Following the shooting death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, tension within the conservative movement over who ultimately bears responsibility, and the tone in which the blame is communicated, are beginning to boil over. While Kirk’s shocking demise on camera during a Utah stop on his college speaking series jolted the right-wing movement into momentary unity through grief, in the days since the shooting, a split has formed between Republicans who responded with calls for vengeance and those who instead urged unity.
Kirk’s killing seems to have shocked the consciousness of conservatives in a way few other acts of gun violence have done. Even Alex Jones, who was infamously ordered by a court to pay for calling the Sandy Hook school shooting a false flag operation and accusing the dead children of being crisis actors, uploaded a video of himself distraught at the news of Kirk’s shooting and blinking away tears in his car. The suspected shooter is a 22-year-old white man raised in a staunchly conservative household with guns. Although investigators have not determined a motive for the assassination, right‑wing media, pundits and some Republican politicians were swift to blame leftist rhetoric broadly.
“They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we gonna do about it?” Fox News host Jesse Watters asked on his show Wednesday night.
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” Elon Musk wrote on X.
“We have to have steely resolve,” conservative political strategist Steve Bannon said on his show “War Room,” before adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
In a speech delivered Wednesday night from the Oval Office, President Trump appeared to agree: “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Calls for reprisal from members of Congress like Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R‑Wis., have ranged from investigations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and deplatforming and prosecuting “those responsible,” to more extreme suggestions of crackdowns on the left. Frequent Fox News contributor Molly Hemingway called for a sort of affirmative action program for conservatives to replace left-wing academics in colleges and universities.
Notably, many of the right-wing voices leading the charge for retribution were vocal critics of Kirk before his death, including Laura Loomer, who deleted recent tweets attacking Kirk for calling on the release of the Epstein Files, and Nick Fuentes, who famously launched “Groyper wars,” a harassment campaign meant to heckle and troll Kirk into moving further to the right on immigration. Fuentes, a popular white supremacist who has been banned from multiple social media sites, said of the left: “They must be censored on social media.”
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
But Kirk’s death was unable to unite some influencers. Following Wednesday’s shooting, longtime Kirk confidant Candace Owens lashed out at Fuentes. “Charlie died but Nick’s the victim,” she wrote on X. “Stop grifting off his death.” Fuentes took a page from the Trump playbook with his reply: “Such a nasty woman.”
Others in the party are trying to stop the sniping. “The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” commentator and author Matt Walsh wrote 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.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., weighed in on Thursday during an interview with National Journal. The senator announced in June that he would not seek reelection a day after he revealed he was opposing Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and his comments made clear he now feels free to speak more candidly. “What I was really disgusted by yesterday is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this. It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement. And there were two in particular that I found particularly disgusting.”
We need your help to stay independent
Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a frequent Trump critic, attempted to push back on that claim that political violence is a one-way street. “I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?” he added, referring to Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, both of whom were fatally shot in June by a Trump supporter. “I don’t think it’s smart,” Bacon said of the dominant tenor on the right. “America needs people to stand above this.”
But such calls for calm and moderation have been met with voracious pushback. “There are no words to describe the pathetic weakness of the Republican Party right now,” complained MAGA media personality Julie Kelly.
After a summer of in-fighting over the release of the Epstein files, Kirk’s killing was a brief moment of unity for MAGA. But there seems to be no peace, no matter how momentary, in the GOP’s long-simmering civil war, not even after a traumatic death. The attempts to stir up right-wing retribution and a Christian revival in Kirk’s memory will undoubtedly continue to splinter when President Donald Trump reclaims his seat at the center of the MAGAverse.
