After the fatal shooting of right-wing personality Charlie Kirk on Wednesday afternoon, the rhetoric on the right quickly escalated. Influential voices on social media declared war on the left, despite the absence of any knowledge about the suspect or their motive at the time.

President Donald Trump made a formal address where he pledged to go after the “radical left.”

“We are seeing language weaponized so swiftly,” says Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard.

“I think the Trump administration has a clear track record at this point of taking these little chips that they can leverage to induce state repression and encroach on civil liberties,” says Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lennard and Breland about the implications of Kirk’s killing and how we think about political violence in the U.S.

“We already know that whoever it does turn out to be, we are living in a moment with an authoritarian government that will weaponize this moment either way,” says Lennard. “This is about finding any opportunity to further escalate the white nationalist project.”

“I worry that his assassination is a progression toward something darker in which a wider group of people are considered to be targets for political violence,” says Breland. “And I don’t think that the rhetoric that’s coming out right now is doing anything to stop it or off-ramp us on this dark path.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy : Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.

On Wednesday afternoon, right-wing personality Charlie Kirk was killed at an event at Utah Valley University.

As news broke, many quickly deemed the shooting a political assassination. As of this recording, Thursday afternoon, the suspect and motive were still unknown. Despite that, Kirk’s killing set off dueling debates around political violence in the United States: Who wages it and how do we define it?

It also fueled a battle to define Kirk’s legacy. Kirk, who many have described as a conservative activist, often took far more extreme positions.

He had a long record of comments denigrating Black people, women, gay and trans people, and immigrants. Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, pushed a Christian nationalist vision of America that, as we’ve discussed on this show, fuels a major part of the MAGA base. The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote of the group: “[TPUSA] exploits complicated feelings of insecurity and anxiety to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order.”

While Kirk started out in the more moderate wing in the conservative party, his politics grew more extreme as his reach exploded, particularly among young people on college campuses. Some on the far-right responded to Kirk’s killing by declaring that war had arrived.

In the wake of the shooting, many valorized Kirk’s legacy, sometimes framing him as, foremost, a deft political actor without accounting for the political implications of his rhetoric.

Joining me now to break all of this down is Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard.

Welcome to the show Ali and Natasha.

Natasha Lennard: Hello. Nice to be here.

Ali Breland: Thank you for having me as well.

AL: I want to note that we are speaking on Thursday, September 11.

Before we get into the shooting: Who is Charlie Kirk, and how did he rise to prominence in right wing political and intellectual spaces? Ali, I’d like to start with you.

AB: Yeah, Charlie Kirk, he’s a lot of things at once, which makes him very valuable. So like very zoomed out: He is a connector. The zoomed-in version is that he’s this influencer who has risen to prominence by running a very successful podcast, running a very successful tour where he goes to different college events and college campuses and debate students from a right-wing perspective.

But then he also has built this extremely robust organization called Turning Point USA, which organizes student conservative groups and then also interfaces to some degree with administration officials. It’s become this really massively powerful organization on the right that is quite influential in both organizing [young] people to show up to the right-wing movement. But then potentially influencing policy in some cases and influencing the Trump administration.

AL : Tash, how would you describe Kirk?

NL: The way Ali put it is absolutely correct. He’s a huge force on the Trumpian right, particularly, representative of the upsurge of white nationalist, Christian nationalist young men, who he indeed committed his life to organizing, particularly focusing on college campuses. This is a man who engaged in a performance of debate. So he’s perhaps best known as one of the “debate me” right. I’ve always framed this — and continue to do so — as a shtick. I see it as window dressing. This is a performance by which he can move around colleges and condescend to young men and women at least a decade younger than him.

“His actual commitment is to the broader Trumpian project, which is making the body politic and those permitted to speak within it as small as possible.”

But his actual commitment is to the broader Trumpian project, which is making the body politic and those permitted to speak within it as small as possible. So the elimination of trans people from public life as far as is possible — through policy and on university campuses and educational spaces in particular — extremely pro-Zionist, the weaponization of antisemitism on college campuses to silence pro-Palestinian speech, pro-mass incarceration, extraordinarily racist in comments he’s made around what constitutes crime and criminality, and a huge supporter of Trump’s deportation machine.

So we find ourselves at a moment within hours of his death when we don’t know who the shooter was. No one has been apprehended and identified at the time of speaking, but immediately the entire Trumpian right........

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