THE SLAYING OF CHARLIE KIRK

 Last Wednesday, a sniper’s bullet silenced a prominent young far-right activist, Charlie Kirk. While not everyone will mourn Kirk’s passing, the fact that he was apparently murdered, not over some personal grudge, but as a means of silencing the ideas he disseminated, dictates that every true democrat should be outraged by this tragedy. Whether you agree with Charlie Kirk’s viewpoints or not, in a democracy, he had a right to voice them. Only in authoritarianism are ideas, no matter how seemingly pernicious, silenced by murdering the disseminator. And this is a time when we clearly need more democracy, not ever-less.

Charlie Kirk

The killing was a heinous and cowardly crime carried out by someone who, by commission of the act, demonstrated his utter contempt for the basic tenets on which the United States was founded, including respect for human and civil rights, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and the rule of law. As such, it was, as President Donald Trump said in his comments from the Oval Office following the killing, an attack not just on Kirk, but on the country as a whole. As has every other targeted attack carried out against political leaders in recent memory and throughout the country’s often bloody history as a whole.  

That said, at a moment in which everyone should have spent some time ordering their thoughts while holding their tongues for a change, deep divisions in an ever more polarized America were immediately in evidence.  Apart from partisan finger-pointing, which ran rampant even before the killer was identified, there was, for instance—inconsequentially and apropos of nothing—a great deal of fatuous nitpicking regarding the legal terminology being employed by the different political sectors to describe what had happened. While MAGA and the GOP wanted to ensure that it was being called “a political assassination”, others were positing that this was a misnomer, since Kirk wasn’t an office-holder as such, but merely an activist (if a very major one). It should be called, these other “opinionologists” claimed, a “murder for political motives” or a “targeted killing”.

Clearly, it was a moment in which what the killing was called was the least significant issue on the table. Much more important was what it signified, not only at the moment, but for the immediate and long-term future. It is correctly being termed by many as a turning point and/or a watershed moment on the country’s political scene. That, of course, begs the question of why the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband didn’t already previously mark that watershed moment.

The answer seems simple to me. It is a matter of political affiliation, and of who is occupying the White House at present.

For the record, however, political assassination is most often defined as: The murder of a public figure. The term typically refers to the killing of government leaders and other prominent persons for political purposes. As such, Charlie Kirk’s slaying fits the definition. He was, indeed, a so-called “public person”, even if he didn’t hold an official office.

First indications are that the alleged assassin, twenty-two-year-old Tyler Robinson, had pigeonholed Kirk as a totalitarian who was spreading hatred through his views, and as such, a symbolic target for assassination. Investigators indicated that a bullet casing left at the scene was inscribed with the words,  “Hey fascist! CATCH!” This would seem to indicate that the alleged killer saw himself as some sort of anti-fascist avenger. It has also come to light that Robinson had a relationship with his roommate, a man who is in the process of transitioning to female.

Tyler Robinson

Any connection made between this last fact and Kirk’s slaying is mere conjecture for the moment, since Robinson is not cooperating with investigators, and his motive for the murder remains unclear. What is undeniable, however, is that, among other extremist views Kirk espoused were radically hostile stances against homosexuals and transgender people. For instance, be called transgender identity a mental disease, that required “brain treatment.” He refused to employ people’s correct pronouns, arguing, “I will not call a man a woman.” Kirk also called for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming health care, and quoted passages from the Bible identifying homosexuality as an “abomination” deserving of death.

But while alleged assassin Tyler Robinson may have fancied himself an anti-fascist avenger, he chose a totalitarian means to his end, since his “solution” for someone he didn’t agree with—indeed, with whom he, like a lot of other people, very likely violently disagreed—was precisely the one a true fascist would have chosen. That is, if you don’t like what someone is saying, attack them physically, not on the debate stage,

Unfortunately, President Donald Trump seems to be engaging in thinking that is only slightly (if any) different from that of the young man charged with the killing. Within hours of Kirk’s death, the president and his closest collaborators were already making it about his own political rivals, ranting publicly and online about what he calls the “far-left” and its responsibility due to the supposedly incendiary language it employs. This immediately raised the political temperature, and, as a result, placed the lives and safety of liberals as a whole in increasing peril. The president of the United States, as we saw during the January Sixth Insurrection, only needs words as a means of inflicting violence on his perceived enemies.

At a time when a genuinely presidential leader would have been seeking to dampen the situation and to call for unity, Trump—not at all surprisingly—chose to hurl gasoline, rather than water, onto the flames. And he did all of this before investigators even had a clue as to the shooter’s identity or motive.

While the less combative of Trump apologists put down the president’s angry words and suggestions that the death of this strategic ally of the administration would be avenged to his being “angry and in mourning for a good friend,” that argument surely won’t fly among political analysts, or among presidential historians.  Presidents, once in office, should become the office, and often, for the good of the nation, and of the people as a whole, leave their personal feelings, emotions and prejudices aside. But in the years that we have come to know him, it is apparent that this simply is not Donald Trump. He is bereft of empathy, prudence or equanimity. He is a self-serving hothead with no compunction about using the power entrusted to him by the people to wreak havoc. Indeed, he thrives on being a bull in a china shop.

Trump vows vengeance

A good example of proper presidential behavior in situations such as these  has been quoted repeatedly over the course of the last few days. It is that of former President George W. Bush following the devastating Nine-Eleven attack on the Twin Towers, which killed more than three thousand Americans. In the face of nationwide outrage toward the kind of radical-Islamist terrorists who perpetrated the attack, Bush became the voice of calm, reminding Americans as a whole that “We are not at war with Islam.” He was making the point that American and resident Muslims were not to blame for the deeds or ideology of radicalized terrorist fanatics, and that this was a time to be strong and united in the face of an existential threat.

Trump, on the other hand, takes every opportunity afforded him by completely unrelated events to deepen the divisions in America, and to polarize the political scene to the point that it becomes an ever-more dangerous minefield of partisan hostility and violence. The president’s calls for the toning down of leftist political rhetoric rang hollow and hypocritical coming from him, since he has been known since 2016 for injecting rage, vengeance and vitriol into the language of everyday politics. He has, in fact, done this so consistently that it has been turning into the new normal across the political spectrum for nearly a decade now.

Trump argues—based, as usual, on his gut, rather than on facts, which remain sketchy at best—that the killer was radicalized by reckless left-wing language that describes people like Kirk (and like the president himself) as nazis and fascists. But long before his consistently authoritarian designs in policy and government gave rise to that kind of language, he was already referring to the Democratic Party in its entirety as “the radical left”, “leftist scum”, “left-wing lunatics”, and numerous other dehumanizing terms. After his election defeat in 2020, his own inflammatory rhetoric spurred the MAGA uprising that culminated in the January Sixth Insurrection of 2021, when hundreds of his most violent followers briefly took over the Capitol, in rioting in which one policeman and one demonstrator were killed, and one hundred forty police officers were injured, a number of them critically.

If the country has become a place where civil dialogue is next to impossible and where the middle-politic gets drowned out by the two violent extremes, it didn’t start with “the left”, but with the president and MAGA themselves, in what has become the language of the Era of Trump. Nothing if not consistent in his one-sided view of the political scene, for anyone who was listening, during his Oval Office speech following Kirk’s murder, Trump made it clear that he is the president of MAGA, not of the American people. Lashing out at liberals, he said:

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, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

Speaker Pelosi and husband Paul

Conveniently absent from his list of mayhem were of the Democratic victims of political violence. There was no mention, for instance, of Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was the victim of a home invasion by a MAGA radical who split Pelosi’s skull with a hammer, while holed-up awaiting the return home of the Speaker herself, whom he admitted planning to kidnap and torture. Nor did he make any mention of the foiled plot by far-right radicals to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Or the fire-bombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home. Or a shooting incident at the campaign offices of Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg. Or the murder of a police officer when a gunman opened fire at the CDC headquarters and Emory University in Atlanta (a case that involved misinformation spread by MAGA about the COVID vaccine). Or the high-profile slaying of  Democratic Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and the shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, both of whom, thankfully, survived. The shooter in that case was disguised as a police officer and was carrying a list of other Democrats he planned to attack.

Slain Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman

So, Trump’s Oval Office speech contained a not-so-subliminal message that the only victims that matter are the ones on the right. It follows then, in the MAGA mindset, that liberal victims aren’t worth mentioning—and probably got what they deserved. In a truly despicable development, following the Kirk slaying, Fox News personality and Trump frequent surrogate Brian Kilmeade sought to shift blame for the Minnesota slayings from the right to that state’s governor and former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. Kilmeade claimed the assassination of Representative Hortman and the shooting of Senator Hoffman happened because “they didn’t like something Governor Tim Walz was doing.” Kilmeade wasn’t alone in this insane claim. He was preceded in spreading that conspiracy theory by none other than Charlie Kirk..

This is, by the way, the same Brian Kilmeade who—after criticizing

Shooting victims Sen. John Hoffman and wife

“violent rhetoric on the left,” suggested that if homeless people didn’t want to submit to programs designed to get them off the street, the only other option should be “lethal injection.” In other words, Kilmeade seemed to think impoverished people who ended up living on the street should be treated like stray animals and be euthanized if a home cannot be found for them. The next day Fox apparently pressured him to apologized, which he did on the air. But they weren’t words easily taken back. And many were asking themselves, in what sort of warped mind can that kind of violent thought even formulate? Never mind the apology after the fact.

Brian Kilmeade

The short answer is, the sort of mind that is a daily disseminator of MAGA dogma and a surrogate of the Trump White House. This is clear from the fact that, following Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump immediately did an interview on the morning show Fox and Friends at Fox News. There, among friends, including Kilmeade, Trump imbued the audience with the idea that the only sort of extremism in America is leftist extremism. (Apparently, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are Eagle Scouts and the KKK is just a bunch of good ol’ boys out for a little harmless fun, not to mention the neo-Nazis who are “some very good people” on that other side).

Specifically, the president said: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”

Less than a day later, he told a gaggle of reporters,  “We have radical left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” (An obvious clarion call to his most extreme supporters—perhaps among them, some of the fifteen hundred convicted January Sixth insurrectionists to whom he gave a blanket pardon and get-out-of-jail-free card). On that same day (Tuesday, September 9), Trump stated that "most of the violence is on the left."

But a Cato Institute study quoted by Time Magazine belies that notion entirely. In the past five years, more than eighty people have died in acts of political violence in the United States. Right-wing terrorists carried out fifty-four percent of those killings. Radicals Islamist terrorists were responsible for another twenty-one percent, while extreme left violence killed twenty-two percent of the victims.

But the Cato study doesn’t stop there. It investigates terrorist crime all the way back to 1975. According to the study, in that time, Islamist terrorism has accounted for eighty-seven percent of the deaths recorded, mainly due to Nine-Eleven, which cost the lives of  more than three thousand people. But the report goes on to take Nine-Eleven out of the equation and breaks down the other political killings that have taken place. Its conclusion: Since 1975, non-Nine-Eleven Islamist terrorism has accounted for one hundred forty-three killings, leftist extremism has accounted for sixty-five murders, while right-wing domestic terrorism has cost the lives of three hundred ninety-one people. The data doesn’t lie. The extreme right is clearly, at least for now, exceedingly more violent than the left, and we’ve got the body bags to prove it.

But neither Trump nor his MAGA ideologues are willing to admit that. In fact, they seek to suppress it. There are reports that, even as we speak, the administration has people combing government reports and documents to find and suppress data that show right-wing nationalist terrorism to be the most imminent extremist threat facing the country today.

A good example of Republican lawmakers living in denial was provided by South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace. In an interview with CNN’s Kate Bolduan, Mace talked about congressional moves to better protect politicians, adding that she was from an open-carry state and was now packing whenever she was out in public. She blamed the threats to lawmakers entirely on left-wing violence, and stressed her belief that “Democrats own” Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Rep. Nancy Mace

Over the course of the brief interview, Bolduan provided Mace with repeated opportunities to admit that there was violence on both sides of the political spectrum, but not once did she acquiesce. She insisted that all violence came from the left, and sought to picture Republicans and the right as hapless victims of a clearly one-sided political trend.    

Both Trump and his GOP hand-puppets are seeking to cast Charlie Kirk as a martyr f or the cause of civil debate and free expression, a young man with a kumbaya attitude toward the world at large, and as a crusader who sought to draw college-aged conservatives into the big tent of “conservative” ideas. But while Kirk had the same constitutional right as every other American to express his views publicly and to organize authorized political rallies, the fact is that many of his ideas were highly controversial and steeped in far-right, white-supremacist ideology. They were far from humanitarian, and lacked even basic empathy for anyone who didn’t agree with him. But he, oddly enough, preached non-violence in politics and felt that the way to spread his far-right views was through contact and debate. As Voltaire once wisely suggested, I may be in complete and utter disagreement with most of Charlie Kirk’s notions, but I would defend to the death his right to express them.

That, after all, is what liberal democracy is all about—the sanctity of individual rights and freedoms and the system (today much battered and deteriorated) of checks and balances to ensure their protection. But while Charlie Kirk’s rights might be just as sacred to me as my own—because if a single person’s rights are violated, everyone’s rights are endangered—those were not the principles Charlie Kirk supported. Nor are they supported by the Trump administration.

Case in point: Right while Trump, MAGA and the GOP as a whole were on a rant about how everyone, like Charlie Kirk, should be able to express their ideas without fear of suppression or violence, the president’s deputy chief of staff (and the shadowy Rasputin behind some of Trump’s most repressive policies) Stephen Miller engaged in an almost hysterical rant on Fox News, following the Kirk shooting, in which he vowed to use law enforcement to “dismantle the left.”

Clearly, he wasn’t simply referring to terrorist organizations, but to anyone opposed to the Trump agenda. Among other things, Miller ranted: “The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven (was) that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.” He went on to say, “I don’t care how. It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

Stephen Miller

In a vow that sounded a lot more like vengeance than the rule of law, Miller then said, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.” Doubling down in no uncertain terms, the deputy chief of staff went on to say, “We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump's leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law to take away your freedom.”

This last was telling, and chilling. It suggested that opponents of the administration would become the targets of a witch hunt aimed at stripping them of everything. and, only then, “if you’ve broken the law…take away your freedom.” The deeper meaning being that even opponents, US citizens who haven’t broken the law, would be targeted, and even exiled! This is troubling, or should be for every large and small-d democrat within the context of an earlier statement that he made, also on Fox News, at the end of last month, in which he claimed that the Democratic Party was not really a party, but “a domestic terror organization.”

If some far-right nut job in a barbershop says something like that while waiting to have his head shaved, you might be able to laugh it off. But when it comes from the deputy chief of staff of the presidency, no matter how insane it might be, it is policy. Which brings me to another point: If the Trump administration wants people to stop calling them fascists, perhaps it would be a good idea to stop talking and acting like fascists, and start embracing the sacred principles of a two-and-a-half-century-old liberal democracy.

As I said earlier, I fully and unequivocally condemn Charlie Kirk’s slaying as a senseless tragedy triggered by a wrong-minded sociopath. But that is all it was. Not some leftist conspiracy for launching an internal terror attack on the US. Not part of a larger plan to wipe out MAGA cheerleaders. Not any sort of incident linked to anything bigger. It was simply one disturbed and/or violent individual who decided to kill the messenger. And it is also important to see clearly what Kirk’s  ideology was, and to understand that controversial opinions always elicit strong reactions.

In that, I have something in common with Charlie Kirk. From statements he made in interviews I’ve seen, it’s clear to me that the far-right activist took in stride the fact that his ideas would necessarily paint a target on him. Controversial ideas are always triggers for agents of opposing extremes. When asked about the multiple threats that he continuously received, he was philosophical about their simply being par for the course for any activist.

That was my own attitude toward the activism in which I was engaged during my youth. I was part of a team working with one of the world’s most courageous journalists, Robert Cox, editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, in the nineteen-seventies. Our newspaper was, literally, the only local news medium that, during the dark days of Argentina’s bloody military regime, daily and publicly renewed its commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and civil and human rights. And our staunch and open opposition to the regime painted targets on our backs as well. But Cox’s philosophy, which proved contagious among those of us who seconded him, was that if you were a professional who was committed to truth and to the morally and ethically acceptable, there was simply no choice but to do your job, report what was happening, and clearly state the facts, or, failing that, to go off and do something else with your life.

My beliefs and Kirk’s couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to one another. But we both saw the risks we took to state our views as simply the price you pay for forging headlong into controversy. A matter of put up or shut up, in which you lay your life on the line for your beliefs. The fact that I find most of the things Kirk espoused morally and democratically repugnant is, for the purposes of this particular aspect, beside the point. During my own years of activism, the threats to which we were subject were so frequent that I wasn’t at all sure that I would ever reach old age. And, like Kirk, I took every precaution I could to mitigate those risks. But in the end, I was lucky. Charlie Kirk was not.

That said,  Charlie Kirk wasn’t your average amateur college activist, even if university campuses were his beat and right-wing youth his target. He was a professional activist, and a highly successful one. It wasn’t as if he became an overnight billionaire or anything of the sort, but he indeed made a small fortune with his  activism. And certainly profited far more than the vast majority of his counterparts on both sides of the political spectrum, especially after Donald Trump appeared on the political scene.

The golden boy of the GOP, he was credited with almost singlehandedly delivering a large swath of the youth vote to Donald Trump in the 2024 election. And his MAGA activism since Trump’s first term proved to be a highly profitable activity.

Kirk founded his political organization, Turning Point USA, in 2012, when  he was just eighteen. Already by the following year, Turning Point was reporting a net worth of nearly twenty-seven thousand dollars and revenues of more than seventy-eight thousand. Kirk’s own compensation as the group’s CEO rose little by little, so that, by 2016, his annual salary was twenty-seven thousand dollars. But from 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected for his first term, until 2021, the year he was replaced in office by President Joe Biden, Kirk’s income rose exponentially, reportedly totaling four hundred thousand dollars that year. And by the time of his death, aged thirty-one, Kirk’s net worth was estimated by multiple sources to be approximately twelve million dollars—not in the league with the ultra-wealthy elite that resides in the Trump cabinet and MAGA leadership, but certainly financially well-off, especially for a college-campus political activist.

Undoubtedly, Kirk’s views raised hackles in a very broad swath of American society. For instance,  he said gun deaths are “unfortunately worth it” to preserve the Second Amendment. As I mentioned earlier, he described transgender identity as a mental disease, and suggested that homosexuals deserved to be put to death. He called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “myth” and said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake”. He promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that liberal politicians are deliberately seeking to expand black and brown populations and make whites a minority, rather than accepting the fact that, in a melting pot like the US, populations and ethnicities evolve in keeping with demographic development. He spread COVID-19 misinformation, and likened mask and vaccine mandates to “medical apartheid.” He suggested mass incarceration as a solution to the housing crisis. He, shockingly, advocated public, televised executions, saying even children should watch them, as a deterrent to crime. He dismissed out of hand the competence of African Americans and considered it reverse discrimination whenever blacks and white competed for the same job and the black candidate got it. Furthermore, he made demeaning statements about African American women in general, and claimed Michelle Obama and other supporters of affirmative action “lacked the brain processing power” to understand arguments on those policies. He also had a beef with black airline pilots, once saying, “If I see a black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”

And those are just some of his most outrageous and often racist opinions. It’s little wonder, then that he also said he hated the word “empathy”, which he called a “made-up New Age term.” Clearly, he had none for those who were unlike him. As for his much-touted belief in debate, it is easy to invite debate when you do it from a position of self-righteousness and self-entitled superiority. 

Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone

Michael Fanone, a former Capitol police officer, who was nearly beaten to death by far-right MAGA extremists who took over Congress by force on January 6^th, 2021, has very succinctly summarized not only his feelings about Charlie Kirk’s slaying, but also my own, and, I suspect, those of millions of democratic-minded patriots all over the US. Fanone writes:

“Charlie Kirk is dead. Shot in the middle of a speech at Utah Valley University.
I am not going to sugarcoat it: I have nothing but contempt for Charlie Kirk’s politics. He made a career out of poisoning young minds with grievance, conspiracy, and hate. He profited off division. He defended the indefensible. He celebrated cruelty. I don’t grieve for his ideas, and I won’t sanitize what he represented.

“But here’s the thing: violence has no place in American politics. None.

“I know what it’s like to be on the business end of political violence.
I felt fists, flagpoles, and tasers on January 6^th. I heard men scream that they were going to kill me in the name of Donald Trump.

“That day taught me something too many of us are still trying to ignore: Once political violence becomes acceptable—once you decide that your enemy isn’t just wrong but expendable—you don’t control where it leads.

“If you cheered this shooting because you hated Kirk, you’re no better than the mob that chanted for Mike Pence’s hanging. If you shrug it off because it happened to the other side, you’re part of the same sickness that’s rotting this country.

“The truth is, we’re running out of safe spaces for disagreement. Universities, statehouses, even the Capitol itself—each one has been marked by the threat of blood.

“Democracy doesn’t survive in that environment. Free speech doesn’t survive. We don’t survive…”

Last Saturday, conservative commentator Michael Smerconish, on his CNN show, Smerconish, posed a question to his cable audience:

Does the Charlie Kirk killing signal the end of something bad or the beginning of something worse.

At the end of the show, with thousands of votes cast, only eight percent of his viewers believed that it was the end. Ninety-two percent indicated that it was only the beginning.

I’d like to catch the contagious optimism of the eight percent, but I’m afraid the pessimists are the realists.