Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left

Law enforcement tapes off an area after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University on Sept in Orem Utah Photo Tess Crowley The Deseret News via AP This is not a moment for dishonesty Contrary to the hurried efforts of a few Democratic leaders to eulogize Charlie Kirk we don t need to pretend the far-right activist engaged in earnest politics across ideology through spirited debate as California Gov Gavin Newsom stated in a post on X paying tribute to Kirk Kirk the founder of the far-right movement Turning Points USA was committed to organizing America s white young men from college campus to college campus and beyond into a politics of revanchist resentment-fueled patriarchal white nationalism However harmful Kirk s project has been to our collective flourishing though the response to his assassination could put this nation and especially those on the left in a position of greater peril than at any previous moment of Donald Trump s authoritarian second term The call couldn t be clearer open season on the left At the time of writing the person responsible for shooting Kirk has not been apprehended or identified That didn t stop Trump from delivering an official address unequivocally blaming the radical left for Kirk s death in the broadest terms viable The Trump administration is a weaponization machine it will transform all manner of things into an ideological arsenal to use against its opposition Anti-genocide activism is antisemitism immigrant workers are the worst criminals addressing white supremacy is discrimination war crimes are peace all of these fascistic transmutations have become grimly common in the last eight months Trump s erratic governing body is predictable only insofar as it can reliably and promptly metabolize events towards authoritarian ends In his televised remarks Trump made straightaway clear how his administration plans to instrumentalize this assassination too regardless of the specifics of the shooting Trump called Kirk a martyr and blamed the radical left for comparing wonderful Americans like Kirk who was an unabashed Christian nationalist to Nazis This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we re seeing in our country in current times the president revealed Without any populace information about the shooter Trump took the opportunity to assert that his administration would hunt down any person or organization associated with the again unknown suspect The call couldn t be clearer open season on the left Demonizing Whom In his speech the president described a scourge of left-wing political violence based on demonizing those with whom you disagree When he was shot Kirk was speaking on a Utah college campus demonizing those with whom he disagreed In response to an audience member asking Do you know how several transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last years Kirk responded too a large number of promoting a baseless and vile conspiracy theory spread by Trump attempting to link trans people with violent crimes Trump then sought to paint a picture of prolific left-wing violence by listing the assasination attempt he himself survived last year attacks on ICE agents which have been egregiously overblown the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the shooting at a baseball competition that injured Louisiana Republican Rep Steve Scalise President Donald Trump makes a televised address from the White House after the shooting of Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk on Sept in Washington Screenshot The Intercept The president notably did not mention the assassination attempts on multiple Democratic members of the Minnesota state legislature last June in which representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed Nor did Trump invoke the time a far-right conspiracy theorist broke into former House speaker Nancy Pelosi s home in an attempted kidnapping and bashed in her husband s skull Needless to say the president revealed nothing of the fact that the majority of politically motivated attacks are carried out by far-right extremists The omissions were as glaring as they were unsurprising Calls for Repression Meanwhile Trump s key propagandists and loyalists spoke in swift unison to weaponize the shooting for repressive purposes Far-right activist and Trump advisor Laura Loomer posted that the ruling body should shut down defund prosecute every single Leftist organization She added No mercy Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence They are at war with us mentioned Fox News host Jesse Waters What are we going to do about it The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror J Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a scarce years wrote the Manhattan Institute s Christopher Rufo on X Rufo a major force in the Trump administration s ongoing assault on higher mentoring added It is time within the confines of the law to infiltrate disrupt arrest and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos With major Republican figures explicitly calling to revive McCarthyite and Cointelpro-style repression of the political left a category that in the deranged worldview of the Trumpian right could include everyone from far-left mutual aid groups to Bill Gates now is no time for lie-filled paeans to Kirk from political leaders It is a moment that demands a commitment to protecting constituents from the sort of hateful ideologies Kirk supported and the kinds of crackdowns Trump and his acolytes are demanding Progressives including Sen Bernie Sanders I-Vt and Rep Alexandria Ocasio Cortez D-N Y wrote social media posts to say that there is no place for political violence in this country Related The Only Kind of Political Violence All U S Politicians Oppose Political violence has invariably been at home in a nation built on Indigenous slaughter slavery dispossession and exploitation to say nothing of rates of incarceration and shootings seen nowhere else on the planet The progressives statements are all the more misplaced at this time of authoritarian escalation at home and U S -backed genocide abroad It is precisely because of the central place of political violence in this country that this moment feels both predictably and uniquely dangerous On Wednesday night Trump called it a dark moment for America but for all the wrong reasons This is no time for whitewashing the memory of a man who did more than perhaps anyone in his generation to recruit young people into the inherently violent cause of white nationalism The urgent work at hand is to take care of each other and to protect the most of vulnerable among us from a world that would be built in Charlie Kirk s name The post Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk s Killing to Attack the Left appeared first on The Intercept