Instead, it was met with cruelty.
Only days after Kirk’s assassination, Jasmine Frye—a staffer tied to Virginia’s Democrat gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger—took to social media to celebrate his death.
“F around and find out,” she wrote. “His entire brand was hate and violence. You attract what you preach.”
These are not the words of an anonymous agitator. Frye works inside Virginia politics, a state with national attention and one of the most competitive races in the country.
Spanberger is campaigning to govern more than 8.5 million people.
Yet her campaign has not condemned Frye’s remarks. Not a single word of disavowal. And in a moment like this, silence is not neutrality—it is complicity.
The claim that Kirk somehow “attracted” violence is false.
He was targeted for doing what he had done thousands of times before: speaking to young people on a college campus.
He was killed because he gave students an alternative to progressive ideology.
His so-called “brand,” as Frye dismissively labeled it, was built on empowering students, defending constitutional freedoms, and challenging institutional leftism. To suggest that such work makes someone deserving of assassination is to endorse political violence.
This is not an isolated case. We are watching a pattern develop where left-wing activists and even political staffers openly justify violence if the victims are conservative.
Conservative speakers are shouted down and physically assaulted at universities. Republican campaign workers have been harassed in public spaces.
Supreme Court justices have faced threats outside their homes. And now, in the aftermath of an assassination, a government-affiliated staffer mocks the victim and shifts blame onto him.
The accusation that Kirk “preached violence” collapses under scrutiny.
His last tour, the one cut short by his assassination, was called the American Comeback Tour—a campaign centered on debate, outreach, and rebuilding American values.
Frye’s remarks go beyond poor judgment. They reduce a man’s life and death to a partisan punchline, erasing the reality that Kirk was a husband, a father, and a national leader with millions of supporters.
When assassination becomes fodder for political mockery, civil society fractures. A democracy that tolerates the celebration of political murder cannot sustain itself.
If the murder of a political leader and young father cannot unite Americans in basic decency, then the question becomes unavoidable: what can?