After Charlie Kirk’s murder, what lies ahead could be terrible

In an era when politics has increasingly become a blood sport Wednesday s assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk before thousands of people on the campus of Utah Valley University was nonetheless a shocking and profane act of violence Kirk like all casualties of gun violence was someone s family member a husband a father a son He was a professed Christian and a provocateur who took his message to places that were often hostile he welcomed a back-and-forth with those who disagreed with his views He was a media savant who leveraged his views into the algorithms of young people particularly men who have been historically reluctant to engage in politics Countless people who couldn t have picked Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens out of a police lineup knew Charlie Kirk Turning Point USA the political organization he co-founded to activate young conservatives played a key role in President Donald Trump s reemergence from the shadows of Jan and his return to the presidency four years later There is no getting around other elements of his character Kirk was eager to weaponize language against several of the largest part marginalized and vulnerable among us That fact alone made his calls for respectful debate and elevating discussion above personal insults ring hollow There was no mistaking how Kirk viewed Democrats and liberals and progressives more generally They stand for everything God hates he commented last year during a campaign appearance with Trump in Georgia The transgender locality he proclaimed were a throbbing middle finger to God and an abomination The Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr was awful and a bad man and the Civil Rights Act of which outlawed discrimination in citizens accommodations inhabitants tuition and federally assisted programs was a mistake With Turning Point USA Kirk published a Professor Watchlist and encouraged college students to add instructors who held leftist viewpoints He in recent months posted on X Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America In no small part Kirk helped fashion the world in which we now find ourselves Divided angry mistrustful of our neighbors and their motives and at the very least increasingly violent in rhetoric Kirk did this literally until the end of his life video footage from the event shows him disparaging the trans society in the seconds before he was shot And yet His brutal murder is a national tragedy that only the majority of inhumane among us would deny Kirk s wife and two young children will forever be shattered by his death and the viewers survivors themselves who had gathered to hear him speak stand to be traumatized by what they saw Kirk s killing puts all of us left and right Democrat and Republican at peril And yet His brutal murder is a national tragedy that only the the majority inhumane among us would deny Kirk s wife and two young children will forever be shattered by his death and the onlookers survivors themselves who had gathered to hear him speak stand to be traumatized by what they saw Kirk s killing puts all of us left and right Democrat and Republican at vulnerability As a colleague disclosed The consequences are likely to be dire for all of us Before Kirk was even pronounced dead before a person of interest and then another was taken into custody and then issued before a attainable motive could be determined right-wing influencers and followers were calling for retribution by using the very pronoun they profess to hate They of module in this context was taken to mean Kirk s murderer whoever that person is and wherever they may be It also meant the social forces or movements that numerous on the right wish to hold responsible Democrats liberals progressives feminists immigrants Muslims LGBTQ people and multiple others literally anyone who is not a fully-paid commuter aboard the MAGA train on which Kirk was one of the majority of skilled and useful engineers After his death was validated by Trump in a Truth Social post Laura Loomer one of the president s closest advisers was unequivocal They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk while he was sitting next to a table of hats that declared she posted on X The Left are terrorists Before Kirk s death was even revealed she attacked the left as a national prevention threat and called on Trump to shut down defund prosecute every single Leftist organization She later wrote Only President Trump can take these people down Related Avenge Charlie s death Fox News Watters says to prepare for war following Kirk assassination Trump was apparently listening In his speech on Wednesday night from the Oval Office he called Kirk a martyr for truth and freedom and parroted Loomer s rhetoric For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world s worst mass murderers and criminals This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we re seeing in our country the present day and it must stop right now My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence he stated including the organizations that fund it and advocacy it as well as those who go after judges law enforcement leaders and everyone else who brings order to our country In the hours after the president spoke Loomer designated Sept a Turning Point in the USA Now Action She could unfortunately be correct We have reached a dark and dangerous moment in which the worst is imaginable in the near future and not just because of Kirk s assassination Within minutes of the event gruesome high-resolution videos of the shooting were circulated and pushed on social media platforms especially X which under the ownership of tech billionaire and former Trump administration official Elon Musk has famously resisted censorship and exposed millions of viewers a large number of of whom weren t seeking those images and had no wish to see them According to the New York Times particular social media companies tried with mixed results to remove the content Although graphic footage of President John F Kennedy s assassination in November was known to exist studied by investigators and had frames that were published as still photos in LIFE magazine it took years for even a poor copy of the Zapruder film to be televised On Wednesday we all became without delay traumatized onlookers to Kirk s murder and that alone has likely helped galvanize the vows of vengeance coming from the right Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts All sorts of conspiracy theories are already circulating on the left as well as on the right made all the more easier by lax regulations from social media platforms that once attempted to monitor flag and restrict disinformation Specific posters have suggested Kirk s murder was an inside job planned to divert attention from contemporary news more closely connecting Trump to the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein In the preponderance elaborate theories a man on the ground in Utah waved a white baseball cap to signal the shooter Similar stories made the rounds after the attempt on Trump s life last year in Butler Pa It should of unit be noted that rampant online misinformation has also endangered the lives of prominent Democrats In December a North Carolina man opened fire in a Washington D C pizza parlor where he suspected a child sex ring connected to Hillary Clinton was operating from its nonexistent basement Democratic Gov Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was the object of a kidnapping and murder plot by a far-right militia group in Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi s husband was seriously injured by a deranged man in their San Francisco home in October an event that then became the subject of salacious rumors Now we face the fear of copycat incidents against Democratic politicians and commentators Social media is full of posts calling for attacks on the media both mainstream and the left On Thursday multiple historically Black colleges and universities went under lockdown after receiving threats All of this will make our national discourse shrink even further But it gets worse The Trump administration s latest moves against Democratic-led cities including Washington D C Chicago and Los Angeles have shown the president to be keen to use the National Guard and even the standing military for domestic law enforcement even though doing so likely violates the Posse Comitatus Act How rapidly could such militarized occupations turn violent On the left the fear has long been that Trump has been waiting for an inciting episode to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law In the face of a passive Republican Congress and a pliant Supreme Court such a turn of events could prove disastrous We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in the present day to backing Jason Kyle Howard s journalism Shock has a curious effect on people even those who experience it from afar It scrambles our thoughts and reactions and causes us to make strange connections In the hours after Kirk s murder I kept recalling a scene from Matewan the film by John Sayles that depicts the massacre of West Virginia coal miners who were fighting for workers rights and to unionize On a grey foggy morning as a group of mourners have gathered on an Appalachian mountaintop a woman played by folksinger Hazel Dickens begins to sing Her voice is weary and brittle She s resigned to what she knows lies ahead and still she sings a prayer of rescue and salvation Deliver us from the gathering storm Unworthy though we are Leave us living safe and warm And sheltered in your arms Like Dickens character on that mountaintop we can all sense the tribulation to come Something has broken in our country in our national character Charlie Kirk s murder has made it clear even to the preponderance optimistic among us that what is broken is beyond repair at least for now And still we hope We sing a prayer against the odds against the tide for deliverance from the evil within Read more about this topic Trump attacks wokeness and betrays his own voters DC now faces all-out assault from the House GOP and necessities a fighter Federal judge tears into Trump on LA and warns the rest of us The post After Charlie Kirk s murder what lies ahead could be terrible appeared first on Salon com