Kirk was a fixture on college campuses throughout the United States, promoting debate and dialogue across the ideological spectrum, and he was killed doing the very thing he committed much of his life to—defending the sacrosanct right to free speech. His murder, however, is not an aberration, but the latest incident of political violence in the United States, which has found itself in the throes of political polarization, amplified by sensationalism across political lines. In an ecosystem of dehumanized politics, political leaders, and by extension their supporters, become abstracted to the point of being mere symbols. … The prevalence, and near justification, of political violence reveals a striking gap between the common values we purport to uphold and our willingness to depart from them to reach political ends. We need to rediscover a human politics, one that respects the innate dignity of the human.