Rainn Wilson, the actor best known for playing Dwight Schrute on The Office, responded to the death of 31-year-old right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk with a heartfelt Instagram post encouraging people to “love across differences.”
In the video, posted on Saturday, Wilson said, “I wanted to address the recent assassination-slash-murder of Charlie Kirk. I didn’t always agree with him, but this whole idea of ‘I’m going to kill someone that I disagree with’ is disgusting and dangerous, and our hearts go out to him, his soul, his wife, his kids and all of his family and supporters.”
He continued, ”He was a courageous man, actually. He was unafraid to speak his truth, and would go often into hostile environments in order to do that.”
Wilson continued with a plea for people to build bridges, telling his followers, “A lot of people have been saying, ‘Hey, we need to bring the temperature down,’ and certainly that’s true in the short term. But we need to go deeper than that. We need to build bridges of love and unity, especially between those we disagree with, as Arthur Brooks says, We need to learn how to disagree better, and still know that we all love our country and we all want to build a better tomorrow. We just have very different ideas of how to do that.”
Wilson, who hosts the Soul Boom podcast that focuses on spirituality, went on to suggest that there are spiritual tools people can use to create community and come together with people “that are very, very different than us.”
He ended his video with a question for his audience, asking them, “How can we dig deeper to find the compassion necessary for a true spiritual revolution?”
Many comments were not receptive, arguing that hate speech, which is what many consider Kirk to have extensively engaged in, was not simply a difference of opinion.
“There is a difference between someone disagreeing with you and someone believing you don’t have the right to exist or have rights‚” wrote one commenter, while others accused Wilson of minimizing the negative impact of Kirk’s words and beliefs.
Wilson’s former Office co-star, Kate Flannery, who played Meredith Palmer, was one of a handful of supportive comments, with Flannery writing, “Everyone has the right to express themselves and be safe and stay alive. Everyone.”
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