Where do we go from here?
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the young, right-wing provocateur, the question looms as large as any we’ve heard during the Trump Era, and especially during the violence-adjacent Trump Restoration.
I disagreed with Kirk on nearly every issue, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die or that the killing of a father with two young children isn’t a tragedy. Obviously, it is a tragedy. But as George Orwell, the oracle, once wrote (h/t Bill Kristol), we live in a time when “the restatement of the obvious” is our “first duty.”
So we’ll state it once more: Kirk’s death was a tragedy, but not only a tragedy for Kirk and his family and his many supporters and for anyone who understands that the assassination was an assault on democracy and freedom of speech — but also one that has put Trump and his MAGA pals in full exploitation mode.
Fox News hosts are saying we are now at war and Kirk’s death must be avenged. Donald Trump, the Provocateur in Chief, justifies right-wing extremists but condemns left-wing extremists — by which he means all Democrats — while vowing vengeance. Elon Musk tweets that “the left is the party of murder.”
There’s more. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said Americans should report “foreigners” who are heard “praising or rationalizing or making light of the event.” We can guess that Landau, like his boss, loves the smell of deportation in the morning. Kirk was a free-speech advocate, of course, who famously welcomed debate with his opponents, but now we see Trump officials advocating for a crackdown on political speech. Making light of the event? Seriously?
Meanwhile, the social media cesspools, from left and right, become ever uglier. And the video of Kirk’s violent death — which I haven’t watched, but many kids apparently have — goes viral.
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But there are voices in the wilderness. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, says political violence is a cancer and calls for forgiveness, while asking the right questions for all Americans of any political stripe.
Imagine.
“We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes,” Cox said at a news conference Friday announcing the capture of the alleged killer. “Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”
Cox added: “History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country, but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”
Cox condemned political violence. He condemned social media. He condemned the alleged shooter.
He did what a leader should do, what virtually any president would have done, what George W. Bush, as one example, did with his bullhorn speech at Ground Zero, and yet, what Trump would obviously never do.
For Trump, the death of his friend is another opportunity to exploit our differences and inflame them. And so he goes on Fox & Friends and blames his political enemies, calling them “vicious” and “horrible.”
In a speech before anyone knew who the killer was, Trump blamed “radical-left violence” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and other political violence, including the organizations that fund and support it.”
He listed Republicans who have been targeted — like himself, but left out entirely any of the Democrats who have been recently victimized. In Trump’s world, the death of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, just a few months before, never happened. The fire at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion never happened. The shooting at the CDC building never happened. And we can certainly forget about the January 6 assault on the Capitol, after which Trump pardoned anyone who had been convicted for actions that day, including those convicted of political violence.
Trump is flying the flag at half staff for Kirk, who more than dabbled in antisemitism, who opposed gay rights, who opposed the Civil Rights Act and called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful,” whose group, Turning Point USA, had a watch list in which students are asked to report leftist professors, who paired New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, with the attack on the World Trade Center.
When Hortman, a Democrat, died, there were no lowered flags at the White House. (In fact, Trump even raised the flag, which had been ordered by Joe Biden to fly at half staff in honor of Jimmy Carter’s death, because he thought it would look better at his inauguration.)
Trump refused to even call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also a Democrat, to offer condolences after Hortman’s death. Instead, he called Walz a whack job. You want, uh, levity? When Hortman and her husband were killed and another Democratic legislator was shot and wounded, Republican Sen. Mike Lee, definitely a whack job, tweeted about “The Nightmare on Waltz (sic) Street.” And also that “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.”
Eventually, he deleted the posts, but not the sentiment.
Where do we go from here?
Do we go after people like George Soros, the longtime Democratic funder, as Trump suggests? Trump says he wants Soros investigated for racketeering. Or do we see this as a watershed moment in our history — which, of course, has been littered with political assassinations — and as a chance to do better?
I fear that this will be remembered as another time in which we did worse, much worse. I hope I’m wrong. Many members of Congress admit they’re scared that the growing political violence could reach them or their families. Judges are routinely threatened, especially judges in cases involving Trump. And the truth is we’ve seen political violence from both sides, but it doesn’t look any better from wherever we stand.
Is there any reason not to believe, as Gov. Cox warned, that political violence metastasizes? I lived through the ’60s and the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, of MLK, of Malcolm X, of all those killed during the civil rights movement. I remember how long the pain lingered.
And as people in Colorado know too well, Kirk’s shooting wasn’t the only violence of the day. We had yet another school shooting, this time at Evergreen High School. And because everything is political, we now know the 16-year-old accused shooter was “radicalized” — as the Jefferson County sheriff put it — and by looking at his social media accounts, he seemed to have embraced white supremacy and antisemitism.
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He also embraced a gun. It’s always guns, isn’t it? The 16-year-old posted a photo of the gun apparently used in shooting two classmates along with a box of ammunition.
How did he get a gun? We don’t know yet, but it will be a major part of the investigation.
Ironically, if irony still applies, a student and a progressive TikTok content maker was challenging Kirk on his views of trans people and mass shootings just moments before Kirk was shot and killed. Kirk had previously made clear his feelings about the cost of mass shootings: “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
He was wrong, in my view.
But it’s not wrong to grieve for him and his family. And it’s not wrong to grieve for the rest of us.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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