The Guardline
This is not a moment for dishonesty. Contrary to the hurried efforts of some Democratic leaders to eulogize Charlie Kirk, we don’t need to pretend the far-right activist engaged in earnest politics “across ideology, through spirited debate” as California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a post on X paying tribute to Kirk.
Kirk, the founder of the far-right movement Turning Points USA, was committed to organizing America’s white young men, from college campus to college campus and beyond, into a politics of revanchist, resentment-fueled, patriarchal white nationalism.
However harmful Kirk’s project has been to our collective flourishing, though, the response to his assassination could put this nation, and especially those on the left, in a position of greater peril than at any previous moment of Donald Trump’s authoritarian second term.
The call couldn’t be clearer: open season on the left.
At the time of writing, the person responsible for shooting Kirk has not been apprehended or identified. That didn’t stop Trump from delivering an official address unequivocally blaming the “radical left” for Kirk’s death in the broadest terms possible.
The Trump administration is a weaponization machine; it will transform all manner of things into an ideological arsenal to use against its opposition. Anti-genocide activism is antisemitism; immigrant workers are “the worst” criminals; addressing white supremacy is discrimination; war crimes are peace – all of these fascistic transmutations have become grimly common in the last eight months.
Trump’s erratic government is predictable only insofar as it can reliably and quickly metabolize events towards authoritarian ends.
In his televised remarks, Trump made immediately clear how his administration plans to instrumentalize this assassination, too, regardless of the specifics of the shooting. Trump called Kirk a “martyr” and blamed the “radical left” for comparing “wonderful Americans” like Kirk – who was an unabashed Christian nationalist – to Nazis.
“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” the president said. Without any public information about the shooter, Trump took the opportunity to assert that his administration would hunt down any person or organization associated with the – again, unknown – suspect.
The call couldn’t be clearer: open season on the left.
“Demonizing” Whom?
In his speech, the president described a scourge of left-wing political violence based on “demonizing those with whom you disagree.”
When he was shot, Kirk was speaking on a Utah college campus, demonizing those with whom he disagreed. In response to an audience member asking, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kirk responded “too many,” promoting a baseless and vile conspiracy theory spread by Trump attempting to link trans people with violent crimes.
Trump then sought to paint a picture of prolific left-wing violence by listing the assasination attempt he himself survived last year, “attacks on ICE agents,” which have been egregiously overblown; the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the shooting at a baseball game that injured Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise.
The president notably did not mention the assassination attempts on multiple Democratic members of the Minnesota state legislature last June, in which representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed. Nor did Trump invoke the time a far-right conspiracy theorist broke into former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in an attempted kidnapping and bashed in her husband’s skull.
Needless to say, the president said nothing of the fact that the majority of politically motivated attacks are carried out by far-right extremists. The omissions were as glaring as they were unsurprising.
Calls for Repression
Meanwhile, Trump’s key propagandists and loyalists spoke in swift unison to weaponize the shooting for repressive purposes.
Far-right activist and Trump advisor Laura Loomer posted that the government should “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She added, “No mercy. Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence.”
“They are at war with us,” said Fox News host Jesse Waters, “What are we going to do about it?”
“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” wrote the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo on X. Rufo, a major force in the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on higher education, added, “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
With major Republican figures explicitly calling to revive McCarthyite and Cointelpro-style repression of the political left — a category that, in the deranged worldview of the Trumpian right could include everyone from far-left mutual aid groups to Bill Gates — now is no time for lie-filled paeans to Kirk from political leaders. It is a moment that demands a commitment to protecting constituents from the sort of hateful ideologies Kirk supported – and the kinds of crackdowns Trump and his acolytes are demanding.
Progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., wrote social media posts to say that there is “no place for political violence” in this country.
Political violence has always been at home in a nation built on Indigenous slaughter, slavery, dispossession, and exploitation, to say nothing of rates of incarceration and shootings seen nowhere else on the planet. The progressives’ statements are all the more misplaced at this time of authoritarian escalation at home and U.S.-backed genocide abroad.
It is precisely because of the central place of political violence in this country that this moment feels both predictably and uniquely dangerous. On Wednesday night, Trump called it a “dark moment for America” — but for all the wrong reasons.
This is no time for whitewashing the memory of a man who did more than perhaps anyone in his generation to recruit young people into the inherently violent cause of white nationalism. The urgent work at hand is to take care of each other, and to protect the most vulnerable among us, from a world that would be built in Charlie Kirk’s name.
