When the governor of Utah said yesterday that the killing of Charlie Kirk would probably be a watershed in American history, my eyes rolled. But I have been thinking about it, and maybe they rolled too soon.

First, while we don’t know a lot about Tyler Robinson yet, we do know some things: he is not an illegal alien, not an immigrant, not Black or brown or Asian or Jewish or any other type of American minority, not gay, not trans, not loaded down by a criminal history, not poor, not from a broken family.  We know he was white, straight, a Mormon, and from Utah. And, oh yes, he was not a Democrat.

Many of these same characteristics can be found in those who attacked the Democratic politicians in Michigan, those who attacked President Trump, and others.

If larger numbers of people begin to see that our dangers from those who are not White and straight is no greater than those who are, this could indeed be a watershed moment. So the question is: how do we get the word out in an impactful way?

Next, people on all sides of the political spectrum seem to believe that what I will call “hate language” contributed to an atmosphere that made this event possible. Among the people raising this concern, of course, are individuals who regularly expouse hate speech. Of course, they would disagree with me (or at least claim to disagree with me).

Two of these people are Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk himself. Their outrageous comments are readily available online.

But defining hate speech is very complicated. Finding the boundary between fact and opinion is hard enough. And can the transmission of facts even constitute hate speech?

And what about opinion?”I hate Nazis!” That is an opinion. It’s an expression of hate. Is it hate speech?

Can speech, which a speaker does not believe to be hate speech, in fact be hate speech? And where does the right of free speech run into roadblocks trying to navigate around any of this?

Take Kirk’s statement about Martin Luther King, Jr. Kirk thought King an “awful person”, and said that the country should never have enacted the Civil Rights Law of 1964. Do either of these statements rise to the level of hate speech? What about his statements naming certain female and Black women, whom he said got their jobs unfairly. Is that hate speech?

Or is “hate speech” the wrong standard? Some people say that we just need “civil dialogue”. And those people are forced to continue with “and I know it when I hear it.”

Take calling Democrats “Marxists, Communists and radical leftists”, for example. It is not fact. It is so unfactual that it is hardly legitimate opinion. It is not civil dialogue. But it is free speech.

People like Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump are not going to stop using these terms, are they? So who will stop? Those who hardly usecl these terms at all.

Without rules or standards, and with a Constitution that protects free speech, we have few tools at our disposal. Like with so much else, leadership has to start at the top, and our leadership is comprised of bottom feeders.

Perhaps the media could help. But all the media could do is call out and spread the speech we want to suppress.

Maybe comics, entertainers, other public officials? School teachers? Parents?

How do you civilize speech with Donald Trump in the White House? You can’t. You can only talk about how important it is to do it.

That seems to be all.