When You "Feel" Wrongly

My Newsweek article on Charlie Kirk and morality vs emotivism

Good morning, friends. Two weeks ago, after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, Americans (the world, really) began a conversation about political violence. I was really disturbed by what happened; in fact, I was surprised by how emotional I was about it.

That led me to discussions on Facebook and X with friends and family about Kirk’s murder, and how people were publicly responding to it. I felt compelled to write up something about Morality vs Emotivism, inspired by some Stoic insights on the elusive nature of feelings.

We don’t always feel what we want to feel, or what we think we should feel.

That’s okay. What matters is something much simpler: what we believe and how we choose to live. I published my thoughts on this in Newsweek, and here on Geeky Stoics, I will share the unedited 1,600 words. My take in Newsweek was only 900, so this goes a bit more in-depth.

Even as I share this, I have mixed feelings about the premise. I don’t want to encourage callousness, but what I find distasteful in the social media era is the public pressure that exists to perform emotion and feeling when you aren’t sure what you feel.

I’m coming up on a year since my Dad’s sudden death, and every day I want to feel worse than I do. I am functional and getting things done, and I feel deeply guilty. I’m told this is normal.

So, I’ll stand aside and share this with you. I hope it sparks some reflection and healthy conversation in your circles.

And again, if you prefer to read the short version in Newsweek, that’s here.

It’s Okay Not To “Feel” Anything About Charlie Kirk. America Needs More Than That.

I didn’t much care for Charlie Kirk. In the nexus of conservative commentators and campus free speech warriors, Kirk was never at the top of my list for daily podcasts or YouTube scrolling. I’ve always enjoyed the motormouthed takedowns of Ben Shapiro, the soothing theological logic of Ross Douthat, and the half-baked, tin-foil-hat theories of Tucker Carlson. If there was time in a day for Glenn Beck, Brett Cooper, or the libertarian Reason Roundtable, I’d spread the love, but Kirk wasn’t my thing, for no particular reason.

After graduating from UNC-Greensboro in 2014 and starting work as a grassroots organizer for a conservative nonprofit, Turning Point USA was our competition on campus for young people interested in free speech, lower taxes, and entitlement reform. Kirk’s TPUSA outperformed us on every campus I worked. Their message was clearer: Socialism Sucks. That took TPUSA and Kirk to the side of now President Trump and helped bring a shift in the youth vote toward Republicans. Kirk’s presence was always felt.

When news broke on X on September 10, 2025, of Kirk being shot in the throat on the campus of Utah Valley University, I made the mistake of watching the most up-close video circulating online. Verification that this actually happened was important to me.

What I didn’t expect, as someone who knows plenty about Kirk but felt entirely neutral about his “Prove Me Wrong” booth schtick and the viral videos making a spectacle of the most foolish students, was that I’d break down into tears at my desk. The feeling was so overwhelming I had to go outside for air and process what had happened.

Feelings are not voluntary; they visit upon you like uninvited house guests wearing masks, often not revealing their true nature until you sit with and interrogate them.

For all of our friends in the physical world, and the acquaintances we collect on Facebook and Instagram, moments of national and even global horror present a pressure to react. No one person enforces that we all post our analysis of mass shootings, floods, police brutality, or political assassinations, but social media’s hive mind has created a culture of personal “press releases” being the norm.

“I condemn this,” announces your 20-something neighborhood barista.

“Political violence is unacceptable in a country built on open debate and free speech,” posts your retired neighbor.

There is a reason we joke about how a celebrity’s “silence is deafening”. When Taylor Swift fails to post enough online about the nightmare happening in Israel-Gaza, or says nothing about alt-right memes claiming her as an “Aryan Goddess”, it’s taken as an endorsement.

So most of us post. And those who choose not to post know the discomfort of it, because people do wonder about their friends who say nothing when the country is having a “discussion” about something horrible or divisive. The relatively new cultural imperative of “empathy” demands public demonstration, and like Holy Communion at Catholic Mass, it can be denied to proud public dissenters against doctrine.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t a fan of empathy as a virtue. To him, it was “new age” and inherently disingenuous to pretend publicly that you always feel what other people are feeling. He was right. We don’t. It’s a worthy aim, but inevitably selective, as Bluesky has illustrated for the world to see after Kirk’s murder.

This weekend, YouGov’s David Montgomery reconfirmed what polling has shown for some time, which is that liberals are four times more likely to defend expressions of joy over the deaths of political opponents. “16% of liberals say this is usually or always acceptable” versus only 4% of conservatives. Small numbers overall, but enough to cast a dark shadow on social media discourse, which is then presented to the world as mainstream.

There’s been quite a bit of online sparring about whether or not empathy is a social ill since conservative talker Allie Beth Stuckey’s book titled “Toxic Empathy” and subsequent responses from famed progressive creators like Lindsey Ellis.

Kirk was also right about empathy doing “real damage” in the public square. Empathy links feeling with virtue, but our feelings don’t reliably tell us what is right or wrong.

So many years of overexposure to injustice, snuff content, tragedy, and videoed catastrophe have led us all to build emotional levees to protect ourselves from the world’s pain. It’s not quite the same as being numb, and it’s not equivalent to how we divert our attention to more pressing personal matters.

Emotional bandwidth is real, and it’s the hyper-focus on empathy that has, in part, convinced millions of Americans that if they don’t feel anything substantial after learning of a controversial political commentator’s murder, they reinterpret it as a sign that nothing immoral has occurred.

Emotivism is substituting for moral judgment.

Morteza Dehghani, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, said about USC’s study on conservatives and liberals’ physical reactions to moral outrage that, “moral violation scenarios require a high level of cognitive and emotional processing, as well as an evaluation of standards of right and wrong.”

“Standards” is an important word choice here. Most interestingly, USC’s research showed that liberals’ physical cues for moral injury manifested in the crotch area, chest, and a bit in the head. Conservatives expressed feelings of violation almost exclusively in their heads.

Our body, mind, and spirit speak to one another.

Christian apologist C.S. Lewis of Narnia fame asserted in The Abolition of Man that modernity was churning out “men without chests” to describe a mediating force between the reason of the head and the appetite or emotions of the gut. It lent to a larger argument that Lewis advanced over the course of his career, that the rising tide of secularism was not just competing with Christian thought in public spaces, but seeking to build a new morality from the bottom up.

What we end up with is what you see in America on TV and social media: equivocation about murder and resentment that our neighbors had nothing to say about whatever bad thing happened a week before.

“We remove the organ,” C.S. Lewis said of Objective Morality, “and demand the function.” This is a country that swept the Ten Commandments out of public school classrooms in 1980 for being “religious” rather than something more foundational to our culture. It makes you wonder if the Code of Hammurabi, forbidding perjury and female infidelity, could be posted in 6th-grade classrooms since it’s simply a manmade “legal code” and not of God.

Our emotions aren’t enough to signal that something is wrong. Emotions lie just as often as they point to truth. A mediating force is needed and benefits everyone, and they may well be “standards” that were handed to us like an onboarding packet at a new job.

As citizens of a large and very diverse country, our capacity for reason shores up what emotion doesn’t always provide on the spot. Everyone has felt violated or immeasurably blessed at some point in their life and been left wondering, “Why do I feel nothing?”

Charlie Kirk’s assassination isn’t wrong because you knew him, or identified with his ideas, or you saw it happen—it’s wrong because at some point you decided it’s wrong.

Any society that recognizes an objective moral standard inculcates its youth with an understanding of morality through institutions geared toward knitting a people together. You can’t have a country if 50 percent or more of the population considers murder by sniper rifle to be just deserts for rejecting Juneteenth as an American holiday.

Kirk’s most virulent haters, who shrug off his brutal slaying by citing his supposed sins, are giving away their game. They know murder is wrong, they simply have chosen a new morality where moral hazard is contingent on the spiritual fitness of the dead.

I wept for Charlie Kirk for reasons I don’t fully understand. Perhaps it’s because of how strongly I’ve always admired his courage in facing down the campus progressives I was too scared to debate in my 20s. Maybe it’s my intuition that his murder could mark the end of conservative intellectual resistance on campuses. Ben Shapiro certainly shows no signs of backing down.

It was not my knotted stomach that informed me that something wrong had happened to Charlie Kirk in Utah. It wasn’t the tears. It was a decision I’d made earlier in my life that violence against another human being, apart from physical self-defense, is morally wrong. It’s not just a social compact or evolutionary instinct where my violence could beget violence against me; therefore, I refrain from it.

It’s what was taught to me in a church, in a school, and in the home—that murder is wrong, and I chose to keep that.

You can choose to live within the guardrails imposed by people who came before you, or by God. You can choose to color within the lines because you recognize, as Ben Shapiro said to Bill Maher this weekend on the worthiness of Biblical morality, “Why do you and I agree on morality, like 87.5 percent? I’m a religious Jew, and you’re an atheist. Why do we agree on those things? Because we grew up a few miles from each other in a Western society that has several thousand years of Biblical history behind it. So you think that you hit that triple and formed your own morality, but the reality is that you were born morally on third base.”