The murder of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy. The reaction is a frightening potential disaster.
On a personal level, the violent death of a 31-year-old father of two is heart breaking.
On the political plane it is a calamity. As of this writing we do not know the motive for the shooting. It is, however, most likely that Charlie Kirk was murdered for his far-right political views.
The right of free and open debate is a fundamental principle of democracy. It is one of the key reasons that democracies have prospered and totalitarian states have failed.
That is why most of America’s political figures have been loud in their condemnation of Charlie Kirk’s death, including President Donald Trump who started off on the right note in attacking the murder and the rhetoric which led to that murder.
But Trump being Trump, he couldn’t help himself from sliding into the self-same finger-pointing accusations of the type that he himself said led to Kirk’s death.
After praising Charlie as a “great American” who “loved his country” Trump went on to say: “All Americans, and the media, must confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonising those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most despicable way possible.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we are seeing in our country today.”
In Trump’s playbook it is himself and the Republican Party who are the victims. Trump makes no reference to the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro. The attempted kidnapping of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (Democrat). The murder of the former Democrat speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark or the wounding of Minnesota state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette (Democrats).
Neither did he mention the eight people who died as a result of the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill or the 1,500 people he pardoned after lauding them as “patriots.”
Trump also failed to reference his own rhetoric which includes describing immigrants as “vermin;” accusing Barack Obama of “treason;” or branding President Biden’s family as “the Biden crime family.” As for the Democrats as a whole, they are, according to Trump, “radical left maniacs trying to destroy our country.”
The rhetoric has led to increased violence across the political spectrum. Since 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House, threats against members of the US Congress, their staff and families, have increased 300 percent.
The fact is that the politics of Donald Trump—and by extension, the wider Republican Party—are the politics of aggressive, no holds barred, gutter rhetoric.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”
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8 Comments
I, for one, won’t mourn his passing; however, I abhor the way it occurred..
As for, “The right of free and open debate is a fundamental principle of democracy. It is one of the key reasons that democracies have prospered and totalitarian states have failed.”????
Russia, North Korea show no signs of internal failure and, as for China, that is without doubt the up and coming superpower..
As an aside, democracy in the USA looks in far more danger of failure than the three totalitarian states I’ve named.
Don’t speak ill of the dead is a good maxim to follow in life. Charlie Kirk made a significant impact on American politics during his short-life. He debated students and academics at Oxford and Cambridge. For that, both Kirk and these Universities should be given credit. Better to have radical conservative views openly challenged and aired for all to see and hear rather than speakers being cancelled on the pedestal of political correctness.
Tommy Robinson is holding a rally in London today. A counter-protest called the March Against Fascism, organised by Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), is also due to take place in the city at the same time.
The Metropolitan police will no doubt have their hands full in containing the passions of demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, but that is the price we must pay for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
Gun violence in the USA continues to take an appalling toll with no sign of it dissipating.
“Two years prior to his death from a gunshot, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk had controversially stated that gun deaths were “unfortunately worth it” to preserve the Second Amendment” Charlie Kirk said gun deaths were ‘worth it’ to keep Second Amendment.
That is not a sentiment that virtually any population in the world would agree with outside the USA (or even most Americans for that matter), yet gun control legislation is perennially blocked by Republican lawmakers.
America did recover from the corruption and venality of the Nixon administration. I have confidence it will be able to recover from the trashing of its democratic institutions by the Trump regime and reestablish the basic civil and human rights that the US constitution seeks to protect, including eventually the type of gun control laws that the Obama administration called for.
I think that if you look at the history of the western democracies over an extended period of time you will see that they have fair much better than totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, North Korea, and the Soviet Union.
I have an uncomfortable feeling that the endgame will be the effective outlawing or (which will come to the same thing) defunding of the Democratic Party.
And we have already seen that the so called Conservatives in the UK looked at Republican voter suppression and thought “What a good idea!” And then the current incarnation of the Labour Party then said to itself “Well, the Natural Party of Government has done this, so far be it from plebs like us to say it’s a bad idea…”
Be afraid.
“Better to have radical conservative views openly challenged and aired for all to see and hear rather than speakers being canceled on the pedestal of political correctness”. I watched quite a few of CK’s videos on YouTube; many of those openly challenging his conservative views would have been better off not going to college. When presented with facts, they seem to resort to personal attacks. The Oxford Union debate – they didn’t fare much better either. Sadly, it seems to be a default position of too many on the liberal left who hide their intolerance under the mask of inclusivity.
And now it appears Kirk was assassinated because he wasn’t right-wing enough. The suspect in custody is a young white American male from a Mormon MAGA family, and member of a fringe far-right movement that makes MAGA look like positively reasonable. So it was nothing to do with intolerance on the political left of right-wing views or people. What we have to contend with now is not left-wingers “celebrating” his death (of which there is, really, very little) but the weaponisation of Kirk’s murder by people on the right.
@Alex Macfie
I think it is too early to judge the motive for Kirk’s assassination, but the picture of “from a Mormon MAGA family” perhaps gives a false picture as it appears he no longer lived with his parents and instead shared an apartment with his transgender partner. So, until firm evidence is unearthed, speculation around motive is likely premature and pointless.
Brenda Will: Please stop parroting right-wing talking points as if they have any truth. Whatever the alleged relationship between the killer and his (allegedly trans) housemate, it is clear from the engravings on the bullet cases that the killer was a member of the far-far-right groyper movement which bore a grudge against Kirk.