Why They're Celebrating

The people celebrating the assassination are just random nobodies like Washington Post staffers, people teaching your children, university professors, aides to elected officials, medical professionals, and prominent talking heads.

— Sunny (@sunnyright) September 11, 2025

Via the UK Daily Mail:

Left-wing social media fanatics have celebrated influencer Charlie Kirk's murder - with some comparing him to Adolf Hitler and even suggesting he 'deserved' his fate.

. . . The killing of Donald Trump's ally is the latest example of political violence in the US spanning a range of political ideologies and affecting both major political parties.

I think the source of this is in the US educational system, and the celebrants will turn out to be students and alumni of elite universities, or at least wannabes. It always bothered me from my time as an undergraduate at one such that the subtext of the whole elite-school admissions rat race was to pound into the winners, those who got letters of admission, that they'd been selected via an intensely meritocratic, years-long process. We'll drop the issue that only a fairly small percentage of each entering class is actually selected based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, at least for now.

We're still left with the implcation that elite-school students are special, and they're better. Those students are going to want to believe this -- it feeds their natural adolescent narcissism. But one thing I began to notice after catching up with schoolmates over the years is that none of them outgrew this narcissism as they might have outgrown teen awkwardness or acne. When I ran into them as adults, they were uniformly superior, and not just superior, but superior to certain people, especially Republicans.

To display their superiority, they endorse what have beren called luxury beliefs:

In his excellent memoir, Troubled, the psychologist Rob Henderson recounts the alienating experiences he had as a mature student from a poor background at Yale University. One classmate told him that it was hopelessly outmoded for people who want to raise kids to prefer monogamy. Henderson, who spent much of his early childhood in the foster system, was taken aback. How, he wondered, thinking back to the chaos and heartbreak of his own childhood, could this girl fail to understand how important a stable family structure is to human flourishing? He pressed the classmate, who had grown up in an intact family, on her own life plans. Personally, she responded, she did plan to enter a monogamous marriage.

Henderson soon encountered political ideas that touched on different areas of social life but were, he felt, similarly performative. Students who hail from extremely safe neighborhoods argued that we should abolish the police. Classmates who loved to talk about how much they hate capitalism went on to stellar careers with J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs.

. . . Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider stratum of society, the affluent and highly educated have resorted to different status symbols to signal their superior standing. This is why luxury beliefs—jargon-heavy political slogans calling for positions that are widely unpopular among the general population—have substituted for luxury goods.

What I found as an elite-school undergraduate was that almost every course syllabus, almost all the readings, were premised on certain core assumptions: Darwinian theory was scientific truth, to the extent that "evolve" in any context meant "change in a desirable direction". Research on human motivations by figures ranging from Freud to B F Skinner disproved the validity of any religion-based assertions about sin or virtue. The idea of the God of the Old and New Testaments was an evolutionary artifact that to some extent has, but certainly will, atrophy as an element of human nature.

Social or sexual views that might derive from that set of assumptions may be argued within a fairly narrow range, but they definitely implied that notions of traditional sexual morality were at best unevolved. Certainly this element of luxury beliefs appealed most directly to narcissistic adolescents -- not only are you just hot to trot, but you're a crusader at the forefront of human progress! And here we get to the crux of the problem with Charlie Kirk:

Get married and have children. It's not only good and godly and will bring you joy and legacy, but it's a simple act of defiance against the oligarchs and the tyrants who would rather you die bitter, alone, and with nothing but robots by your side as you enter eternity. https://t.co/hLsfQ79xGO

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 2, 2024

He was going onto college campuses and arguing persuasively against luxury beliefs. This may not have been the assassin Tyler Robinson's specific motive -- the most recent reports suggest he held inchoate "antifascist" beliefs -- but I think it's a big reason the elites are celebrating his assassination.

The problem is that although Kirk represented retrograde Republican-style beliefs, his assassination comes at a time when those beliefs are resurgent, and in fact at a time when the elite universities that inculcate those beliefs are on the defensive. The received luxury beliefs on sexual morality that lie at the basis of the whole elite-university curriculum -- I suspect sophomores are still assigned Coming of Age in Samoa --implies that any loosening of traditional sexual paradigms is a step in the direction of progress. Charie Kirk stood against progress, and indeed human evolution itself.

These and similar luxury beliefs are doomed, and deep down, the people celebrating Kirk's assassination know this.