Put your phone down. You don't need social media tonight.
You might see the video of the shooting, and you don't need that, and you will be invited into a world of hate and retribution, and you don't need that either.
Already the hate peddlers and the Russian bots are spinning AI fantasies of retaliation and blame, the doers of evil who relentlessly try to divide us and drive us into the dark are working at a frantic pace.
And we don't need that.
We need to stop and think, and remember.
Remember that we are brothers and sisters, fellow children of God -- and neighbors and friends, fellow citizens of the Republic. We need to remember that our politics should be driven by love of country, not hatred of opponent, that our goal is to build our nation, not destroy it.
We will be tempted to point fingers of blame and use this demonstration of political hatred as fuel for more political hatred. We will remember the two attempts on Trump and the two Christian schools and we will marry those with what this Democrat said and what that Democrat said and the rhetoric of extremism and invective will seem causal, like the spark on the gasoline, and we will raise our fist in rage.
And we will wade into the waters that took Charlie Kirk's life.
And in a nation under God, we can't do that. We can't do that anymore. We've got to reach back to our values and hold tight to them. We've got to love our neighbors as ourselves, and treat people the way we want to be treated, and forgive until 70 times seven.
For the sake of our souls, our sanity and our country.
That doesn't mean that we put our candle under a bushel, or that we shrink from the declaration of truth. Americans' political passion has been the fuel of our democracy. Strong views deeply held, pulling the country first this way and then that, have combined to drive us forward, to establish and expand our freedom and equality.
Democrats should be Democrats and Republicans should be Republicans, but we must all be Americans first, we must all be brothers and sisters first. And we must hold more firmly to our shared humanity than we do to our divided politics.
We cannot do the right thing the wrong way, and hating other Americans is the wrong way, no matter how noble or crucial we may believe our cause is.
All of us need to tone it down, to attack ideas instead of people, to recognize and rejoice in the subtle difference between disagreement and division, and to commit to choose the one over the other.
All of us need to commit to choose the good over the evil.
Now is the time, while this young father is being mourned, to personally and collectively resolve to do better and be better and to go forward with passion-tempering civility, and to never lose sight of the humanity which is the most fundamental thing we share.
It's not about what this one or that one said yesterday or two years ago, it's not about this nickname or that slur, one philosophy or the other, it's not about affixing blame or playing gotcha. It's not about who we were yesterday, it's about who we will be tomorrow, and what we will learn from this assassination and what it teaches us about what lurks beneath the surface.
A 31-year-old married father of two little girls sat down before a crowd to answer questions, an American exercising freedom of conscience and speech, and by dinner time millions of us had seen him sustain a gunshot wound from which survival was impossible.
They shot him, just like they shot the archduke.
Not the Democrats, but the demons of hell who delight in our sorrow and plot our downfall. The ones we have listened to for too long.
Stay off your phone tonight, don't look at social media. Don't take the bait.
And don't look at the other side the same way again. They are not your enemies, they are your brothers and sisters.
And if this shared sorrow, this horrific assassination, does not remind us of that, then nothing will.