The folly of assassinations is that they generate the opposite of what the assassin intended. Aside from the tragedy of taking a human life, there is a pattern of how assassinations work against what the assassins aim to accomplish.
Perhaps this realization could prevent assassins before they pull the trigger, if even a small amount of thought replaces the emotion driving the act. Here are six assassinations, spanning over 2,000 years to the present, that illustrate how the folly of assassinations has unfolded repeatedly.
Rome’s Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar’s assassination might be the most famous in history. He was the leader of the Roman Republic. He held the Roman consulship, which was broadly like being the US President with chief executive powers, subject to limits imposed by the Roman Senate. For four hundred years, the Roman Republic’s Senate chose who would serve as consuls, typically for a one-year term and sharing power with a co-consul.
Caesar broke Roman law when he led his army across the Rubicon River into Rome while serving as a top military governor. This was a treasonous act and sparked a civil war, causing many senators to flee Rome. Caesar defeated his enemies and increased the Senate’s size by appointing his supporters, effectively controlling the Senate.
Initially, Caesar obtained just temporary dictatorial powers from the Senate, a practice previously approved for past consuls. However, the Senate later appointed Caesar as dictator for life, and he referred to himself as the “Father of the Fatherland,” with coins bearing his image. The Republic was dying for all to see.
Caesar was assassinated by senators who aimed to restore the Republic’s authority and maintain their oligarchic control over Rome. Instead, a civil war erupted, destroying many of their businesses and resulting in higher tax payments. Caesar’s great-nephew Gaius Octavius fought his way to power, promising to restore the republic, which he did more as a symbolic gesture than a true source of authority.
As a result, wealth and power became concentrated in a single ruler—the emperor—with the Senate losing power, wealth, and respect.
Russia’s Tsar Alexander II
Two assassins from the terrorist group “People’s Will” killed Tsar Alexander II in March 1881. They hoped to see a populist revolution end the monarchy and replace it with a freely elected Constituent Assembly that guaranteed freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association. Their most radical proposal was to transfer all land to the Russia people and gradually transfer factories into the hands of the workers.
Tsar Alexander II was a liberal monarch who abolished serfdom, granting over 23 million people their freedom and rights as citizens. Although many remained indebted and bound to landowners, his reforms extended to the judicial system, education, press, and local government. Nevertheless, he used his absolute power to modify his reforms whenever it suited him.
Upon his death, his son Tsar Alexander III took the throne and consolidated power as an absolute autocrat, blaming his father’s liberal policies for the assassination. His father was tolerant towards Jews; he eliminated special taxes levied on them and allowed them to be eligible for state employment. Tsar Alexander III reversed these reforms and instead promoted the idea that the Jews orchestrated his father’s assassination.
Of the ten conspirators, only one was Jewish, a 27-year-old pregnant woman who permitted the conspirators to meet at her rental apartment. Nevertheless, Alexander implemented the May Laws of 1882, which fostered open anti-Jewish sentiment and led to dozens of pogroms across the western part of the empire.
The assassination of Alexander II reversed the modest progress made during his reign. It didn’t produce a liberating revolution but instead brought an autocratic ruler who removed any individual rights he claimed threatened the nation’s security.
Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 inadvertently sparked World War I. A Bosnian Serb, a member of a Serbian nationalist secret terrorist group called Union or Death, killed the future ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A growing Serbian movement for independence had emerged, aiming to free those living outside Serbia from Austro-Hungarian control.
The Serbs did gain independence after the war, but only after losing between 16% and 25% of their total population, including civilians and military personnel. And once the new government was formed in 1918. It retained an autocratic monarchy that did not support elections or other democratic functions of a government. They began to enact like the prior oppressive Hungarian laws against the Serbs. This time Slovenes, Croats, and Albanians, suffered under Serbian rule.
Twenty-three years after gaining independence, the Serbian nation was invaded by the Axis powers led by the Nazis, who established the fascist Ustaše regime in the Independent State of Croatia. Widespread atrocities followed, including the genocide of Jews, Roma, and Serbs by the regime and other Axis collaborators.
Over time, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand led to the deaths of over a million Serbians and resulted in an unstable Serbian autocratic monarchy that lasted only one generation. A Soviet Union-controlled local dictatorship then replaced it, with no single ethnic group holding dominance, and the Serbs were again not independent.
President Abraham Lincoln
In 1865, Abraham Lincoln became the first U.S. president to be assassinated. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was an ardent Confederate sympathizer who condemned Lincoln for abolishing slavery. He was involved with the Know Nothings, an anti-immigrant political party, and supported the party’s candidate for Congress in the 1854 elections.
His objective, and that of his co-conspirators, was that by assassinating President Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward simultaneously, they hoped to create chaos in the Union forces and government, which would allow the Confederacy to preserve slavery in the South.
Lincoln’s assassination united the North in solid support, while even some of the South’s most prominent leaders condemned it. General Robert E. Lee publicly condemned the assassination as a crime and a deplorable act.
Lincoln’s assassination ultimately made it easier for Congress to enforce a stricter Reconstruction on the South than what President Johnson had begun to pursue. However, the elections in 1866 resulted in an increase of Radical Republicans to overrule Johnson’s accommodating policies.
The next year, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. It put the Southern states under military rule and forced them to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and equal protection to former slaves.
The assassination worked to not only end slavery but to raise the status of negroes to full citizenship, the very thing that the assassins feared the most.
Martin Luther King Jr.
In April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. As president of the SCLC, he was a nationally recognized leader in the fight to end all forms of segregation.
The Conference was organized into affiliates, most of which were either individual churches or community organizations within Southern Black communities. They conducted nonviolent protests to initially challenge segregated busing but later expanded to all public services.
Ray never stated his goal in assassinating King, but his beliefs and past actions show that he was a strong segregationist who opposed racial integration among Americans. In 1967, Ray volunteered at the Wallace presidential campaign headquarters in California, after expressing admiration for Hitler and white supremacist ideals to his friends.
There was a debate over whether Ray acted alone. The King family believed that Ray was part of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government, the mafia, and the Memphis police. However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which also investigated the assassination of JFK) maintained that Ray’s shot killed King.
Whether Ray acted alone or as part of a conspiracy, the assassination aimed to prevent King from advancing civil rights for America. Ray and others hoped to halt the fight for extending civil rights to Black Americans and possibly other minorities. King’s assassination reignited federal legislation to accomplish that.
President Lyndon B. Johnson urged Congress to quickly pass the Fair Housing Act, also known as Title VIII, as a tribute to King and his lifelong work. The new law made it illegal to discriminate in housing based on race, color, religion, or national origin. However, the legislation was passed with compromises, one of the most critical being that the mandate for HUD to promote integration has often been ignored by HUD and federal programs.
Despite this shortcoming, King’s assassination resulted in significant legal changes and a cultural recognition of civil rights as a core value that our democracy should promote for all citizens. His assassination made it happen with broad public support.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk, the co-founder and CEO of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, was assassinated last month while speaking to 3,000 of the 46,000 students at Utah Valley University. His scheduled appearance had led students to gather 1,000 signatures urging university officials to prevent Kirk from appearing.
This was the first rally of his “The American Comeback Tour,” where he would defend a MAGA agenda and challenge liberals and conservatives in his audience to challenge his beliefs, with the slogan “Prove me Wrong.”
As a youth, Kirk was an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts and joined the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which believes in the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible. Kirk rejected violence, stating that he did not harbor hatred for his opponents. He also did not encourage his followers to riot on the streets, but his strong reactionary statements elicited anger and fear in many.
Kirk described the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a destructive force that liberals transformed into “an anti-white weapon.” He called Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson an unqualified “diversity hire.” He also accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.” He has also said that “men should look for women who are willing to submit,” according to AZ Central.
But what seemed to motivate his suspected assassin, Utah resident Tyler Robinson, was his seeing Kirk messaging as debasing the LGBTQ community and transgender people. Kirk encouraged students and parents to report university professors whom they suspected of embracing what reactionaries call gender ideology.
On his show, he threatened doctors who helped people transition from one gender to another, saying, “These doctors need to be put in prison quickly. We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.”
Statements like this could have triggered fear and anger in Robinson, who had a relationship with a roommate transitioning from male to female. According to the county sheriff’s office, Robinson told his mother he accused Kirk of spreading hate.
If Robinson’s assassination of Kirk was motivated to dissuade right-wing activists and their political allies from limiting the personal rights of gays, transgender individuals, Blacks, women and other minorities, he failed. The results were the same as in all previous political assassinations: the aggrieved were energized.
Kirk’s organization immediately attracted large donations to expand its membership and message. Research into TPUSA’s tax records, according to The Guardian, showed that the mega donors who have funded it in the past are the leading supporters of right-wing causes. They enabled TPUSA to raise $85 million in 2024; this year, after Kirk’s assassination, that number is expected to increase even more with their help.
Mega media influencer Tucker Carlson sent a fundraising appeal to his 1.2 million followers on his network channel so that TPUSA can manage the surge of requests to expand from its current 900 college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters. The group’s spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, told Fox News that they received 54,000 inquiries about launching new chapters.
Bottom Line
Assassinations expand the very social and political forces that an assassin wants to end by killing an individual. It is an absolute folly to believe that an assassination can accomplish the type of changes that an assassin expects. Peaceful change may seem weak, but it takes strength to pursue it, because it is ultimately the most effective approach for achieving a sustainable political outcome.
This story also appears in Nick Licata’s Becoming a Citizen Activist
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