The assassination of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk at a college campus in Utah has ignited a firestorm of anger on the right, with many politicians and influencers excoriating “the left” and others appearing to call for retribution and even warning of “civil war.”
Shortly after Kirk’s death was confirmed Wednesday, president Donald Trump gave an Oval Office address from behind the Resolute Desk. Without presenting evidence, Trump blamed Kirk’s murder on the “radical left.” He rebuked those he claimed had compared “wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass-murderers and criminals.”
Trump said such rhetoric is “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” and he vowed to hunt down “every one of those who contributed to this atrocity” as well as others who “go after” law enforcement and those “who bring order to our country.” Trump closed his remarks with a warning that “radical left political violence… has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh is, like Kirk, a high-profile right-wing media influencer and podcaster. He wrote a provocative post on X on Wednesday calling for “The entire Right has to band together” because, “we are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell.” Walsh called the struggle “existential” and “a fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.” On Thursday he added: “I woke up even angrier.” Walsh rejected calls for reconciliation and characterized the coming struggle as self-defense: “They want us dead. They’re killing us. Now is not the time for kumbaya stuff. This is real.”
Similar messaging from gun advocates Thursday took on an even more ominous tone. The president of the American Firearms Association — a group “that fights aggressively in defense of the Second Amendment” — sent out an email to members reading only: “Charlie Kirk gave his life fighting the fight for Freedom… May we all resolve to crush the Communist left without remorse.”
Laura Loomer, the right-wing extremist and close ally of the president’s, wrote a post on X seeking to connect Kirk’s death to the recent high-profile murder of a Ukrainian immigrant, Iryna Zarutska.
“Between the video of Iryna and the video of Charlie, both bleeding to death out of their necks, this has been a very radicalizing week,” Loomer wrote. “A message to the Left: Debate time is over. You ended it.”
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The actor and right-wing activist James Woods also posted on X, saying the quiet part out loud: “Dear leftists: we can have a conversation or a civil war. One more shot from your side and you will not get this choice again.”
Kirk was an advocate for the now-pardoned criminals of the Jan. 6 uprising, and an ally of the “Stop the Steal” movement that built up to it. Ali Alexander, an organizer of the main Jan. 6 rally, used a Telegram post to advocate for Trump to capitalize on Kirk’s muder by “seizing powers not normally exercised,” adding: “Let no judge, no law, no injunction, no protest, no norm, no fear stop him.” Alexander clarified his meaning in another post: “10 percent of the left-wing must be arrested, charged, detained, or made to flee. We must forcibly separate the Democrats from their militant arm by any and all means necessary.”
Meantime, actual white supremacists were preparing to use Kirk’s death to their benefit, even though they did not see him as an ally in their struggle. The leader of a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe shared a post on Telegram reading in part: “In life Charlie Kirk was our enemy… In death he is a martyr because he was killed in a political climate in which he was seen as one of us despite the fact that he was not. To the leftist there is very little difference.”
Calls to avenge Kirk’s death have run hot even as the shooter remains at large and the precise motivations behind the murder are not clear.
After initially announcing it had a suspect in custody, the FBI later revealed that that person had been released. The bureau has since released photographs of a new suspect, a college-age male. The Wall Street Journal is reporting authorities recovered a .30 caliber hunting rifle believed to be the murder weapon in a “wooded area” near the suburban campus. The paper, citing claims from law enforcement sources, described the gun, obliquely, as containing ammunition “engraved with expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology,” though The New York Times later reported that this information had not been verified by government analysts and did not match other summaries of the evidence.
Kirk was a provocateur who continuously stirred controversy with hot takes on everything from the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to a version of the “great replacement” theory — he urged the protection of “white demographics in America” — that was noxious enough to get called out by the Anti-Defamation League. In death, he’s been praised by the likes of Vice President J.D. Vance and liberal pundit Ezra Klein for engaging in vigorous debate with those who passionately disagreed with him.
Ironically, other right-wingers are now seeking to avenge Kirk’s death by riling up outrage at Kirk’s left-wing critics — targeting influencers whom they view making light of his murder. The social media celebrity Catturd posted a “notice” on X to leftists “making fun of Charlie Kirk’s death right now.” He wrote: “We’re gonna expose every last one of you motherfuckers.”
Loomer has joined in efforts to dox people, especially federal employees, who posted they were not going to mourn Kirk’s death. “If you celebrate political violence and work in the government, I’m going to hunt your social media posts down and I’m going to get you fired and ruin your chances of ever getting another job,” Loomer wrote on X. “I want you to eat out of the dumpster like the trash you are.”
A congressman, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) is getting into the same fight: “I’m going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms,” he wrote on X, “to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
Kirk was one of the most powerful influencers in the right’s media and political ecosystem — marshaling both young men and the religious right to engage in electoral politics. His organization, Turning Point USA, ran a robust get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of Trump in 2024, and Kirk was not only a close ally of the president, but also one of the nations’ top podcasters, and a relentless producer of viral video content.
Kirk was in Utah as part of a rolling tour in which he debated liberal students on college campuses, with clips of these exchanges providing fodder for his social media accounts. The gunshot to the neck that killed him rang out as Kirk was answering a question about the number of mass shootings in the last decade. Kirk responded by trolling back: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
From Rolling Stone US
