Within hours of Charlie Kirk being shot dead at a college event in Utah, he’d been turned into a far-right martyr in the US’s raging culture war. Many prominent rightwing voices and influencers quickly characterized his murder, in no uncertain terms, as an act of war from the left – and have vowed to respond in kind.
“We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show War Room. “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
Even as the suspect – and any information about their motivations or political leanings – remained at large and unknown, incendiary rhetoric from major political commentators spread rapidly online, blaming leftist violence for Kirk’s death. Many called for swift retribution in the form of an aggressive crackdown against their political enemies.
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X.
“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. What are we gonna do about it?” Fox News host Jesse Watters said on air Wednesday night. “Everybody’s accountable… the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now. This is a turning point and we know which direction we’re going.”
“We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and podcaster Matt Walsh on X. “This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”
While all three living former presidents released statements addressing Kirk’s death, condemning political violence while calling for calm, introspection and civility, Donald Trump put out a video statement Wednesday night saying that rhetoric from “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism we are seeing in our country today”.
Trump vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence”. He listed a number of other violent incidents, including his own attempted assassination, as well as attacks on Ice agents and the shooting of Steve Scalise, the US House majority whip, at a congressional baseball game in 2017. (Trump did not mention the two Democratic lawmakers from Minnesota who were murdered along with their spouses in June).
Kirk, 31, shaped gen Z conservatism on college campuses through his organization Turning Point USA, leveraging rhetoric about “liberal rot” in education and “cultural marxism” to galvanize a young generation of Trump supporters.
Through his twenties, Kirk became one of the most influential voices in the Maga movement, and enjoyed close proximity to Trump and his allies. He was also known for voicing bigoted and controversial views, calling for a total ban on transgender healthcare, describing immigration from Muslim countries as “civilizational suicide”, and peddling conspiracy theories about the results of the 2020 election. He was on stage at an event at the Utah Valley University in Orem, opining about recent acts of violence, including the shooting at a Minnesota Christian school by a person who identified as transgender, when he was sniped from about 130 meters away.
The shooting represents a disturbing escalation in the growing crisis of political violence in the US.
Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, fears that the reaction from the right will lead to further acts of violence.
“The singular message emerging from across the right is one of vengeance and retribution,” said Lewis.
“The rhetoric being used by elected officials and mainstream figures is indistinguishable from the vitriolic statements by far right extremists, which only further increases the likelihood of retaliatory vigilante violence.”
Many prominent voices on the right claimed that media comparisons between the Trump administration’s recent actions and those of authoritarian or fascist governments have functioned as intentional pretext for violence.
Following Kirk’s shooting, Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist, a conservative online magazine, described these comparisons as “assassination prep rhetoric”.
“We have a very serious problem with the media and other prominent Democrat activists prepping the ground for open season on and assassination of conservatives,” she wrote on X.
“You called us Hitler. You called us Nazis. You called us Racists,” posted Katie Miller, a conservative political advisor and wife of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “You have blood on your hands.”
Some have called for the Trump administration to take aggressive action against those perceived to be complicit. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos,” wrote Christopher Rufo.
“The best way President Trump can reinforce Charlie’s legacy is by cracking down on the left with the full force of the government,” wrote Laura Loomer, a far-right political activist. “Every single left wing group that funds violent protests needs to be shut down and prosecuted.”
White supremacist Matt Forney, in a post that has been viewed over one million times, compared Kirk’s death to the Reichstag fire of 1933 (the arson attack on the German parliament building by a Dutch communist, which Hitler used to justify his aggressive crackdown against communists). “It is time for a complete crackdown on the left,” said Forney. “Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO… they caused this.”
Overnight, a blacklist website was set up to name and shame people who were perceived as “celebrating” Kirk’s death on social media. The website is called “Charlie’s Murderers”.
Nick Freitas, the Republican Virginia state delegate and commentator, suggested that Kirk’s death marked a major turning point for the future of the US.
“I don’t think they realize it yet, but murdering Charlie is going to be remembered as the day where we finally woke up to what this fight really is,” Freitas wrote. “It’s not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another. One side will win, and one side will lose.” His statement was shared nearly 35,000 times on X, and was shared across other social media sites, including by Proud Boy Telegram channels.