After the fatal shooting of right-wing personality Charlie Kirk on Wednesday afternoon, the rhetoric on the right quickly escalated. Influential voices on social media declared war on the left,despite the absence of any knowledge about the suspect or their motive at the time.
President Donald Trump made a formal address where he pledged to go after the “radical left.”
“We are seeing language weaponized so swiftly,” says Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard.
“I think the Trump administration has a clear track record at this point of taking these little chips that they can leverage to induce state repression and encroach on civil liberties,” says Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lennard and Breland about the implications of Kirk’s killing and how we think about political violence in the U.S.
“We already know that whoever it does turn out to be, we are living in a moment with an authoritarian government that will weaponize this moment either way,” says Lennard. “This is about finding any opportunity to further escalate the white nationalist project.”
“I worry that his assassination is a progression toward something darker in which a wider group of people are considered to be targets for political violence,” says Breland. “And I don’t think that the rhetoric that’s coming out right now is doing anything to stop it or off-ramp us on this dark path.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy : Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.
On Wednesday afternoon, right-wing personality Charlie Kirk was killed at an event at Utah Valley University.
As news broke, many quickly deemed the shooting a political assassination. As of this recording, Thursday afternoon, the suspect and motive were still unknown. Despite that, Kirk’s killing set off dueling debates around political violence in the United States: Who wages it and how do we define it?
It also fueled a battle to define Kirk’s legacy. Kirk, who many have described as a conservative activist, often took far more extreme positions.
He had a long record of comments denigrating Black people, women, gay and trans people, and immigrants. Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, pushed a Christian nationalist vision of America that, as we’ve discussed on this show, fuels a major part of the MAGA base. The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote of the group: “[TPUSA] exploits complicated feelings of insecurity and anxiety to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order.”
While Kirk started out in the more moderate wing in the conservative party, his politics grew more extreme as his reach exploded, particularly among young people on college campuses. Some on the far-right responded to Kirk’s killing by declaring that war had arrived.
In the wake of the shooting, many valorized Kirk’s legacy, sometimes framing him as, foremost, a deft political actor without accounting for the political implications of his rhetoric.
Joining me now to break all of this down is Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard.
Welcome to the show Ali and Natasha.
Natasha Lennard: Hello. Nice to be here.
Ali Breland: Thank you for having me as well.
AL: I want to note that we are speaking on Thursday, September 11.
Before we get into the shooting: Who is Charlie Kirk, and how did he rise to prominence in right wing political and intellectual spaces? Ali, I’d like to start with you.
AB: Yeah, Charlie Kirk, he’s a lot of things at once, which makes him very valuable. So like very zoomed out: He is a connector. The zoomed-in version is that he’s this influencer who has risen to prominence by running a very successful podcast, running a very successful tour where he goes to different college events and college campuses and debate students from a right-wing perspective.
But then he also has built this extremely robust organization called Turning Point USA, which organizes student conservative groups and then also interfaces to some degree with administration officials. It’s become this really massively powerful organization on the right that is quite influential in both organizing [young] people to show up to the right-wing movement. But then potentially influencing policy in some cases and influencing the Trump administration.
AL : Tash, how would you describe Kirk?
NL: The way Ali put it is absolutely correct. He’s a huge force on the Trumpian right, particularly, representative of the upsurge of white nationalist, Christian nationalist young men, who he indeed committed his life to organizing, particularly focusing on college campuses. This is a man who engaged in a performance of debate. So he’s perhaps best known as one of the “debate me” right. I’ve always framed this — and continue to do so — as a shtick. I see it as window dressing. This is a performance by which he can move around colleges and condescend to young men and women at least a decade younger than him.
“His actual commitment is to the broader Trumpian project, which is making the body politic and those permitted to speak within it as small as possible.”
But his actual commitment is to the broader Trumpian project, which is making the body politic and those permitted to speak within it as small as possible. So the elimination of trans people from public life as far as is possible — through policy and on university campuses and educational spaces in particular — extremely pro-Zionist, the weaponization of antisemitism on college campuses to silence pro-Palestinian speech, pro-mass incarceration, extraordinarily racist in comments he’s made around what constitutes crime and criminality, and a huge supporter of Trump’s deportation machine.
So we find ourselves at a moment within hours of his death when we don’t know who the shooter was. No one has been apprehended and identified at the time of speaking, but immediately the entire Trumpian right has jumped to demonize and lambast the entire broader left as somehow responsible.
And so it’s a dangerous moment.
AL: We’re going to touch on that, but first I’ll go back to you, Ali. What was it about Kirk that was so enticing about his message and made and drew younger voters to him in particular?
AB: Yeah. On some base level, it was just oratory, like just a radical scale — the ability to speak very well and speak convincingly and reduce complex ideas to this very simple palatable way of speaking.
I was just watching his memorial show, and the COO of Turning Point USA was talking about how one of his earlier conversations in the organization with Charlie, as they were founding TPUSA was specifically to create this — it was to make what they called like a battle tank instead of a think tank. And not just develop new ideas and policies, but develop this very convincing and palatable way of presenting it to make it more convincing to young people. And to get the quote that he said was, average Americans to engage with it and want to engage with it too.
Add on to what Natasha was saying earlier, the way that this manifested was both in, I think, more conventional and moderate ideas of conservatism, especially initially. Then as his project grew and as the years went on, he started to become much more extreme, but he still retained this influence in the more moderate conservative world. And I think that was really his value, was that he had a foot in understanding what was going on in the far-right internet and like figuring out how to, in a very savvy way, incorporate that into his project and speak to those people while also being respectable enough to get meetings with Don Jr. and the White House. And be seen as this more mainstream figure in a way that a lot of people with those views really can’t fully do and can’t fully stay in the mainstream.
AL: Natasha, in the aftermath of the shooting, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether this will exacerbate political violence in the United States. I also want to mention, just as we’re talking about political violence and mass shootings within hours of this happening, there was a shooting at a high school in Denver that has been overshadowed in much of the coverage.
First, how do you each define political violence and where does hateful speech — racist, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic speech — and the political effects of that speech fall here? Natasha, I’ll start with you.
NL: I’ve always taken quite a kind of capacious view when thinking about political violence to the extent that after an assassination, a shooting like this, when we see politicians across the political spectrum, but even including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez putting out messages — and they’re now platitudinous at this point — along the lines of “political violence has no space in this country,” it’s both misplaced and kind of risible.
This country is the home of so much political violence structurally so— through its foundations in Indigenous slaughter, slavery, exploitation, dispossession, mass shootings seen nowhere else on the planet and rates of incarceration seen nowhere else on the planet. So we can’t help ourselves to any space within this country that is not in some way ordered by and drenched in histories and continuities of political violence. Which makes it all the more dangerous in moments like this when events and dramatic events and high-octane events can be so weaponized to place the fault and the origins of political violence in one small corner, as we’ve seen the right immediately do.
But I do think in terms of, if we are thinking just empirically numbers wise, which we can’t ignore, it remains the case by a vast degree that the majority of politically motivated violent attacks in the most archetypal way of thinking about it, are still to this day committed by members of the far right and almost all cis men. That remains true despite far right claims to the opposite.
AL: Ali, I want to bring you in here too. How do you define political violence? And I’ll bring up this question too, about where hateful speech and the effects of that speech fits into this picture, if at all?
AB: Yeah, I mean, I think that there are tiers. I think that the most clear conventionally understood one is acts of physical violence that specifically bring harm onto individuals. So, you know, like assassinations, fighting or targeting people. And then there is a tier of a different type of violence that doesn’t show up in studies. And I think is still pernicious and bad, but it’s a distinct thing where you engage in this otherizing or marginalizing rhetoric that can both, I guess in its own way, feel violent, but then more importantly can induce or create the conditions to produce violence toward others.
But yeah, I think generally when I’m talking and thinking about political violence, especially right now, I’m thinking of it in the context of ascendant, like assassinations or in years of led context where there were these attacks and acts of terrorism in Italy or things like that.
AL: Tash, after news broke that Kirk was shot and then died, influential right-wing personalities went on social media to declare war on the left, even though at the time the suspect and motive were still unknown. Then Donald Trump released a video amplifying those messages and said — in the broadest terms —that his administration would go after “the radical left” and the organizations that support them.
Many on the right are calling Kirk a martyr, which is a very loaded word. And I’ll just note as of this recording, the suspect is still unknown, but the FBI has released a photo of a person of interest. But Tash, how is this language being weaponized?
NL: We are seeing language weaponized so swiftly. We’re seeing an almost immediate transmutation of an act of about which we know — at this time, at the time of speaking — almost nothing into a clear and highly and swiftly pronounced and announced political campaign. So you have people like Laura Loomer calling essentially open season on the broadest framing of who could count for left. And blaming the entire left and anyone associated with it for this shooting.
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Donald Trump specifically in his public address spoke of the rhetoric as being responsible, spoke of terrorism. So all the words immediately marshaled speak to a very serious threat of political repression. You also had the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo — famed of course, for turning critical race theory into a boogeyman across the country and informing the attacks we see ongoing in higher education; he very specifically called in no uncertain terms for a return of J. Edgar Hoover’s approach to crushing left wing political activism. So these are open calls to revive some of what had been condemned as some of the darkest points of U.S. 20th century history, COINTELPRO-style tactics, McCarthyite repression. And you have influential figures in Trump’s universe saying we are not even pretending this isn’t exactly what we’re calling for.
I find it a very dangerous moment.
AL: Ali, you’ve covered Kirk and the broader right. What do you make of this? How language is being weaponized in this moment and, as Natasha is speaking to, historically?
AB: There’s like two different columns of things that I’m concerned by, and one of them is this rhetoric inducing literal violent backlash. And there being like a spiral of violence that people have talked about that, in addition to these big influential people who are the most important here, you can see this echoing down in less influential but still notable posters on the far right who maybe won’t do things themselves but have notable followings who are encouraging even more directly violent sentiment.
And then the other column Natasha talked about too is state repression. And this is being used as justification to just add a little bit onto what you said already. I think the Trump administration has a clear track record at this point of taking these little chips that they can leverage to induce state repression and encroach on civil liberties and trying to ride them as hard as they can.
So, Edward Coristine being attacked, the DOGE employee, was a little bit of the justification as to why federal agents went into Washington, D.C. Charlie Kirk getting killed is a much bigger deal than that. That potentially gives them a bigger chip to use and I don’t see why they won’t, given their track record so far.
AL: Ali, conspiracy theories over Kirk’s shooting sprang up instantly online. We also saw this in the case of the shooting of the two Minnesota lawmakers earlier this summer and with the shooting of Donald Trump last year. What do you make of the way in which the absence of facts and information, misinformation and disinformation spreads today, and the way in which it is politicized?
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AB: I think about this a lot, and I don’t — I want to have better answers for this than I do. But my basic answer is that it’s concerning. It’s not good. And I’ve observed this, other people have observed this. My colleague Charlie Warzel has written about this in different ways. But it increasingly seems like, or just seems like for lots of people, conspiracy theories are just the fundamental mode by which we process large, mainstream, hard-to-understand events in the news. And that there’s always a very, very notable set of people that will immediately come up with some conspiracy theory.
I saw on Threads this conspiracy went viral, that this is a false flag that is intentionally set down. And Charlie’s life was essentially sacrificed to allow the Trump administration carte blanche to do what it wants.
I think that the genesis point of this is political and it’s a sign of a society that is very unequal and unstable, but I just don’t feel confident in understanding completely what’s generating it, but I do feel confident it’s not good.
AL: Tash, what are your thoughts?
NL: Yes, just following on from what Ali said. It’s what drives this very conspiratorial moment and the leaps to assign a certain political narrative so quickly in the absence of knowledge, I think it would take libraries to really, really pick apart.
But I think what we can say already is that we don’t yet know who the shooter was. But we already know that whoever it does turn out to be, we are living in a moment with an authoritarian government that will weaponize this moment either way, and have decided to do so. So the facts of the matter, of course, are important, but will any sort of revelations regardless of who the shooter is shift this government, the Trump government and his acolytes, plans and policies and desires and inaction to further repress dissent — left-wing voices, marginalized voices, trans voices? Absolutely not. They’ve made this clear. This is not about what actually happened. This is about finding any opportunity to further escalate the white nationalist project, which is inherently violent, and indeed is the water in which such stochastic violent events can occur.
[Break]
AL: Natasha, the killing happened when Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University. How does the location of a college campus for this shooting affect the nature of the response given the role of colleges in historical social movements?
NL: I’ll admit ignorance about any of the histories and specifics of this Utah college campus. I think, you know, Kirk, so much of his work, so much of his activism was centered around college campuses and holding forth and taking spaces there and producing a kind of a youth movement around his revanchist project — the rights’ revanchist project.
Obviously, we are at a moment, and have been particularly, in the nearly two years of genocide, Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza that campuses have become a site of political struggle and a site particularly of major conservative repression against left-wing speech, against pro-Palestinian speech. And the idea that they are — and this is a claim the right have been making, people like Christopher Rufo on the forefront of this for years, even before Trump’s second term and throughout the Biden administration — that college campuses are this threat, this site of massive communist liberatory risk to United States of America’s freedoms. Of course, we are at a moment of — and I teach at university in New York — 30 years of the neoliberalization of the university now further imperiled by far-right control, censorship, and attacks on academic freedom in the most extreme ways we’ve seen since McCarthyism at least.
So to have more grounds for censorship, alleged claims for needs for security on campuses, is no good thing, of course. But I just think we are likely to see more weaponization, more mischaracterizations from the right about university life in general.
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AL: You know, we touched on the issue of mass shootings as a uniquely American phenomenon. I mentioned this shooting in Colorado, which was the 47th shooting to take place at a high school this year. There is such a disconnect between how numb we have become to that kind of political violence where I don’t even think we consider — do we consider a mass shooting political violence, or do we just consider it a function of where we are? I don’t know if either of you have thoughts on that.
AB: Yeah, I mean, it’s born of politics and it’s related to politics. I think it’s important to not lose sight of that distinction about how it is something that’s clearly like rot of what happens or is related to what happens in Washington.
Maybe to make too obvious of a point, I personally do think about it differently in that it seems to be making a sort of different point in most cases. Sometimes there’s crossover, but I guess it just depends.
AL: Tash?
“There is no apolitical or unpolitical mass shooting event in this country. ”
NL: I think we can talk about the fact of mass shootings in the U.S. as an unequivocally political morbid symptom that won’t stop without political intervention. But I agree with Ali. We can talk about politically motivated attacks in terms of what the politics of a given shooting involve, in terms of motivation, in terms of consequences. And again, with this particular shooting, the first aspect of who the shooter is and whatever motivations they might be, we don’t know. So yeah, I think it’s worth making those distinctions, but there is no apolitical or unpolitical mass shooting event in this country.
AL: For both of you, I just want to ask for your final thoughts and what’s missing from this conversation that we haven’t touched on already.
AB: I guess one of my final thoughts is that I’m concerned that this widens the aperture for the potential kinds of violence that can reverberate back into politics.
We’re already in an uptrend. More political violence has happened over the past several years than the past decade than it did prior. It’s at historical heights that we haven’t seen in decades. But it was contained, it was bad, but it was mostly contained to elected officials — with maybe some small exceptions, or in the case of Luigi Mangione, a CEO who’s in a formal position of power.
Kirk retains power and influence but, I think, is in a less formal role, and I worry that his assassination is a progression toward something darker in which a wider group of people are considered to be targets for political violence. And I don’t think that the rhetoric that’s coming out right now is doing anything to stop it or off-ramp us on this dark path.
AL: Tash?
**NL:**Yes, I would agree. And, any escalations, especially given the asymmetries of power, and indeed the asymmetries of gun power in this country, mean that any sort of escalation and spiral further toward that direction puts those who are already more vulnerable at higher risk. And again, political violence or politically motivated violence, even in the most traditionally understood terms — the sorts of which is tracked by the ADL historically, which is the conservative Anti-Defamation League — still has far-right motivated attacks against masses of people and against minorities as the overwhelming majority. So I think that we are not seeing a specific trend away from that, but any sort of escalation is dangerous and all the more dangerous at this moment.
“What we do not need is the whitewashing of Charlie Kirk’s politics to make it sound like he was open-minded.”
What we do not need is the whitewashing of Charlie Kirk’s politics to make it sound like he was open-minded, invested in a broad and robust public in which people have equal access to speech, learning, and education. That is not the man who was killed yesterday. Nor is it the job of Democrat leaders to scramble into those hagiographic performances at a moment where they should be attending very, very quickly to their constituents and their most vulnerable constituents — to protect them from the very kind of world that some of Charlie Kirk’s worst supporters and worst defenders in his life would have wanted to see come into being. And again, that is a world that is crueler, whiter, and less inclusive of huge swaths of millions of Americans and the people that live here. And I think that’s who we should be protecting and thinking about right now.
AL: Thank you both. We are going to leave it there. We really appreciate you taking the time, and thank you for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.
AB: Thank you so much. It was great.
NL: Thanks.
AL: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing.
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This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave.
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