Millions of Americans just witnessed a killing.

On Wednesday, scattered amid social media’s banal ephemera — tired memes, partisan agit-prop, and celebrity gossip — appeared a video of a young man speaking into a microphone, then recoiling from a gunshot to the neck.

For hours, this snuff film was impossible to escape, the atrocity autoplaying over and over, as clout chasers capitalized on the human mind’s helpless fascination with violence. It was a horrifying spectacle, made all the more so by the identity of the deceased — the conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk.

Kirk evangelized for causes that I despise. But through years of long-form commentary, he had endeared himself to millions of conservatives. Our brains did not evolve to distinguish parasocial relationships from actual ones: For almost all of our species’ history, to hear a person speak on a near-daily basis was to know them intimately. Countless Republicans, therefore, experienced Kirk’s death as though it were the loss of a friend.

For liberals, meanwhile, Kirk’s killing constituted an appalling assault on political liberty. The commentator came to prominence as a defender of conservative speech on campus. Now, while speaking at a university, he had been silenced by a bullet. Such violence did not just steal Kirk’s voice, but discouraged others from articulating provocative views in public, whatever their ideological content.

Kirk’s assassination........

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