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You are here: Home / Featured / TRUMP ALLY CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATED ON CAMPUS: SO WHAT’S NEXT?

TRUMP ALLY CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATED ON CAMPUS: SO WHAT’S NEXT?

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Charlie Kirk, a conservative youth activist and close ally of President Donald Trump who helped propel Trump into office, has died after being shot in the neck during a rally at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

Expressions of outrage, sadness, and grief at yet another American in political life being murdered poured in — but so did the rumblings of partisan and ideological finger pointingon the right. At this writing, no suspect is in custody. Kirk died instantly after being shot from far range. A gruesome video showing him speaking then shot in the neck with blood gushing out of his neck has appeared online. A link to it appears on The Drudge Report front pagE.

The New York Times:

Charlie Kirk, the charismatic founder of the nation’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist group, was fatally shot on Wednesday while speaking at Utah Valley University in what the state’s governor described as a “political assassination.”

Officials had taken two people into custody by late Wednesday as part of their investigation, but both were released without being charged in relation to the shooting. It was unclear if anyone else was in law enforcement custody.

Charlie Kirk’s event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday was the first stop of a fall semester tour organized through Turning Point USA, the right-wing political organization he led.

For “The American Comeback Tour,” which began this year, Mr. Kirk had traveled to college campuses across the country to discuss a range of political topics, including immigration, abortion and transgender issues.

Over the past decade, Charlie Kirk became one of the most influential young leaders in right-wing American politics.

Mr. Kirk, 31, who was fatally shot on Wednesday while speaking at Utah Valley University, had been an energetic member of President Trump’s inner circle, known for his abilities as a speaker, his fund-raising and his loyalty to the president.

The Nation:

Yet, as shocking as Kirk’s killing was, the fact that there was this kind of assassination is sadly not that unexpected. After all, America is awash in violence, political or otherwise, every day of the year.

Responding to the initial reports of the shooting, Representative Jaime Raskin wrote: “Condemning another absolutely disgraceful act of gun violence.” The word “another” captures the disturbing truth of the news: Gun violence, whether in the form of school shootings or political violence, is out of control in the United States. This violence is a product of a political system that refuses to implement gun control even as the social fabric frays.

We have known this for a long time. Writing in The New York Times in June, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape argued that “since the beginning of President Trump’s second term in January, acts of political violence in the United States have been occurring at an alarming rate.”

Pape cited the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and the attempted assassination of one of her colleagues; the arson at the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; and the killing of Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC. He also noted that this surge in violence, which dates back to the polarization that started with Trump’s candidacy in 2016, also manifested itself in the January 6 insurrection, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and the assassination attempts against Trump, among many other cases.

Pape painted a dismal picture of society where political violence is becoming much more common and socially accepted:

Today’s political violence is occurring across the political spectrum—and there is a corresponding rise in public support for it on both the right and the left. Since 2021, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which I direct, has conducted national surveys on a quarterly basis on support for political violence among Americans. These surveys are telling because, as other research has shown, the more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.

Our May survey was the most worrisome yet. About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump’s agenda.

Prospect:

But what I say in this moment, or what any of those leaders say, doesn’t really matter when there’s an open struggle, in these moments of confusion, to redefine reality.

“The Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization,” said Sean Davis, a conservative activist who was merely echoing the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just a couple of weeks ago. “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination,” said writer Tim Urban. “The Left is the party of murder,” said incipient trillionaire Elon Musk on his personal microblogging site, X.

This effort to amp up your political side in times of extreme emotion, to not just condemn the individual act but to slander all your political opposition at once, is the kind of thing you see in societies in open civil warfare. The only time we’ve seen it in America was in the prelude to open civil warfare. The consensus about the pointlessness of political violence, if you scratch the surface, almost surely still exists. But an infinite scroll that pounds ideas into people’s heads, and dares them to take action, perverts that consensus.

America has often been on the brink of deciding that it is intolerable to live among one another. There have been secession threats for as long as there has been a country. In recent years, it has been dealt with through a kind of whispered segregation, where we ideologically sort ourselves among ideological lines. But we cannot divorce ourselves entirely. We come together in the noisy black hole of our social media feeds, where we read the heaviest users tell lies about each other and perform what can only be described as perpetual incitement. And that definitely feels like what happens right before societies break, and turn on each other.

I had the sad occasion to discuss political violence a year ago, when our current president was also shot at, turning his head at the most opportune moment to survive the attack. What I said then remains true: This is not a singularly violent moment in our history, we are a deeply violent country, and no political party or ideology holds an absolute monopoly on the manifestation of that violence. Eleven of the last 12 presidents have seen at least some sort of plot on their lives. We have been here before and in greater numbers, as the names Kennedy and King will surely reveal. It’s part of the background noise of living in this country.

Wired:

Minutes after right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at an event in Utah on Wednesday, far-right influencers and extremist communities lit up social media with calls for violence against the left.

Kirk, the cofounder of conservative youth organizing group Turning Point USA, was shot and killed while taking questions at a TPUSA event held at Utah Valley University. Law enforcement officials said late afternoon Wednesday that a “person of interest” was in custody, but that individual was later released. No motive has yet been reported by authorities.

Despite this, many far-right influencers and Republican officials immediately blamed the left for carrying out the shooting. In some extremist groups, members called for civil war and violent retribution. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” said Alex Jones, the influencer and school shooting conspiracy theorist, during a livestream on his Infowars channel.

“For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” said President Donald Trump in a taped address posted to his Truth Social account. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in the country today.”

Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, who had his sentence for seditious conspiracy with regards to the January 6 Capitol riot commuted by Trump earlier this year, announced on Infowars that it was time to restart his militia group in order to provide public protection for figures like Kirk.

“I’m going to be rebuilding the Oath Keepers, and we will be doing protection again,” said Rhodes. “If my security team had been at that event, if they had been up there on the high point, looking for potential threats, they would have saved Charlie Kirk from being shot.”

Rhodes then called on Trump to “do what’s right, what’s necessary” and “invoke the Insurrection Act” in the wake of the shooting. “You should declare the left in this country is in obvious open rebellion against the law of the United States, they’re committing insurrection, they’re aiding and abetting an invasion, and they’re blocking the execution of federal law,” Rhodes said.

More mainstream right-wing commentators and lawmakers have also joined in the rush to blame the left and call for action.

Ed Martin, the US pardon attorney and former acting US attorney for DC, wrote on X: “For it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord,” citing Romans 12:19.

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