How the Right Reacted to Charlie Kirk's Death

At one point yesterday evening I was sitting on my phone processing the videos of Charlie Kirk’s murder and the news about 47th school shooting this year. At the same time I was reading news of NATO being called in to aid Poland in fighting off Russian drones and watching posts about Kamala Harris’s regrets from the 2024 election.

It all felt like too much. An overwhelming storm of information, a hurricane of fear and rage that defines American life in 2025.

And in the middle of it all, Charlie Kirk. A man who wore 1776 (a call to war) in his Instagram handle for years. Now dead, shot in the neck while speaking on a college campus. A political assassination that will reverberate across the political landscape.

We should not have to live in a country where gun violence of this nature is a very real and terrifying possibility. This is not righteous. This is not freedom. This is not the country we deserve.

And yet here we are.

Kirk himself once said that deaths are the cost of the Second Amendment. Yesterday, he became that cost. And this should all Americans to ask: how long are we going to keep paying in blood? How long are we going to have to make this our normal while people like Charlie Kirk, and there are many more like him, argue this is freedom, that children's lives are somehow an acceptable price to pay?

What struck me was how quickly the outrage machine moved on the right, how instantly the violence was repurposed into ammunition. Instead of pausing to reckon with the fact that Charlie Kirk’s death is the very embodiment of the “cost” he once defended, the response from the right has been to double down, to declare war, to pour gasoline on an already raging fire. It reveals the cruelest truth of all: that for some, violence is not a tragedy to mourn but a tool to wield.

As I write this, we don’t know who the shooter is or their motives. Yet, Rep Nancy Mace went to the press and said, “Democrats own what happened today.” That Patriot Mom posted on IG, “the left has declared LITERAL WAR on us. DEMOCRATS AND THEIR VIOLENT RHETORIC OWN THIS…this is what they want for all of us.” Elon Musk posted, “The Left is the party of murder.” Laura Loomer said, “we must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.” President Trump sat in the Oval office and said that the “radical left” is directly responsible for the “terrorism that we are seeing in our country today.”

Conservatives across the internet are threatening to wage war, and a man sits in the White House who has already sent the National Guard to blue cities.

Though I found his views abhorrent, I have always recognized that Charlie Kirk was a brilliant organizer and messenger, and there was a reason he kept 1776 in his Instagram handle for his 8 million followers. It was a constant rallying cry, a reminder to them that America was on the brink of revolution. And now, his own life has been claimed in precisely that spirit of violence. The symbolism is impossible to ignore: when you glorify 1776, you invite its bloodshed. What Kirk once wielded as branding has come full circle as consequence.

An hour before he was killed, Charlie’s employee Alex Clark posted a tweet urging we return to public executions. We would be a “better country” if there were more public displays of violence.

It’s not as if we are at a loss for spectacle. As Ezra Klein posted on Twitter:

In the last few years we've seen:

- The plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer

- The Storming of the Capitol and pipe bombs left at the RNC and DNC

- The break-in to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and the brutal on Paul Pelosi

- Multiple assassination attempts against Trump

- The assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and the shooting of on State Senator John Hoffman and his wife

- Luigi Mangione's assassination of Brian Thompson

- The assassination of Charlie Kirk

Political violence is contagious. It is spreading. It is not confined to one side or belief system. It should terrify us all.

The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in it without fear of violence. Political violence is always an attack against us all. You have to be so blind not to see that.

And we can add to that last year’s fire to the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, the shooting at the CDC, the 2017 of four people at the Republican practice for the congressional baseball game, badly wounding Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and much more I’m sure.

Amanda Litman wrote that “Political violence is meant to scare and silence — it is absolutely never acceptable. We don’t have to agree with someone to affirm they have a right to speak their mind without fearing for their life or safety.” She is right, violence is used as a tool of control to force your whims on people who otherwise will not comply. But it is also the action of people who exist in a political ecosystem where they feel there is no other option.

David Graham wrote for The Atlantic:

“[E]mploying force is actually an admission of defeat. A person who resorts to violence has concluded that he cannot change the terms of debate with words or arguments. Might may not make right, but it can end the conversation. Scholars have noted that assassinations occur most frequently in countries with “strong polarization and fragmentation” and that “lack consensual political ethos and homogeneous populations (in terms of the national and ethnic landscape).”

This calcification (as anyone who has read my book knows) is a hallmark of what we are seeing in our politics today, and the extremism is further exacerbated by the power of today's internet. And provocateurs, emulating an industry Charlie Kirk innovated, are constantly adding flames to the algorithmic fire. With the easy access to guns in the United States, the impulse to solve problems with violence is ever-more frightening to all of us.

The right has spent years building a massive messaging machine and priming their people for revolution. They want violence to be the story, because violence is the terrain where democracy loses.

What happens when the outrage machine builds a world where violence is both inevitable and useful? I wish I could say I have a simple answer. A call to make or a petition to sign to make it stop. But there isn’t. We are living in a country where the activists see more to gain from stoking war than from finding peace.

I don’t know what Trump and the right will do in response, but I do know that this is not the direction I want our country to take. At moments like these, I am always reminded of my why. It’s not because I believe change is easy. I do it because I believe surrender is fatal.

Hope, for me, is not a naïve faith that things will get better on their own. It is the stubborn act of refusing to give in to despair, of insisting that a country full of people I care about is worth fighting for even when it feels impossible.

We should not have to live in a country where school shootings and political violence are the norm. Our neighbors, our families, our children deserve better. And that’s what we are fighting for.