Charlie Kirk’s assassination looks like a watershed moment. I fear what's next.

Where do we go from here?

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the young, right-wing provocateur, the question looms as large as any we’ve heard during the Trump Era, and especially during the violence-adjacent Trump Restoration.

I disagreed with Kirk on nearly every issue, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die or that the killing of a father with two young children isn’t a tragedy. Obviously, it is a tragedy. But as George Orwell, the oracle, once wrote (h/t Bill Kristol), we live in a time when “the restatement of the obvious” is our “first duty.”

So we’ll state it once more: Kirk’s death was a tragedy, but not only a tragedy for Kirk and his family and his many supporters and for anyone who understands that the assassination was an assault on democracy and freedom of speech —