Interesting idea. I wouldn’t agree that it’s a class thing per se, but Ezra Klein directly called Charlie Kirk one of “us,” in a list that included Ben Shapiro, and said he wanted Kirk to be safe for his project for the sake of his (Klein’s) own project.
For the record I found Charlie Kirk‘s politics appalling (no surprise) and even dangerous on basically every level. But I agree with Ezra Klein about how he conducted them: in the open, transparently, with words. In a healthy Republic you don’t die for that.
in any case there’s no getting around the fact that he’s a martyr now and the convergent narrative on the right is that they tried to reason with the rest of America, and his murder is just another sign that the time for civil disagreement is coming to an end.
And if I’m being honest it’s hard to disagree, which is why this feels like a pretty big deal. Going back to my previous point- it doesn’t really matter if the assassin was a “ radical leftist” who wanted to shut up Charlie Kirk, or if it was a right winger who wanted him to be a martyr, or a rogue element who wanted to accelerate chaos as a pretext for authoritarian crackdown, or even just a lone nut. The direction of travel is the same.