Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, speaks at an event in Detroit on June 14, 2024. Kirk was a staunch ally of US President Donald Trump. Photo / Nic Antaya, The New York Times
The people filming with their phones at Charlie Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” event yesterday at Utah Valley University were probably hoping to capture the kind of provocative viral moment that the right-wing youth activist is known for.
Instead, they filmed a shocking act of political violence — the kind of thing, once again, that America is known for.
Kirk, a close ally of United States President Donald Trump who founded the country’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist organisation, was shot in the neck, about 20 minutes into his debate.
Trump announced Kirk’s death — at the age of 31 — on social media, and Speaker Mike Johnson held a moment of silence on the House floor.
“Political violence has become all too common in American society, and this is not who we are,” Johnson said yesterday.
But it is.
It was only a few months ago that a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were assassinated by a man who said his actions were motivated by his views about Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
Before that, a man set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence while Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, and his family members slept inside.
Two employees at the Israeli Embassy in Washington were fatally shot.
The Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico and a Tesla dealership in the state were firebombed.
And that was just in recent months.
In 2021, a mob seeking to avenge Trump’s loss broke into the Capitol, where some rioters physically fought law enforcement officers and threatened to hang Mike Pence.
Former Representative Gabby Giffords, a Democrat, was shot in the head in 2011.
Republican lawmakers were shot while practicing baseball in 2017.
The husband of Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi was attacked at home in 2022.
Trump was shot in the ear while campaigning last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, before another attempt on his life just months later.
“I like to not think about it,” Trump said earlier this northern summer about the assassination attempts.
“You know, it affects some people greatly. I can’t afford to be affected because I have a job to do.”
The suspect’s motivation was not immediately known.
Still, Kirk’s death has become the latest episode of violence against a political figure in a nation where that has become a grim routine.
And while there have been violent periods in America before, this is a new era of instant footage and instant reaction.
“I don’t know where we go from here as a news programme,” Fox News anchor Will Cain told viewers, as he announced Kirk’s death, “and I don’t know where we go from here in America.”
Kirk had spent much of his day talking about another violent death caught on camera, largely in the context of his political beliefs.
Earlier in the day, he had posted to his social media account stills and snippets of a graphic video showing the stabbing of a Ukrainian woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, and told his followers to consider her killing a political matter.
“It’s 100% necessary to politicise the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska,” he wrote, referring to the victim of the crime. “Because it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her.”
By the end of the day, he had become a victim himself, and it was his death that the political world was reacting to.
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s shooting, the response seemed to cleave along political lines. Democrats including Shapiro and Giffords condemned the violence, as did many Republicans.
Other voices on the right did what Kirk had suggested people do about the Charlotte murder: They politicised it.
Before authorities had charged anyone or revealed any motivation, some on the right placed blame on Democrats, or even called for war and vengeance.
That has worried experts in political violence, who warned that, whatever the motivation behind Kirk’s death, it could potentially kick off fresh violence in response, depending on how it is framed by political leaders.
Elon Musk, the erstwhile Trump ally, called the left the “party of murder” in a post on his social media platform, X. And Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, seemed to blame the “rotten House and the corrupt media” for the attack.
“Every damn one of you who called us fascists did this,” she wrote on X in all capital letters.
Enrique Tarrio, a former leader of the Proud Boys, reposted to his X account a post from a fellow January 6 defendant calling for “war”.
Those reactions alarmed Lilliana Hall Mason, of Johns Hopkins University. Mason has found that about 20% of Americans believe that political violence is at least sometimes justified — but said that number rises to 60% if people from the other political party committed an act of violence first.
“It really does depend on how leadership frames it for their supporters,” Mason said.
“To the extent that leaders are framing this as something that needs to be retaliated against, I think that creates a huge opportunity for really bad things to happen.”
She added: “If the cycle of retaliatory violence gets started, it’s really hard to stop it”.
Dr Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine and a public health researcher at the University of California, Davis, urged caution.
“It is not inevitable today, as it was not inevitable the day after Donald Trump got shot last [autumn], that we are going to become a more violent nation, that we are going to use violence to solve our political differences.”
He added: “The task that all of us face is to keep the extremists from pulling us over the cliff with them”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jess Bidgood
Photograph by: Nic Antaya
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