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The Public Intellectual
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The cruel and horrendous killing of Charlie Kirk was both reprehensible and indefensible. Political assassinations, regardless of the source, are an act of violence against all Americans. Such violence is on the rise, and it is not limited to one ideology: In recent months we have seen attacks against both Republicans and Democrats coming from people with a range of political identities.
A suspect in Kirk’s killing is now in custody in Utah. In a press conference, law enforcement announced that a rifle and bullets found near the scene of the killing were inscribed — some with anti-fascist slogans, and others with what seem to be references to internet memes. While we are still learning about the motivations of the suspect, we do know that the claims made by Trump and his supporters — that political violence is primarily the work of the left, are pure fabrications.
Blaming the left for all political violence is a smear that reproduces a rhetoric of desperation. It functions less as a serious argument than as a pretext for legitimizing state repression. This is quite evident in the fact that Trump and many in the MAGA movement are weaponizing the act of this isolated individual in order to openly call for violence against the left as a whole, seizing on Kirk’s death to peddle accusations that his killing was the work of progressives, as TIME reports. This kind of scapegoating reveals the larger strategy: any event, no matter how tenuous, will be weaponized to justify crackdowns on dissent. What this exposes is not concern for truth or justice but the naked readiness of the Trump regime to unleash violence against critics. This is fascism stripped of disguise, fascism on steroids.
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In his address on Kirk’s death on September 10, Trump claimed that the “radical left” was to blame, insisting that rhetoric comparing “wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” The same narrative quickly spread across right-wing media and social platforms. Influential MAGA voices echoed Trump’s framing, stoking resentment toward the left and portraying Kirk’s killing as a call to arms. Far right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer declared, “The Left are terrorists,” warning that Kirk’s death was only the beginning of “more targeted assassination.” “You could be next,” she wrote, before demanding that “these lunatic leftists” be shut down “once and for all.”
Such rhetoric is part of a broader strategy: to weaponize Kirk’s death as proof that dissent from the left is itself a form of violence that justifies repression.
At this current moment in history, the greatest threat of violence and its normalization comes not only from far right extremists, but also from a government that uses the threat of violence as a tool of political power.
Mainstream media outlets are mostly focusing on Kirk’s death and in doing so rightly condemn his killing as a horrific act of violence. But at the same time, they are ignoring a deeper truth: violence is not an aberration in the United States; rather, it has become central to the politics of Donald Trump and his regime. Moreover, much of the coverage of Kirk reduces him to a sharp debater, a youth organizer, or a rising figure in the far right. What is largely ignored is the substance of his arguments, which helped normalize a culture of hate, white nationalism, authoritarianism, and violence itself.
Kirk’s record is clear. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful,” and labeled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake.” He claimed the racist “Great Replacement” theory is real, insisted that immigration is a deliberate strategy to erode the white population, and derided the very idea of white privilege as a fabrication. He “compared pandemic vaccine requirements to apartheid during a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson.” He argued that Israel was not starving Gazans,” in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He spread a vicious falsehood about Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five, wrongly insisting he had taken part in a gang rape, an attack that was not only defamatory but also part of a long pattern of baselessly criminalizing Black men as predators. Kirk smeared wgay people and “encouraged students and parents to report professors whom they suspected of embracing … gender ideology.” He trafficked in antisemitic stereotypes, once claiming that “Jewish dollars” were funding Marxist ideas in education as well as policy that pushed for open borders.
Perhaps most chilling was his defense of mass gun violence. Kirk declared that some gun deaths, (assuming this includes children), are simply the price “of liberty” to protect the Second Amendment. At a time when classrooms have become sites of recurring carnage, such remarks treat murdered children as collateral damage, erasing the human cost of the U.S.’s obsession with guns and elevating ideology over life itself.
These are not isolated remarks; they form a worldview that dehumanizes, divides, and elevates cruelty into a political principle. To remember Kirk only for his debating skills or his reach among young conservatives is to miss the disturbing truth: he championed ideas that normalized hate and legitimized violence as a way of governing.
This kind of scapegoating reveals the larger strategy: any event, no matter how tenuous, will be weaponized to justify crackdowns on dissent.
Kirk’s murder – tragic and senseless – cannot be separated from the broader U.S. landscape in which violence has become the grammar of politics, hatred is given more weight than compassion, and truth itself is sacrificed at the altar of power. In this climate, the needs of ordinary people and the promise of the common good are not only neglected but treated with disdain. To confront this reality is not to deny grief, but to name honestly the world we now inhabit, one in which the struggle for justice and human dignity has never been more urgent. Kirk’s death is not an aberration but a grim marker in the U.S.’s descent, where violence has become the lifeblood of politics and hatred the currency of power. This is not simply a tragedy — it is the death rattle of democracy itself, a notice that the nation is being hollowed out from within by those who thrive on cruelty and contempt.
According to Reuters’ data, the United States is now in its most sustained stretch of political violence since the 1970s: more than 300 politically motivated attacks have erupted since January 6, 2021. In just the first half of 2025, nearly 150 such incidents have been recorded — almost double the number during the same period last year, according to University of Maryland researcher Michael Jensen. This is not simply a wave but a storm.
According to one study that has been referenced by the National Institute of Justice, between 1990 and 2020, the far right was responsible for 227 ideologically motivated attacks that resulted in 523 deaths, while the far left was linked to only 42 such attacks, causing 78 deaths. These figures almost certainly underestimate the extent of far right violence, since U.S. courts have often been reluctant to classify groups on the right as extremist and because law enforcement agencies have historically directed their surveillance and investigative resources toward the left, leaving right-wing violence less scrutinized.
To make matters worse, the Trump administration removed the reference to this study from the National Institute of Justice website, in addition to removing other data that sought to make sense of the numbers behind ideological violence, an erasure that can only be understood as a politically motivated attempt to downplay the threat posed by far right violence.
Soon after the anniversary of 9/11, it is worth recalling that what followed those attacks was not a defense of democracy but an endless reign of state violence: the devastating invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, torture programs and extraordinary renditions, secret CIA prisons, and the horror of Guantánamo. The lesson is unmistakable: the machinery of political and state violence has long been driven by those in power — not by the left.
This is the climate in which Kirk lived and spoke. To grieve his death honestly is to reckon with the country that made such violence thinkable. Warnings even in the liberal press have too often turned the assassination into a warning aimed not at Trump and his allies but at Democrats, liberals, and the left – cautioning them not to be too harsh in criticizing Kirk’s ideological position lest it fuel Trump’s threat to dismantle democracy. Even worse, some commentators have rushed to defend the abstract principle of free speech while ignoring the substance of Kirk’s far right beliefs and the culture of cruelty he helped to spread. The implicit suggestion is that if liberals and progressives provide “balance” and soften their rhetoric, the cycle of violence will somehow abate.
Such arguments miss the point. They deflect responsibility away from Trump, whose hateful rhetoric has both normalized and legitimized political violence, and place the burden instead on his critics. To imagine that silencing dissent or softening critique will stop the advance of authoritarian violence is not only naïve but dangerous. Trump does not need to weaponize Kirk’s death; he already thrives on scapegoating and making use of tragedy to deepen his culture of fear. The machinery of authoritarian power is already in motion: democracy and the rule of law have been steadily dismantled, the streets militarized, and mass detentions and deportations normalized against those marked by race, origin, or dissenting politics. At the same time, the regime tightens its grip by punishing local officials and judges who resist its illegal edicts. Cities are being militarized as tanks are now rolling through the streets of Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles. What is unfolding is not a response to one tragic event but the consolidation of a politics of terror that has been years in the making.
Kirk’s killing is not merely the sorrowful loss of a single life; it stands as a foreboding emblem of a nation in decline. It signals that the atmosphere of U.S. democracy has grown toxic, choked by a politics of violence. What we are witnessing is not an isolated act but the symptom of a wider rot, the erosion of civic bonds, the elevation of cruelty into common sense, and the slow unravelling of a republic that once fashioned itself, however falsely, as a model of freedom. To treat this moment as nothing more than personal grief is to ignore its darker portent: it announces that the pillars of democracy are cracking, and the edifice itself is beginning to crumble.
The current collapse of democracy is neither accidental nor abstract. It has been fueled by Trump’s poisonous rhetoric, which has turned politics into a theatre of humiliation and cruelty. His demonization of opponents has moved from the fringes into the mainstream, shaping a culture where enemies are to be destroyed rather than debated. In this climate, the very air of public life grows toxic, turning grievance into license.
As Robert Pape warns, U.S. politics may be on the brink “of an extremely violent era … The more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.” When the culture itself becomes a breeding ground for violence — supercharged by the rampant acquisition of guns and the spectacle of cruelty — every killing echoes as more than personal loss. Kirk’s death is not just another entry in the ledger of political violence; it is an omen. It tells us that a republic drunk on resentment and hatred cannot breathe freely, that the poison that a politics of domination has released into the cultural bloodstream cannot be easily contained. If this moment is ignored, if it is seen only as the misfortune of one man rather than the symptom of a larger crisis, then the canary’s warning will have come too late.
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