Dear American Right, The “Violent Rhetoric” Is Coming From Inside Your House

Kirk As the New Horst Wessel/Ernst vom Rath/Reichstag Fire

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk Wednesday, all over the right-wing political world and commentariat we’ve seen mouth-frothing rage, as authoritarian crybullies blame the killing on the “violent rhetoric of the left” and attempt to leverage it as a pretext for repressing or liquidating the political opposition. The far right has attempted to turn him into a martyr on the model of Horst Wessel (an SA brawler for whom a Nazi marching song was named) or Ernst vom Rath (a German diplomat assassinated in Paris who was used as a bloody shirt for Krystallnacht), or use him as a “Reichstag Fire,” a pretext to “go full Bukele.”

Meanwhile, liberal or centrist figures like Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom are bending over backwards to praise Kirk for “doing it the right way” and call on people to “continue his work,” because — despite decades of evidence to the contrary that even a three-year-old should be able to understand — they operate under the delusion that if they just roll over and show their bellies to the mouth-frothing right-wing mobs one more time they’ll leave them alone. And far more than far right propagandists, it’s because of the cowardice or opportunism of people like Klein and Newsom that millions of people who never heard of Charlie Kirk and have no idea what gutter filth spewed from his mouth only know of him as that good-faith debater guy who tried to do politics the right way.

But that’s a serious mistake. Conceding the debate will only embolden the fascists and strengthen their hand in the future, while weakening the opposition and further demoralizing people who expect it to fight back.

We must respond to the attempted gaslighting by fighting back with the truth about what Charlie Kirk said, did, and stood for. As Ilhan Omar put it: “There are a lot of people who are out there talking about him just wanting to have a civil debate. These people are full of shit, and it’s important for us to call them out while we feel anger and sadness.”

None of this is to say that he deserved to be shot. He presented no imminent threat that would have justified lethal force in self-defense. And even the worst human beings are capable of learning, growth, and change, and becoming better people — an avenue that was forever closed off for him.

Donald Trump was in the forefront of efforts to capitalize on Kirk’s death as an excuse to persecute his enemies:

It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

The following day, speaking on the South Lawn of the White House, he said:

We have to be brave in life, in all fairness, we have a life. I probably shouldn’t be out here talking to you in all fairness but we will be brave. And we have a great country. We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.

Bear in mind that this pearl-clutching over the “demonization” of Kirk as a Nazi comes from a man who, as we will see in more detail below, has repeatedly demonized his own political enemies and entire demographic groups as far-left Communists, Marxists, fascists, vermin, and poisoners of the nation’s blood.

In writing this column, I suppose I run the risk of being classified by Trump as an instigator of terrorism since, as A.R. Moxon points out, “American conservatives tend to cast accurate naming and exposure of what they do and say as a violent threat against them.”

Katie Miller, a conservative political adviser and wife of prominent Nazi and racist Stephen Miller, whined: “You called us Hitler. You called us Nazis. You called us Racists. You have blood on your hands.”

Mollie Hemingway, Editor in Chief of The Federalist, complained of “the media and other prominent Democrat activists prepping the ground for open season on and assassination of conservatives.” Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the publication, tweeted: “I hope that Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho-terrorist network that has been terrorizing Christians in this nation unabated for more than a decade.”

Further on the right, calls proliferated for official war against the left, liberals, and the “Democratic Party.” For example Joey Mannarino: “The Democrat Party must be classified as a domestic terror organization and their members & leaders treated accordingly.” And again:

Trump has to go full Bukele. Now.

Fill the jails up with these terrorists.

White nationalist Matt Forney put it even more extremely:

Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.

Also:

The left must pay. Ban the Democratic Party. Shut down CNN and MSNBC. Military tribunals. If you are to the left of Lindsay Graham, you belong in prison. YOU CAUSED THIS.

In mainstream media interviews, right-wingers’ self-victimization reflexes were in full force. Some chud from a “major conservative organization” was interviewed on NPR Morning Edition on September 11 preaching about how the left’s “demonization” caused this. Michel Martin pointed out some examples of extreme demonizing rhetoric on the right, and the guy started hysterically sobbing: “I can see why you’re being defunded.”

The Truth: The Violence Is On the Right

But this is all bullshit. As Alex Nowrasteh points out, political violence by the right has outnumbered that by the left 6-1 in recent years. Consider a breakdown of some recent major incidents:

• The man who targeted and killed Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home in Minnesota in June was a Trump supporter.
• The man charged with the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, in April was a Trump supporter.
• The man convicted of orchestrating a series of shooting[s] at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022 was a Trump supporter.
• The man who tried to kidnap then Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband, Paul, in 2022 was a Trump supporter.
• The men who wanted to hang Mike Pence on Jan 6, 2021, were Trump supporters.
• The man who killed the son of Obama-appointed District Judge Esther Salas in 2020 was a Trump supporter.
• The men who were convicted of trying to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in 2020 were Trump supporters.
• The man who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and other top Democrats in 2018 was a Trump supporter.
• The man who killed left-wing activist Heather Heyer after driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville in 2017 was a Trump supporter.

There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years. In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by… right-wingers.

Further, the history of political violence throughout American history has been overwhelmingly right-wing. Violence by the powerful and their proxies — state, paramilitary, and vigilante violence — against subject and marginalized populations, to keep them in subjection and get their minds right when they get out of line, has been a constant throughout the country’s history. The history of the slave patrols; the various iterations of the Klan; strike-breaking by state militias, Pinkertons, and the American Legion; the Palmer raids; the white race riots that created hundreds of “sundown towns”; COINTELPRO and the assassination of Fred Hampton… these are as American as apple pie. Throughout American history, every time there’s been mobilization and victory by marginalized groups or workers, the response on the right has been state, paramilitary, and vigilante violence.

The right frequently as much as admits as it. Not only do they contrast their own ideology as one of “tough-mindedness,” condemn the “sin of empathy,” and celebrate the role of violence (“God, guns, guts”) in building this country; but they mock liberals for general softness and wimpiness, frequently taunting them with their lack of capacity for violence in a coming civil war.

Charlie Kirk’s History of Violent, Demonizing Rhetoric.

Charlie Kirk himself had a long history of demonizing political opponents and marginalized people, and presenting them as existential threats. How’s this for demonization?

The Democrat Party supports everything that god hates … I hope you give a Sunday sermon and you talk about how the Democrat Party believes everything that god hates.

He joked about the hammer assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband:

Why has he not been bailed out?… By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out, I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks.

He opined not only that there should be public executions, but that children should witness them. “Death penalties should be public, should be quick, it should be televised. I think at a certain age, its an initiation…What age should you start to see public executions?”

And of course, he heavily promoted the white genocide trope, including the alleged leading role of Jews in it:

In October 2023, just days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Kirk drew controversy after he derided Jewish philanthropy to American universities for “subsidizing your own demise by supporting institutions that breed Anti-Semites and endorse genocidal killers.”

Weeks later on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” he also said that Jewish people control “not just the colleges; it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

Kirk also said ”the number one funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits” is “Jewish donors.”

Of course, none of this stopped Ashley Rindsberg at Fox News from whining about statements that Kirk promoted the “antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,” when, according to Rindsberg, “Kirk was widely known as one of the most influential supporters of American Jews in the country.”

As you might expect, Kirk was also a strong promoter of the myth of anti-white persecution.

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

…Okay, I’m going to say it. More than six hundred white women a year are murdered by Black men. Six hundred white women a year. Did you know that? By Blacks. So six hundred white women are murdered by Blacks a year. One just happened, well he was a Hispanic, he might have been half-Black doesn’t really matter, here in Scottsdale. Young, twenty-nine-year-old girl, walking on a hiking trail, and a trans-Hispanic comes and stabs her to death.

He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” and warned that we were heading toward “white genocide” like that supposedly occurring in South Africa.

Where is this headed? South Africa. That’s where this is headed. They repeatedly have calls for genocide against white people….

How much — and by the way, why are whites taking this? Why are we just sitting idly by and allowing corporate America to give all the jobs to nonwhite people, and the destruction of meritocracy?

And just to put the icing on the racist cake:

If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us! They’re coming out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.”

Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

Likewise: “…if I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I don’t — I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?”

Oh — don’t forget LGBT, and particularly transgender, people.

These people are sick… I blame the decline of American men,” Kirk said. “Someone should have just took care of it [sic] the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s.

He characterized “the transgender thing happening in America” as “a throbbing middle finger to God” and then proceeds to deadname Lia Thomas and tell her “you’re an abomination to God.” He also quoted a Bible verse used to justify stoning gay people, and called the verse “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”

And how’s this for “calling for political violence”: “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer’s, corrupt, tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

Aside from his own violent, red meat rhetoric, Kirk was at best lukewarm in admonishing his more enthusiastic followers when they called for violence. At an event in Idaho, an audience member asked: “When do we get to use the guns? … How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?” Kirk prefaced his reply by reassuring the questioner that he was on their side, but then warning that his “overly blunt” rhetoric was “playing into their hands,” before agreeing that “we are living under fascism.”

Charlie the Fake “Free Speech Advocate” and Real Totalitarian.

It’s also bullshit that he was a “free speech advocate.” This “free speech advocate” created a Professor Watchlist, encouraging students to inform on professors who said “woke” things in class, in order to instigate harassment against them. One of them, Stacey Patton, reported:

I am on Charlie Kirk’s hit list.

His so-called “Professor Watchlist,” run under the umbrella of Turning Point USA, is nothing more than a digital hit list for academics who dare to speak truth to power. I landed there in 2024 after writing commentary that inflamed the MAGA faithful. And once my name went up, the harassment machine roared to life.

For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: “bitch,” “c*nt,” “n****r.” They threatened all manner of violence.

They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that I be fired.

Now, after the fact, his partisans want to rewrite his history of violent rhetoric and frame him as a “debater,” a voice of reason. James Woods, for example:

The left says they want “national conversations.” Charlie Kirk actually did just that. In the lion’s den, no less, at left-leaning venues, hoping facts and common sense would prevail. And they murdered him for it.

At Reason, Intellectual Dark Web wannabe Robby Soave gushed: “He did not confine himself to the company of the already converted, and he seemed to enjoy venturing into the fray and arguing with liberals and leftists — the more of them at once, the better.” His colleague Liz Wolfe, like Robby fond of calling Black women “affirmative action hires,” was equally sycophantic: “He valued the art of persuasion, of discourse, of changing a mind or letting your own be molded, as it so often is, by fierce exchange.”

All of this is, once again — all together now — bullshit. The nature of the “debate” Kirk was engaged in at the time of his death is itself instructive.

Audience member: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

Kirk: Too many

Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

Kirk: Counting or not counting gang members?

The questioner asked the number of trans shooters and total number of mass shooters in order to establish the numerator and denominator, and thereby show what a tiny fraction of mass shootings were actually committed by trans people. Kirk, seeing the bind he was in, immediately pivoted to another talking point in order to shift from demonizing trans people to demonizing non-whites. He was literally in the process of losing — badly — one of his precious “debates,” while using sophistry to stave off defeat. As Mike Masnick described his Duane Gish “debating” style:

He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

The right’s perception of it is a reflection mainly on their critical thinking capacity. Here’s how Jack Posobiec dishonestly characterized that pathetic performance: “Charlie died fighting, even as a question was asked about violence and chaos in our country. His last public act was speaking into the storm with courage and clarity.”

Kirk’s idea of “debate” was, in fact, a living illustration of the worthlessness and banality of the so-called “conservative ideas” we supposedly close ourselves off from in our left-wing “echo chambers” and “bubbles.”

Kirk Was Typical of the Right’s Violent, Eliminationist Rhetoric

As already seen above, violence has always been inherent in the ideologies of the right and in the American power structure. It’s baked into the “paranoid style in American politics.” Since the emergence of the New Rights after WWII, we’ve had our Phyllis Schlaflys, Willis Cartos, and angry grandpas ruining Thanksgiving by muttering darkly about “George Soros” and the “globalists.”

But the right’s rhetoric took a major step in the direction of violence with the election of Barack Obama, which drove a sizeable share of the white population absolutely bonkers with paranoia and rage, and the formation of the so-called Tea Party. And it continued to escalate by orders of magnitude as channer-manufactured online projects like Gamergate, Comicsgate, StandWithVic, the Men’s Rights movement, etc., cooked the brains of millions of young men — followed by Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the MAGA movement, QAnon, and anti-vaxxine batshittery. The panic over the “transgender ideology” was completely manufactured whole cloth as an astroturf project, much like the anti-abortion movement in the ‘70s; but it succeeded in further cooking the brains of white men. The right whines about “woke mobs,” but the actual mobs are Gamergaters and other manbabies swarming people like Anita Sarkeesian, Sarah Jeong, and Leslie Jones with death and rape threats.

It’s no exaggeration to say that death threats have become standard operating procedure for the right. For example, consider Tim Nordin, president of the Eau Claire Area School District, who

was at home ahead of a school board meeting in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, last spring when he checked his email and found a threatening message from someone with the alias “Kill All Marxist Teachers.”

“I am going to kill you and shoot up your next school-board meeting for promoting the horrific, radical transgender agenda. It’s now time to declare war on you pedos. I am going to kill you and your entire family”…

As the article points out, this is a logical consequence of the dehumanizing, eliminationist rhetoric current on the right.

Right-wing personalities now routinely — and falsely — refer to LGBTQ people as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” They’ve also accused teachers of “grooming” children, while claiming doctors “mutilate” and “sterilize” minors. The result has been an escalation in threats targeting trans-inclusive hospitals and school districts generally, as well as specific workers within them.

Then there’s the Texas legislator who stated his proposed response to undocumented immigrants as “shoot, shovel, shut up.” True to form, in a country that produced the Ku Klux Klan.

Chief among the voices of violence and hate on the right is Trump himself. The man is unable to give a single speech without demonizing and dehumanizing his enemies, resorting to eliminationist and “enemy within” rhetoric, and calling for violence against them. In a timeline of incendiary Trump rhetoric at The Atlantic, the president can be seen instigating or celebrating violence against reporters and hecklers:

On hecklers: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?”

“Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my guy!” October 18, 2018, referring to then-Representative Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for physically assaulting a reporter.

On two separate occasions he called for the imprisonment of reporters, and the use of prison rape as a tool of extortion, to force them to reveal the names of leakers.

Trump has also dehumanized immigrants and the opposition party as “vermin” and “poisoning our blood,” and presented them as existential threats:

We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.

I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries … We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.

It is the enemy from within. And they’re very dangerous—they’re Marxists and Communists and fascists … They’re dangerous for our country. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick; they’re so evil.

On undocumented immigrants, Trump has said, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country:”

In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state. And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. They should have never been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.

The Atlantic article didn’t mention Trump’s attempt to incite a racist pogrom against Haitians with the blood libel that they’re “eating the pets,” or the constant lies from Trump, Noem and Leavitt that the immigrants they’re arrested — many of them on their way to comply with immigration law, because Stephen Miller considers them the easiest to kidnap — are “dangerous MS-13 gang members.”

Trump also joked about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and posted a meme on Truth Social showing an AI slop image of helicopters leaving a city skyline in flames and quoting the Kilgore line about the “smell of napalm” from Apocalypse Now, along with a declaration of “War” against Chicago.

Throughout 2024, Trump, his campaign staff, and auxiliaries like Marjorie Taylor Greene constantly paraded a string of stories from the press about alleged violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants — most notably Greene shrieking “Say her name — Lakin Reilly” during the State of the Union Address. All of this despite the fact that immigrants — whether documented or not — commit crimes at lower rates than the native born. But as with the minuscule numbers of actual trans-involved mass shootings or late-term abortions, or the declining rates of violent crime in big cities (Chicago, in fact, has a significantly lower murder rates than many cities in Red States), statistics don’t matter; stupid people think in anecdotes, not statistics.

In closing, I quote Erin Reed:

Political violence is corrosive and we must not excuse it — killing Charlie Kirk was horrific. But we also must not sanitize the memory of a man who wished harm on those he disagreed with, and who spread a message of hate to anyone willing to listen or pay him to so [sic]. We can denounce the violent killing of Charlie Kirk without praising his abhorrent legacy.

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