Kirk Coverage Downplayed MAGA's Culture of Violence
Ari Paul
The Atlantic's Graeme Wood (9/11/25) expressed doubt that "this disgusting scene of high-definition murder...will restore the moral senses of all those who have hitherto been casually pro-violence."
The assassination of far-right podcaster and political activist Charlie Kirk in Utah was truly shocking in every sense. It happened in the open, at a college campus in broad daylight with 3,000 onlookers. Graphic and close-up video footage of his final moment, showing a bullet placed precisely at his carotid artery at the very second Kirk was questioned about mass shootings, seemed out of a movie. The man who once said gun deaths were worth the price of the Second Amendment (Newsweek, 4/6/23) became an illustration of what that price looks like before our eyes.
Flags at half mast. A moment of silence at Yankee Stadium. The vice president skipped a 9/11 memorial event to be with Kirk’s family (USA Today, 9/11/25), and Kirk’s body was transported back to his home state on the vice president’s aircraft (CBS, 9/11/25). He was no mere pundit or activist, but a valued capo in the Trump political machine.
“Charlie Kirk’s murder was one of the worst moments in recent American history,” read the subhead of an Atlantic piece (9/11/25) by Graeme Wood. (It was apparently much worse than US support for killing thousands of children in Gaza, about which Wood shrugged, “war is ugly,” arguing that it’s “possible to kill children legally”—Atlantic, 5/17/24.)
Wood was not alone in the press, as much of the coverage has framed the murder as a moment where the United States crossed the Rubicon when it comes to political violence. While Kirk's murder was bad news for democracy—as no one ever deserves to be killed for their speech—the media reaction glossed over the role that President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and Kirk himself, as a prominent supporter of that movement, have helped to legitimize the kind of political violence that Kirk apparently fell victim to.
'Epidemic of leftist violence'
The assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman in June 2025 was one of several right-wing attacks that New York Post columnist Miranda Divine (9/11/25) ignored in order to claim that "political violence is almost exclusively from the left."
The right-wing press, as expected, has whipped itself into a frenzy over a wave of domestic terrorism that is only coming from the left, though the motives of the killer at the time were unknown. “We are suffering through an epidemic of leftist violence,” said Miranda Divine of the New York Post (9/11/25), adding that Kirk’s killing is “the latest manifestation of the hateful rhetoric aimed at President Trump and his MAGA movement.”
President Trump has fanned the flames. As the New Yorker (9/11/25) noted:
Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”... Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned.
Elsewhere, coverage didn’t blame the left, but did suggest that Kirk's killing had brought US society to an inflection point. The New York Times (9/11/25) said that before Kirk’s killing, “there were signs of a looming political crisis” and increased “polarization and the coarsening of public discourse.” While there have been other acts of political violence, reporters Richard Fausset, Ken Bensinger and Alan Feuer wrote, the “killing of Mr. Kirk on a Utah college campus…raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase.”
The Times quoted Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, saying “I think that you have a cultural civil war underway.” (Gingrich has been waging cultural civil war for a long time now; in 1990, he put out a memo urging Republican candidates to tar their opponents with words like "sick…pathetic…traitors"—Extra! Update, 2/95).
The Washington Post editorial board (9/10/25) noted, while listing off other instances of political violence:
Months before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, the conservative activist warned about the spread of “assassination culture.” He cited the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, as well as the killing of a healthcare CEO. And now it seems all too likely that he himself became a victim of that violent fervor while speaking on Wednesday at Utah Valley University.
The Post’s news side featured a report (9/11/25) claiming that the nation is “facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s.” The paper summoned memories of the “assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson (9/10/25) said Kirk’s murder “will unleash unknown consequences in a nation that is angry and already confronting a fractured political future.”
'More frequent and deadly'
Donald Trump posted an image of himself as an Apocalypse Now character as he declared war on Chicago.
Most of these pieces rightly situated Kirk’s murder with other acts of political violence that targeted both Democrats and Republicans. But what these pieces miss—or actively try to hide—is how much this dangerous era escalated when Trump came into the White House. The president and his allies in right-wing media not only provided the rhetoric that inspired an enormous amount of political violence, but worked actively to normalize it.
From Trump's calls for violence against protesters who disrupted his rallies (FAIR.org, 3/12/16) to official presidential social media posts depicting Trump as Robert Duvall's napalm-loving colonel from Apocalypse Now, MAGA is a political agenda that celebrates violence (FAIR.org, 11/1/19).
PBS’s Frontline (4/21/21) reported:
“We’ve seen a rising tide of attacks by far-right extremists in recent years,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Frontline. “The threat is coming from a host of ideologies, from white supremacists to incels, to everything in between. Unfortunately, the attacks are becoming both more frequent and deadly.”
To track that change, Frontline analyzed data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS defines terrorism as the “deliberate use—or threat— of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact,” a similar definition to the one used by the FBI.
According to a CSIS database, there were 405 such terror attacks or plots in the US from 2015 through 2020—more than double the total number in the previous decade. And in the last five years, those attacks or plots were predominantly carried out by white supremacists, militias and other far-right extremists: 63% and increasing. Far-left incidents are also on the rise but made up a smaller portion of the whole, 13% from 2015 to 2020, according to Frontline’s analysis. Religious extremists accounted for 19%, with the remaining 5% linked to “ethnonationalist” or “other” ideologies, per CSIS categorizations.
Political violence is of course nothing new in American culture; deadly extremism, coming mainly though not exclusively from the right, was rampant both before (Extra!, 3–4/95, 7–8/95; Extra! Update, 10/96) and after September 11, 2001 (FAIR.org, 4/16/13, 6/13/14). But MAGA has moved what was once far-right rhetoric and tactics to the center of the US right. As the Brookings Institution (3/12/21) pointed out, many right-wing tactics of the Trump era were pioneered by self-styled militia groups that have operated along the US's southern border since the 1980s:
Many of the right-wing armed groups’ tactics exhibited during Trump’s presidency—harassment of minorities, purposeful recruitment of military veterans, cultivation of allies in law enforcement forces and among politicians, and efforts to influence elections—had years of beta testing at the US/Mexico border.
Five years ago, the Guardian (3/18/20) also painted a frightening picture:
White nationalist hate groups in the US have increased 55% throughout the Trump era, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a “surging” racist movement continues to be driven by “a deep fear of demographic change.” Nationally, there were 155 such groups counted last year, and they were present in most states. These groups were counted separately from Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads, Christian Identity groups and neo-Confederate groups, all of which also express some version of white supremacist beliefs.
'Bring a gun with you'
The New York Times' Ezra Klein (9/11/25) wrote admiringly of Kirk's "moxie and fearlessness."
Charlie Kirk was a central actor in the right-wing hate machine that fomented violence. He encouraged violence against immigrants (Media Matters, 3/22/24):
At what point is it time to start to at least use rubber bullets, or use some sort of tear gas, to prevent this and quell this invasion?... And at what point do we use real force?. . . Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?
He incited partisan division and hatred, and encouraged the purchase and use of weapons in that context (Media Matters, 10/12/23):
You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons, I keep on saying that. Buy weapons. Buy ammo. if you go into a public place, bring a gun with you…. Thank goodness in Arizona we can carry, and we carry.
Where the New York Times (9/10/25) saw "a charismatic right-wing activist" who “showed a genius for using social media and campus organizing,” those who found themselves targets of Kirk's "genius" saw something entirely different.
Kirk's "Professor Watchlist" doxxed academics Kirk claimed "advanced leftist propaganda"; those listed quickly found themselves and their universities subject to a torrent of abuse—including racial slurs and death threats—from Kirk's followers, at times requiring universities to offer those academics extra security. Journalism professor Stacy Patton, who experienced this harassment firsthand when she was put on the list in 2024, observed:
Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.
This is the activism that the New York Times' Ezra Klein (9/11/25) described as "practicing politics in exactly the right way":
He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.... A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.
'Throbbing middle finger to God'
Charlie Kirk (X, 9/11/23): "“The one issue that I think is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God is the transgender thing happening in America."
Kirk referred to LGBTQ identity as a "social contagion," and called trans people an "abomination" and a "throbbing middle finger to God” (Erin in the Morning, 9/11/23).
He said that Black women like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson "had to go steal a white person's slot" through affirmative action, because they "do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously." “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” he declared (Wired, 1/12/24).
Upon Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral primary, Kirk posted: “Twenty-four years ago, a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim socialist is on pace to run New York City.” "When we think of what it means to be an American, is [it] someone by the name of Islami Mohamed?" he remarked on another occasion (Media Matters, 8/19/25): "I don't think so."
“You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population,” Kirk insisted (Religion News, 1/7/25). He also claimed (Media Matters, 8/19/25) that "the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
'Disgracefully ill-timed'
MSNBC's Rebecca Cutler said it was "“inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable” to connect Kirk's murder to his hate speech (Guardian, 9/11/25).
In the wake of Kirk's murder, it was taboo to point out that his politics, and those of the MAGA movement he embraced, contributed to a culture of hatred and demonization. MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd was promptly fired by the cable network after he observed:
Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions…. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.
When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in condemning violence, remarked that “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” the Washington Post (9/10/25) editorialized that this was "a disgracefully ill-timed comment."
In fact, there is no better time to point out that the right-wing movement Kirk was a crucial part of has played the leading role in dehumanizing others and normalizing violence. Failure to honestly examine the politics that are driving extremism will steer us away from the kind of analysis and action that are needed to prevent more tragedies.
Research assistance: Caitlin Scialla
|
