Yves here. To state what may seem obvious, the assassination of Charile Kirk has the potential to considerably deepen already large schisms in American politics. Kirk, as the circumstances of his death show, made a point of going to college campuses and as a youngish man, was a “relatable” figure. Even though he stood for conservative ideas that many abhor, he was opposed to the war in Ukraine and even though he had been a staunch Israel supporter, he had started questioning Netanyahu’s conduct. But what set him apart from most political commentators and activists in the US was that he was willing to speak across doctrinal lines and (by reputation, I have not watched him enough to have an independent point of view) remained civil and would even concede that the other side had a point. He was also apparently genuinely outgoing and solicitous and was extremely well-liked by media professionals and elected officials; their grief about his death is apparently genuine.
Despite, as we’ll see below, calls from many prominent conservatives to punish the “radical left,” as in domestic enemies, the workings of the right wing hive mind may be diffusing this impulse. Early report focused on markings on the bullets found with the assailants gun. For instance, see the most recent Wall Street Journal headline: Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution. The reason for the later Journal caveat (earlier headlines weren’t qualified) was that the information on the markings came via an internal police report.
But the bigger reason is a lot of conservatives aren’t buying it. It seems too tidy even in light of Kirk’s final exchange with the crowd. From the Independent:
[Kirk] responded to a question from an audience member who asked: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”
Mr Kirk responded “too many”, which resulted in some cheers from the crowd. After the individual said there had been five, they then asked the conservative political activist how many mass shootings there had been in the US in the last decade.
Uttering his last words, Mr Kirk asked: “Counting or not counting gang violence?” before a sniper’s bullet hit him in the neck.
A conservative contact who monitors its media intently focused on the fact that Trump and others almost immediately depicted the shooting as the involving more than one person (and this was separate from condemnations of lefties as stokers of “terrorism”). The emerging consensus in right mass opinion seems to be that the shooter was a foreign operative, The fact that as of this writing, he remains free suggests a certain level of tradecraft. At this point, he could have gotten to Mexico. If this belief gets traction, it will take some of the air out of the campaign to use this tragedy to the advantage of authoritarians and censors.
Ken Klippenstein provides confirmation:
Today on 9/11, it occurs to me that both the attack 24 years ago and the one that took Charlie Kirk’s life yesterday are plagued by many of the same wild allegations. Foreign intelligence involvement, federal coverup, a manufactured false flag; the parallel conspiracy theories are surreal.
Before the assassin has even been identified, countless people (including the president) have concluded it must have been a group effort, with Fox News alluding to unspecified “foreign intelligence” involvement. Others on the left, meanwhile, insist that the killing was orchestrated by Donald Trump to divert attention away from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
The reason behind the insta-theories is simple: nobody trusts what the authorities have to say. That’s understandable. Consider how almost a quarter of a century after the 9/11 attacks, there are still key documents that haven’t been declassified. This despite Trump’s repeated promises to declassify them (and even references to a Saudi Arabian role in the attack).
For instance, if you click through to the comments on this video clip, you’ll see a lot of questions about it:
— Ali (@MerruX) September 12, 2025
At the same time, the usual suspects are not letting this crisis-of-sorts go to waste. From Chris Hedges:
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.
His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.
“We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show “War Room,” adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X.
“The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and author Matt Walsh on X. “Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”
Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote that he will use, “Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk…” He further states “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
There’s more of that sentiment in Hedge’s post, and even more in the wild. Doxxing has begun, along with threats to the DNC (soon deemed “not credible”) and some historically black colleges.
Now to the main event.
By Julia Conley. Originally published at Common Dreams
Despite the fact that the murderer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained unidentified and still at large, President Donald Trump declared the “radical left” as “directly responsible” for the assassination in remarks from the White House on Wednesday night—comments that critics say shows Trump is more than willing to exploit the killing for his own purposes while sowing more, not less, political violence in the future.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that criticism of Kirk from the left was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
The president didn’t specify which opponents of Kirk he believed contributed to his killing; over the years the influencer, who frequently visited college campuses to debate students, clashed with and was criticized by supporters of abortion rights, gun control, and immigrants’ rights. But Trump said his administration would “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.”
Trump did not detail how the White House would determine what groups “contributed” to Kirk’s killing.
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he asserted, though he did not mention any of the political violence—which is statistically more pervasive—on the political right.
Trump: "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of… pic.twitter.com/dQwhTv52a9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2025
The president was echoing sentiments expressed by far-right influencer Laura Loomer who has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration, lobbying for the hiring and removal of certain aides.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization,” Loomer said Wednesday, even before Kirk was publicly pronounced dead. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.”
In a Thursday op-ed for Common Dreams, author and journalist Christopher D. Cook laments how “Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the left.”
The president, writes Cook, “seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk’s assassin or their politics.”
Trump named a number of victims of political violence in recent years, including US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot in 2017 by a man who opposed the president; and Trump himself, who survived two assassination attempts last year.
The president did not mention the killing earlier this year of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. The suspect in Hortman’s killing was an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
“Democrats own what happened today,” she told reporters. “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Mace added that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers “own” Hortman’s assassination.
The comments from Trump and Mace, wrote Cook, only show that these are “not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit” of political violence now pervasive in the United States.
At Zeteo, journalist Mehdi Hasan listed several other recent acts of political violence in which the suspected or confirmed perpetrators held right-wing ideologies, including the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro earlier this year; the assault of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022; and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
“There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years,” wrote Hasan. “In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by… right-wingers.”
On the social media platform X, Texas Monthly senior writer Robert Downen pointed out that some far-right white supremacists had also “reviled” Kirk.
“I’m not speculating about the shooter,” said Downen. “I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater-to-Nazi pipeline is canon. It’s how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was quick to rebuke the suggestion that Democrats or left-wing groups are to blame for the rise in politically motivated attacks or the emergence of violence as a commonplace, acceptable occurrence in American culture.
“Oh, please,” she said when a reporter asked her whether Democrats should tone down their rhetoric. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States, and every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word.”
In a podcast put together Wednesday evening in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, journalist David Sirota said that “what we desperately need right now in this country are leaders who lower the temperature, leaders who will try to pull us back from the brink.”
Instead, Sirota warned, “we have a president right now who seems mostly interested in using the bully pulpit to actually bully people. Inflaming every cultural conflict he can stick his nose into—all for the cause of grabbing more power and money for himself and his family.”
In place of more anger, hatred, and calls for political retribution, Sirota told his audience he wanted to offer a different message.
“It’s a simple message whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan,” said Sirota. “Your life has value and your political opponents’ lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries’ ideas, and you can fight hard for your cause, but the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that’s the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians, and the sociopathic demagogues win.”
The “nihilism” and “greed” of too many, he added, “are creating the conditions for a civil war—one that we must all do our part to stop. Before it becomes unstoppable.”
Apologies for the side track.
Starting a short time ago, NC asks for my consent (I’m in France) at each and every page.
Earlier the site asked it once, stored the response in a cookie (I think) and I could read for the next few days, weeks, .. until the cookie got removed.
Now Admiral requires to ‘read additional information’ to have enlightened consent. So I need to click twice each time I want to read an article: once for the ‘more info’ and once for the consent/no consent option.
But that answer is not saved. If I dare to refresh the page or post a comment, I need to consent again (2 clicks).
So one needs to be motivated to keep on reading NC from Europe.
I didn’t change anything on my PC, mobile, or Firefox settings, and I only have this issue with NC.
Are others seeing the same?
I am having the same issue on an Android phone in the UK.
Same
And what, dare I ask, is the enlightened consent?
The contrast between various unhinged MAGA subsets and more traditional brands of conservatism that Yves drives at is very astute. The problem is, as has been pointed out here before, the right is far more sensitive and responsive to its [rapidly radicalizing] base than the Dems are. So whether cooler conservative heads will prevail and lower the temperature is very much in question. Especially since Elon’s Twitter and Trump are driving the escalatory rhetoric. Twitter is awash with “testimonials” about how Kirk’s murder has driven the testifier to renounce dialogue with “the left” as a viable path going forward. Very unfitting tribute to what they otherwise insist is Kirk’s legacy.
So I return to my tinfoil hat question from yesterday: qui bono from Kirk’s murder?
Living in the information silos already did the renouncing of dialogue for them.
And nobody has really been standing in the way of the trantrum going especially since the beginning of the year.
OIFVet: Indeed. Welcome to the U.S. version of the Anni del Piombo, the Years of Lead. And who profited from the upsurge in violence in Italy? The U S of A. The extra-parliamentary right and left, awash in murky funding, were trying to prevent the “historic compromises” between the Christian Democrats and the Communists, who together at that time were getting 60 percent of the vote. The possibility of further reforms was just too dangerous for the hard right and the leftists of the Red Brigades types.
The U S of A is now in its Years of Lead, likely initiated by the unresolved financial crisis of 2008, which generated the Naked Capitalism blog and Occupy Wall Street. Unlike the CD and PCI in Italy, both of which were highly functional political parties, the U S of A now enters its Years of Lead with a rapacious mono-party, a predatory top 5 percent, a serious maldistribution of income, police forces with reputations in the toilet (FBI, ICE, many local police forces) and a deliberately non-functional health-care system.
Further, what I am seeing in many of the names that come up as “MAGA” is not the kind of conservatism exemplified by our beleaguered friends at The American Conservative — opposed to foreign adventures, committed to the legal framework, skeptical of big business, leery of concentration of political power — and more reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.
Yes, the Klan. Many of these influencers espouse toxic U.S. religion, that national Calvinist cargo cult. They oppose immigration on the grounds that it dilutes the Nation. The impulse, it seems to me, is a long-standing U.S. tendency that has never been curbed, related to race.
(As a side note, it is, errrr, fascinating to watch J.D. Vance, Catholic convert of convenience who thinks that Catholicism will validate his authoritarianism, and how he is behaving during this event.)
Who benefits? During the Anni di Piombo in Italy, there were assassinations that seemed to serve no purpose. They were murders for the sake of murders so as to cow the populace. What of the two dead whistle blowers at Boeing? What of the AI whistle blower? Who benefits?
In short: The danger here is that the U S of A will enter a cycle of violence without sturdy institutions to pull the society out of waves of violence. In Italy, eventually, the carabinieri and the court system dragged in hundreds of mafiosi, members of the Brigate Rosse, and various Masons with extremely dubious right-wing extremist pasts. In Sicily, I landed at the Falcone / Borsellino airport, a reminder of two slaughters of magistrates and law-enforcement officers, and I am not sure that there are comparable people in the U S of A.
With the moral collapse of U.S. institutions, who pulls the populace forward? A bunch of liberaloids are passing around the latest stylings by Rebecca Solnit, one of the sloppiest thinkers around. Is that the best that anyone can do?
Most Americans didn’t know who he was until yesterday – especially the people who right-wing politicos are trying to draw attention to.
Ridiculous and also a sign of this information silo age.
I, a European, had heard no more than the name Charlie Kirk, before the assassination. I suspect I was the norm in that respect rather than the exception. Which is why I find it remarkable, and verging on the ridiculous, that the EU parliament, for example, sought to hold a 1 minute silence in his memory. A silence not unreasonably interrupted by various factions finding the whole matter idiotic. That the BBC went into total over the top coverage, including additional documentaries and wall to wall reporting in its news output. Pushing pretty much every other news story aside. Something is seriously skewed in the way Europeans and Brits embrace their vassalhood to the US. This can only get worse, it would appear.
One of the main duties of the office of the President of the United States is to show leadership in times of trouble. To set the moral tone of how the nation reacts and to promise that the full force of the justice system be used to find any guilty parties and to bring them to a court of law of justice for judgement. Also to tamp down any dangerous overreactions that might pervert the course of justice so that people of all factions know that he will do right for the themselves and the nation.
Instead Trump decides to splash gasoline and lit flares all over the place and accuses up to half the nation of being in on it before the killer is even identified much less captured.