Charlie Kirk, a conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, was brutally assassinated while participating in a live debate in Utah. As of this writing, the assassin has not been caught. FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted that the suspect had been apprehended, but a little while later tweeted that suspect had been released, and that the investigation was ongoing:
Because it’s not clear who shot Kirk, it’s not known what the motive was. It could be a confused, politically inscrutable lunatic, like the two assassins that took aim at Donald Trump last year. It could be someone on the political left, who hated Kirk’s conservative politics; there were certainly plenty of those. Or it could be someone on the political right, who thought Kirk wasn’t sufficiently rightist. For example, Kirk had received a lot of hate from the white supremacists known as “groypers”:
And Kirk certainly had rivals for influence within the MAGA movement, such as Laura Loomer.
So unless and until the killer is caught, we won’t have any idea about the motive behind Kirk’s murder. That fact should be obvious. And yet it’s not stopping many figures on the political right from assuming that the killer was a lefty, and calling for extreme measures in response:
This seems very foolish to me. First of all, it’s risky to jump to conclusions. If the killer is caught and turns out to have been a rightist, or a politically confused nutcase, what are all of these people screaming for war against “the left” going to say? “Ahh well, nevertheless”?
Second of all, hatred begets hatred, and violence begets violence. When people like Elon Musk and Matt Walsh blame their political enemies for something like this, it simply encourages rightists to go out and do more of the same. Maybe that makes sense if you think you’re in the middle of a civil war, and the way to fight that war is to sit safely behind your keyboard and make inflammatory remarks until someone somewhere with less to lose goes out and murders someone from the other team. But if you’re a sane, normal, reasonable person who wants to go to work and love their family and have a functional, stable country, then you shouldn’t go around screeching for civil war.
Even worse, some right-wing influencers are using Kirk’s assassination to call for the implementation of fascism and a violent purge of the Democratic Party:
