We are grateful that Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin is in custody. We unreservedly denounce political violence and underscore that speakers, no matter their viewpoint, should never fear for their lives. Nevertheless, we refuse to pull our punches when it comes to Donald Trump, MAGA rhetoric, and the billionaire-owned media’s coverage of both.
Too many journalists seem to find it impossible to acknowledge that Kirks’s extremist views, conspiratorial rhetoric, overt racism, and election denialundermined democracy and that his assassination is abhorrent. (Creating a “watch list” to target certain professors hardly provides a model for civil debate.) We should not be cowed into silence about Kirk’s views and reprehensible comments because we fear MAGA provocateurs’ retribution or mischaracterization. Our democracy requires we defend all speakers, not that we ignore the difference between admirable and malignant messages.
The inclination to whitewash Kirk’s views and lionize his politics—whether stemming from a well-meaning effort “not to speak ill of the dead” or from cowardly avoidance of MAGA blowback—reflects corporate media’s fixation with moral equivalence and its intellectual confusion. Its determination to downplay the MAGA Republican Party’s conspiracy-based extremism and to treat it as a normal political party inevitably enables authoritarianism.
Likewise, we must reject Trump’s groundless, premature, reprehensible remarks about Kirk’s assassin. Before we knew anything about him, Trump blamed millions of left-leaning Americans, thereby inciting his followers against their countrymen. (If nothing else, Trump is consistent in this regard: Trump also blamed the Pennsylvania assassination attempt on his opponents, although the shooter had no discernible political bent.)
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans, like Charlie, to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump declared from the Oval Office. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” Such vile demagoguery is pure Trump.
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Currently, we cannot describe with certainty whether the assassin’s views are right- or left-wing or some incoherent jumble. We should not exclude the possibility that, as the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel explains, we are dealing with someone enmeshed in “a hybrid threat network of disaffected people that can include Columbine obsessives, neo-Nazis, child groomers, and trolls… [who] perform for one another through acts of violence and cheer their community on to commit murder.”
Baselessly indicting a whole segment of the population for a lone assassin’s crime is an odious, dangerous, and all-too familiar authoritarian tactic. Trump’s insidious habit of inciting violence under the banner of victimhood has not changed since Jan. 6.
Trump’s refusal to condemn political violence on the right underscores his inability to act as president for the entire country. He insisted on Fox News that radicals on the right are just concerned about crime, whereas “radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.” For him, right-wing violence is a non-issue or worse, excusable—and he “couldn’t care less” that his admission horrifies people.
Let’s not forget he joked about the near-murder of Paul Pelosi and refused to call the governor after the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband (taking the moment instead to insult Gov. Tim Walz). He called Jan. 6 a “day of love” and pardoned those involved in a violent insurrection, which injured and killed police officers. He failed to condemn the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Passover sedar. We heard nothing from him in the aftermath of the CDC shooting that killed DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose.
Shapiro condemned Trump’s selective outrage. “I think it is dangerous when the president cherry picks which political violence he's going to condemn and which he's going to allow to just simply pass,” he said. “I think we need to be universal in condemning all political violence.”
SubscribedSeveral MAGA congressmen and more voices online, without a shred of proof, jumped on the anti-left vendetta bandwagon. At least Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who announced his retirement this year, spoke responsibly. “What I was really disgusted by… is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this,” Tillis said. “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement.”
Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, another retiring Republican, pleaded, “I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?”
Two voices outside D.C., from opposite ends of the political spectrum, modeled responsible leadership. “It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all,” New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said to a group of Jewish voters, continuing:
That humanity, it reminds us that this news is not just that of the murder of a prominent political figure, but also the news of a wife who grieves her husband, of a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old who will grow up without a father, and the fact that there are families feeling that same anguish right now in Colorado, as they wait for their children, also shot at a school.
Meanwhile, Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s remarks contrasted with FBI leadership’s inflammatory and contradictory statements. “This is our moment. Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?” Cox asked. “I hear all the time that ‘words are violence.’” He added, “Words are not violence. Violence is violence, and there is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable.”
Americans must hold on to our moral bearings and democratic values if we are to get through this period. We can condemn Kirk’s murder without celebrating the views or perpetrating the falsehood that the parties treat violence in the same way. We must denounce Trump’s pathological quest to demonize and persecute opponents. And more than ever, we must enlist decent, truth-telling allies regardless of ideology to defend pluralistic democracy. Otherwise, violence will escalate, and authoritarianism will prevail.
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