In an era when politics has increasingly become a blood sport, Wednesday’s assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk before thousands of people on the campus of Utah Valley University, was nonetheless a shocking and profane act of violence.
Kirk, like all victims of gun violence, was someone’s family member — a husband, a father, a son. He was a professed Christian and a provocateur who took his message to places that were often hostile; he welcomed a back-and-forth with those who disagreed with his views. He was a media savant who leveraged his views into the algorithms of young people, particularly men, who have been historically reluctant to engage in politics. Many people who couldn’t have picked Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens out of a police lineup knew Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, the political organization he co-founded to activate young conservatives, played a key role in President Donald Trump’s reemergence from the shadows of Jan. 6 and his return to the presidency four years later.
There is no getting around other elements of his character. Kirk was eager to weaponize language against some of the most marginalized and vulnerable among us. That fact alone made his calls for respectful debate and elevating “discussion above personal insults” ring hollow.
There was no mistaking how Kirk viewed Democrats, and liberals and progressives more generally: They “stand for everything God hates,” he said last year during a campaign appearance with Trump in Georgia. The transgender community, he proclaimed, were “a throbbing middle finger to God” and an “abomination.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and “a bad man,” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, public education and federally assisted programs, was a mistake. With Turning Point USA, Kirk published a “Professor Watchlist” and encouraged college students to add instructors who held leftist viewpoints. He recently posted on X: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
In no small part, Kirk helped fashion the world in which we now find ourselves: Divided, angry, mistrustful of our neighbors and their motives, and at the very least, increasingly violent in rhetoric. Kirk did this literally until the end of his life; video footage from the event shows him disparaging the trans community in the seconds before he was shot.
And yet: His brutal murder is a national tragedy that only the most inhumane among us would deny. Kirk’s wife and two young children will forever be shattered by his death, and the 3,000 witnesses — survivors themselves — who had gathered to hear him speak stand to be traumatized by what they saw. Kirk’s killing puts all of us, left and right, Democrat and Republican, at risk. As a colleague said, “The consequences are likely to be dire for all of us.”
Before Kirk was even pronounced dead — before a person of interest, and then another, was taken into custody and then released, before a possible motive could be found — right-wing influencers and followers were calling for retribution by using the very pronoun they profess to hate. “They,” of course, in this context, was taken to mean Kirk’s murderer, whoever that person is and wherever they may be. It also meant the social forces or “movements” that many on the right wish to hold responsible: Democrats, liberals, progressives, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people and many others — literally anyone who is not a fully-paid passenger aboard the MAGA train on which Kirk was one of the most skilled and useful engineers.
After his death was confirmed by Trump in a Truth Social post, Laura Loomer, one of the president’s closest advisers, was unequivocal. “They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk while he was sitting next to a table of hats that said 47,” she posted on X. “The Left are terrorists.” Before Kirk’s death was even announced, she attacked the left as “a national security threat” and called on Trump “to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later wrote, “Only President Trump can take these people down.”
Trump was apparently listening. In his speech on Wednesday night from the Oval Office, he called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom,” and parroted Loomer’s rhetoric. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” he said, “including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
In the hours after the president spoke, Loomer designated Sept. 10 “a Turning Point in the USA. Now, Action.”
She could, unfortunately, be correct.
We have reached a dark and dangerous moment in which the worst is imaginable in the near future, and not just because of Kirk’s assassination. Within minutes of the event, gruesome, high-resolution videos of the shooting were circulated and pushed on social media platforms — especially X, which under the ownership of tech billionaire and former Trump administration official Elon Musk, has famously resisted censorship — and found millions of viewers, many of whom weren’t seeking those images and had no wish to see them. According to the New York Times, some social media companies “tried with mixed results to remove the content.” Although graphic footage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 was known to exist, studied by investigators and had frames that were published as still photos in LIFE magazine, it took 12 years for even a poor copy of the Zapruder film to be televised. On Wednesday we all became immediately traumatized witnesses to Kirk’s murder, and that alone has likely helped galvanize the vows of vengeance coming from the right.
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All sorts of conspiracy theories are already circulating on the left as well as on the right, made all the more easier by lax regulations from social media platforms that once attempted to monitor, flag and restrict disinformation. Some posters have suggested Kirk’s murder was an “inside job” planned to divert attention from recent news more closely connecting Trump to the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In the most elaborate theories, a man on the ground in Utah waved a white baseball cap to signal the shooter. Similar stories made the rounds after the attempt on Trump’s life last year in Butler, Pa.
It should of course be noted that rampant online misinformation has also endangered the lives of prominent Democrats. In December 2016, a North Carolina man opened fire in a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor where he suspected a child sex ring connected to Hillary Clinton was operating from its nonexistent basement. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was the object of a kidnapping and murder plot by a far-right militia group in 2020. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was seriously injured by a deranged man in their San Francisco home in October 2022, an event that then became the subject of salacious rumors.
Now we face the fear of copycat incidents against Democratic politicians and commentators. Social media is full of posts calling for attacks on the media, both mainstream and the left. On Thursday, multiple historically Black colleges and universities went under lockdown after receiving threats. All of this will make our national discourse shrink even further.
But it gets worse. The Trump administration’s recent moves against Democratic-led cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles, have shown the president to be keen to use the National Guard and even the standing military for domestic law enforcement, even though doing so likely violates the Posse Comitatus Act. How quickly could such militarized occupations turn violent? On the left, the fear has long been that Trump has been waiting for an inciting incident to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. In the face of a passive Republican Congress and a pliant Supreme Court, such a turn of events could prove disastrous.
Shock has a curious effect on people, even those who experience it from afar. It scrambles our thoughts and reactions, and causes us to make strange connections. In the hours after Kirk’s murder, I kept recalling a scene from “Matewan,” the 1987 film by John Sayles that depicts the 1920 massacre of West Virginia coal miners who were fighting for workers’ rights and to unionize.
On a grey, foggy morning, as a group of mourners have gathered on an Appalachian mountaintop, a woman played by folksinger Hazel Dickens begins to sing. Her voice is weary and brittle. She’s resigned to what she knows lies ahead — and still she sings a prayer of rescue and salvation:
Deliver us from the gathering storm
Unworthy though we are
Leave us living safe and warm
And sheltered in your arms
Like Dickens’ character on that mountaintop, we can all sense the tribulation to come. Something has broken in our country, in our national character. Charlie Kirk’s murder has made it clear, even to the most optimistic among us, that what is broken is beyond repair, at least for now.
And still we hope. We sing a prayer, against the odds, against the tide, for deliverance from the evil within.
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