The murder of political activist Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, on Sept 10 at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, was horrifying.
Kirk was addressing a crowd at his “American Comeback Tour” event when the single shot rang out. As he had promoted conservative politics on college campuses, he had become one of the most prominent voices in the conservative youth movement.
I listened and watched the reports roll in the same as you did. Later, I watched Kirk’s shattered widow struggle to speak through tears about her grief and about their two young children who will now have to grow up without the father whom they adored, but will likely not even remember.
Peace on Charlie Kirk and his family and all who knew and loved him.
But I want to talk about another side to this mess. As we all should know by now because it happens every time some spasm of political violence flares up, the incident immediately sets off yet another round of fault finding.
Indeed, social media was quickly abuzz with jeremiads hurled at both sides of the ideological divide, long before any of us possessed the slightest crumb of information about the identity of the shooter, his motives, or his political standing.
Today it appears we know who he is. As to 22-year-old Tyler Robinson’s motives and present politics, the picture as of last week was not yet clear. But you would not know that from the ugly things people are saying out there.
One talking head on the right use the word “radical leftists” dozens of times in his commentary, fixing certain guilt on every progressive. On the left, talking heads blamed a conservative false-flag operation.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat whose home was torched in April while his family slept inside, condemned the murder in harsh terms: “Political violence has no place in our country. We must speak with moral clarity.”
Unfortunately, political violence has a place in our society.
Kirk’s murder going down three months after Vance Boelter, a far-right extremist disguised as a police officer, killed retired Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home and seriously wounded a state senator. Investigators later found a list in the killer’s vehicle marking nearly 70 potential targets, among them abortion providers and Democratic lawmakers across multiple states.
Each act of extremism and bitter animosity poisons our collective bloodstream. Two leaders from different parties and perspectives, struck down by senseless acts of political violence.
Once again, I am stunned and saddened not only by the killing, but our capacity to fool ourselves into insisting “we are not the ones responsible for the deadly stink in the room, so it’s gotta be those other guys. Get a rope.”
Look, we all have something to do with the stench. We all project the bad in ourselves onto others. We do it in part because if we were to admit the evil in our own ranks, we would have to do the one thing most of us absolutely do not want to do: face too many awful truths about ourselves.
What we now know is it was the work of one deranged individual — not a conspiracy.
The online publication Mighty Girl recently posted much of the following, including this information from The Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Between 2016 and 2025, there were 25 attacks and threats targeting elected officials, political candidates, judges and government employees that were motivated by partisan beliefs. For comparison, only two such incidents were reported in the two previous decades. The increase in partisan attacks spans the ideological spectrum, but has done little to lower the heat in political rhetoric.
The words and actions of our political leaders as time moves on will prove consequential. Lilliana Mason, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of “Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy,” said that our leaders’ response to these attacks will determine whether violence escalates or subsides.
Yet even as some leaders call for unity, the challenge remains the rhetoric that experts say powers such violence.
In a speech after Kirk’s shooting, President Donald Trump declared that Americans and the media need to “confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.” To many Americans, the words drip with irony and hypocrisy coming from the man who has referred to his political opponents as “vermin” that needed to be “[rooted] out,” called judges “monsters,” and, in a Memorial Day social media post, described those Americans who oppose his policies as “scum” and accused them of “trying to destroy our country.”
Many experts say the president’s rhetoric toward those who disagree with him — often labelling them as “enemies” and “traitors” — inflames such extremism and contributes to the normalization of political violence.
On his first day in office for his second term, Trump granted full pardons to all those convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — more 1,500 rioters in total, including the 123 individuals charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to a police officer.
Political scientist James Piazza released a study finding that countries where politicians used hate speech “often” or “extremely often” saw an average of 107.9 domestic terrorist attacks compared to just 12.5 in countries where politicians rarely used such language.
The question remains, however, whether our leaders will take the steps they must to end such harmful rhetoric and drive out such violent extremism.
As Sen. Robert Kennedy, whose brother President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, noted in his speech, “On The Mindless Menace of Violence” on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, the violence goes on, and on, and on in this country of ours.
Two months later, on the eve of his victory over Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the California primary, RFK was himself gunned down.
As President Abraham Lincoln wrote in his famous letter to his friend James Conklin during the Civil War: “Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.”
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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.
