TomDispatch's post
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The Killing of Charlie Kirk
What comes next?
Rajan Menon
Sep 12, 2025
I knew that Charlie Kirk was a young conservative activist with a vast following, but beyond that my knowledge about his life and political activities was limited. In the aftermath of his murder at a public event at Utah Valley University yesterday, I, like many others, have come to know much more about him. Kirk was, in short, a rockstar among conservatives, especially those of the Trumpian variety. He relished debating political opponents here and abroad, sometimes more than one at a time. He founded Turning Point USA when he was merely 18, and in a short time it created 850 chapters on college campuses. His organization played a major role in getting out the vote for Trump and also hosted podcasts with a wide following, including The Charlie Kirk Show and Cultural Apothecary. On a host of issues—LGBTQ+ rights, the purpose of the family, the role of women, gun rights, and the root causes of the nation’s most pressing problems, he held views that were unpalatable to liberals and beloved by Donald Trump’s followers. All of this he had accomplished by age 31.
I don’t share any of Kirk’s views, but that’s beside the point. Regardless of one’s assessment of his political and cultural ideology, one can—and indeed in a democracy must—agree that he had the right to espouse them in public without fear of being gunned down. If we support denying free speech to those whose views we find objectionable, we are condoning a politics that could permit them to deny us the right to express our own political ideas. That way lies the corrosion of democracy and tolerance, both of which are already under grave threat, perhaps more than ever, in a country in which political differences are too often already treated as evidence of enmity, even treachery rather than as matters that can be discussed with civility and tolerance.
Kirk’s killing is an especially horrifying example of political violence and it comes in the wake of many other attacks on public figures, including two attempts on President Trump’s life, one of which, thankfully, was foiled before it could be carried out. Add to these the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a hammer-wielding assailant, the fatal shooting of two Minnesota legislators, the Molotov cocktails hurled at Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a gunman’s targeting of the Centers for Disease Control, and the surge in threats against judges—just a few examples.
When it comes to intolerance, social media—yes, I grant that it has positive attributes—has made matters worse by providing a platform for smears, misogyny, falsehoods, demonization, hate speech, the degradation of women, and even the celebration of violence. Its baleful influence is especially worrying because most Americans, and particularly young people, today apparently obtain most of their news from that source. Presumably, their political opinions are susceptible to being shaped by the likes of Elon Musk, who, following his rebranding and revamping of what used to be Twitter as X, has made hate-mongering on social media far worse. Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, social media posts range from some leftists celebrating his assassination, prompting a warning to users from Bluesky, to right-wing users blaming liberals for his death and demanding vengeance.
Lost in all of this seems to be the human element: a man in the prime of his life was shot to death, leaving behind a wife and two young children. We can all recall the saying frequently misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Perhaps public support for maxims like this one was never as deep as we may have learned from our school civics textbooks; but the commitment to them now seems lower than ever. Worse, the trajectory is decidedly downward.
My last post was a rumination on Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, a 1935 novel that told of the rapidity with which democracy’s foundations could be shattered. Lewis’s book was an imagined scenario. But in our current political reality, the cracks in the edifice of contemporary American democracy are all too visible; and Charlie Kirk’s killing could deepen and widen them. If some on the left have expressed views that verge on “good riddance,” others on the Trumpian right have, even before the perpetrator has been arrested and questioned, blamed the left-wing “radicals” and demanded retribution.
Consider what the New York Times reported today: “Matt Forney, a right-wing journalist known for racist and misogynistic content, called Mr. Kirk’s assassination the American Reichstag fire, alluding to the 1933 fire at the German Parliament building that was used by the Nazi party as a pretext to suspend constitutional protections and arrest political opponents. “It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned,’ Mr. Forney wrote.”
Zeteo offered an even scarier assessment of what might lie ahead, noting that “Donald Trump gave an incendiary televised address in which he railed only against ‘radical left-wing political violence.’ Elon Musk claimed, ‘the left is the party of murder.’ His fellow ‘Silicon Valley bro Shaun Maguire said ‘the Left lectured us for the last decade about the dangers of violence from the Right’ but ‘the danger was actually on the Left.’ Katie Miller, wife of far-right Stephen [Miller], accused liberals of having ‘blood on your hands.’”
President Trump has a public platform that is unmatched—not just here at home but internationally as well. Musk, Maguire, and Katie Miller have much less influence in the national marketplace of ideas, though their pronouncements still sway the MAGA faithful. This ought to be a time when prominent political personalities, above all the President, urge calm, denounce incendiary accusations, and condemn calls for retribution on an entire swath of American society, lumped together as the radical left. Yet here they are blaming Kirk’s murder on liberals—less than a day after it occurred.
The timing of these accusations makes them particularly alarming. Trump has already federalized the National Guard and deployed its troops to American cities, over the objections of their mayors and governors and without any sense that any of these places faced a law-and-order emergency. And now, bad economic news might prompt him to go further.
The Consumer Price Index—calculated based on the cost of a basket of key goods and services—increased to an annualized 2.9% last month, the highest since January, and the uptick was especially notable in gas and grocery prices. Job growth has declined 75% compared to a year ago: revised data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that for the 12 months up to March, the average monthly increasein job creation fell from 147,000 to 70,000; and the decline has continued since then: the figure for August was 22,000. Trump’s tariff wars haven’t helped matters: one of their consequences has been the equivalent of an average tax increase of $1,300 per household, according to the Tax Foundation, or up to $2,400, according to Yale’s Budget Lab.
These abstract numbers have registered in public opinion because people drive, shop, and look for jobs. By the end of last month, Gallup reports, Trump’s approval rating had fallen by 10 points to 37%. That’s an all-time low for his second term and only three points higher than his worst favorability rating during his entire first term. (The saving grace for the president is that his popularity among Republicans since January has remained around 90%.)
Any president in this predicament, especially one who has promised to revive the US economy as part of his MAGA program, would understandably want to change the public’s focus. And Trump, as so many political pundits have observed, excels at making people focus on what he wants by resorting to the surprising and the sensational. In the context of his deployment of the National Guard to cities, raids by ICE, and, now, his blaming of the political left tout court for Kirk’s murder, this skill of Trump’s raises the question of what he might do in the wake of that horrible event to change the channel.
We must wait and watch. For now, this much is certain: the ways in which the president and his acolytes have rushed to frame Kirk’s assassination provide justifiable grounds for apprehension, which scholars who study trends in American political violence share.
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