An account of Charlie Kirk’s murder that ignores the victim, the perpetrator, and the motive is no account at all.

Y esterday afternoon, officials within the State of Utah confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that the murder of Charlie Kirk was an act of political violence. The facts are as follows: A young man whose ideological views had become increasingly left-wing killed another young man who was famous for his conservatism. That the two men differed in this manner was not incidental to the event, but its cause. In a confession to his lover, the killer submitted that he had “had enough of” the victim’s “hatred,” and wished to end his life so that he could no longer promulgate it. “Some hate,” he wrote, “can’t be negotiated out.”

Some observers have flatly denied that this was the case. Others have conceded the details, but proposed that they do not matter. Both are wrong. Typically, the political preferences of our most notorious villains are, indeed, irrelevant. Here, they are crucial. One can no more understand a politically inspired murder by ignoring its political facts that one can understand a financially inspired murder by ignoring the financial facts. It would be nice if there was no such thing as ideological violence in these United States, but, alas, that has never been the case. As citizens, our responsibility is to accept that and to debate it on its own terms.

Brian Schatz, a senator from Hawaii, disagrees. “What f***ing difference does it make,” he asked this week, “if this murderer was left or right?” The answer should be obvious. If an asteroid were to hit the earth, it would not be of particular consequence whether it were made predominantly of nickel-iron or of silicate rock, and it would not be particularly instructive whether its initial point of impact were Paris or Singapore. Likewise, if a hallucinating man were to blow up a restaurant, we would not profit much from knowing whether he believed that he had been told to commit his act by a walking toaster or by a diabetic penguin or by the secret messages that he believed were being broadcast to his ham radio, and it would prove ultimately irrelevant whether he chose a Wendy’s or a McDonald’s as the venue of his crime. But here? Here, one cannot understand the story unless one accepts all of its details. The man who murdered Charlie Kirk did not choose his victim at random, but chose him deliberately. His motives were not chaotic, but comprehensible. His attack was not improvised, but planned. His aim, in his own words, was to kill someone whom he considered to be full of “hatred,” and then, having “left no evidence,” to “keep this secret.” To ignore these facts is not merely to reject reality; it is to render it incomprehensible. An account of the murder that ignores the victim, the venue, the perpetrator, and the motive is no account at all.

Not all attacks on political figures are political. The man who shot President Reagan in 1981 was crazy, not ideological. Given the lunacy of the perpetrator, one could spend a lifetime looking into the why of that case and still leave empty-handed. But this is not true of the man who shot Abraham Lincoln, or of the man who shot Martin Luther King Jr., or of the man who shot William McKinley. They had their reasons, and they followed them to their bloody ends. To acknowledge this is not to assign blame to those who did not commit the crimes, nor to indict, wholesale, the political movements to which they belonged. It is, however, to distinguish between madness and evil, between chaos and design, between agency and vassalage. We Americans are a self-governing people, and our institutions presuppose our free will. To this order, the madman poses a wholly different threat than the sinner, and, if we are unable to work out which is which, we will become helpless in the face of both tests.