On Friday, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man from Utah, was arrested and accused of fatally shooting Charlie Kirk. Even before the alleged assassin’s apprehension was announced Friday morning by President Donald Trump on “Fox & Friends,” Republican politicians and right-wing media influencers rushed to use Kirk’s murder as a permission structure to move American politics even more to the right.
At 31, Kirk was one of the most influential and prominent right-wing political activists in American politics. He was widely credited with bringing young conservatives into the electoral process by visiting college campuses to engage them, not by sparring with faculty in a lecture hall, but by debating underclassmen on the quad — the very place he was shot on Wednesday while speaking at Utah Valley University on the first stop of his American Comeback college tour.
As rapidly as the grizzly video of his killing circulated online, many across the political landscape worked to sanitize his legacy of inflammatory rhetoric without interrogating his actual arguments.
Republicans in Congress are hoping to dedicate a statue to the influencer on Capitol Hill and pushing for him to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. Some have gone so far to compare him to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Kirk called a “bad guy.” Meanwhile, King’s son, Martin III, released a statement mourning Kirk’s passing as a “tragedy.” Major professional sports teams from the New York Yankees to the Green Bay Packers observed a moment of silence for Kirk this week. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth performed a public prayer for Kirk in front of gathered troops and shared the video on social media. Flags were lowered to half-mast by order of the president.
While people across the ideological spectrum agree that Kirk’s violent death is part of a concerning trend of growing political violence, the right has insisted on blaming the left for its rise, despite statements from Democrats condemning the fatal shooting.
While people across the ideological spectrum agree that Kirk’s violent death is part of a concerning trend of growing political violence, the right has insisted on blaming the left for its rise, despite statements from Democrats condemning the fatal shooting.
Eric Trump called for “accountability from MSNBC and NBC.” On Fox News, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu suggested Muslims were somehow to blame. “If you have a different opinion from the left, they want to kill you. That is a fact, and that’s the way you all should report it,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., told reporters. Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, called for a House select committee on left-wing violence. On Thursday, the State Department announced it would review the legal status of immigrants who praised, rationalized or made light of Kirk’s death. Hegseth announced that the Defense Department is policing the speech of service members. On Fox News, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said, “The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.”
The Democratic National Committee, several historically Black colleges and the homes of the Maryland House speaker and Senate president, on the other hand, received bomb threats the day after Kirk’s killing.
Much of the right seized upon a report published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday while the alleged gunman was still on the loose. “Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology: Sources,” the story’s initial headline read, irresponsibly amplifying right-wing podcaster and comedian Steven Crowder’s claim that he had received details from an anonymous Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives source. “Investigators found ammunition engraved with expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology inside the rifle that authorities believe was used in the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, according to an internal law-enforcement bulletin and a person familiar with the investigation,” the paper reported. The Journal’s reporting was picked up by the New York Post, Jerusalem Post and other outlets.
As Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of the New Republic noted, “early status reports are usually not made public due to their low reliability.” Hours after the Journal’s report went viral, the New York Times cited an unnamed senior law enforcement official who said the report may have been “misread or misinterpreted.” The Journal eventually updated its headline to read, “Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution.” By then, however, the anti-trans narrative was already cast on the right.
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Right-wing influencers like Laura Loomer were also determined to push the administration toward another target: “Leftist” organizations.
On Wednesday, just an hour after Trump announced Kirk’s death, Loomer was already making recommendations to the administration. “The best way President Trump can reinforce Charlie’s legacy is by cracking down on the Left with the full force of the government,” she posted on X. “Every single Left wing group that funds violent protests needs to be shut down and prosecuted.” Elon Musk echoed the sentiment on X: “The Left is the party of murder.”
The administration, it seems, is listening.
Asked Friday on Fox News how we “fix this country,” Trump shrugged off any responsibility for leadership. “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” he replied. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.’”
The president concluded: “The radicals on the left are the problem.”
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By Saturday morning, Miller was posting on X about “a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination” that had infiltrated American society, including “gov’t workers, even DOD employees.”
Later that evening, after reports emerged from Fox News and the New York Post that Robinson’s roommate was reportedly transgender, Loomer continued to goad Trump and Miller on X, tagging them in a post to “rid America of the trans movement.” She wrote, “He can shut these people down and take away their funding and make sure none of these freaks are able to benefit from a 501c3 status…If not now, when?” In another, she said she was “confident [Miller] could lead the charge.” Hours earlier, she had specified one group in particular: The Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ equality.
“I’d like to see it [the nation] heal,” Trump told NBC News on Saturday. “But we’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics, and they don’t play fair and they never did.”
The president ignited a firestorm by preemptively blaming the left for Kirk’s killing before anyone knew who the shooter was. Coupled with FBI Director Kash Patel posting inaccurate information to social media in the middle of the manhunt for Kirk’s killer and less than credible leaks to the media, it now seems the administration is intent on using an act of violence to intimidate and crackdown on its political enemies.
