Donald Trump is lying about political violence |
Charlie Kirk, the influential right-wing activist, was shot and killed Wednesday on a college campus in Utah. The shooter is still at large, and as of this writing, little is publicly known about the shooter’s identity or the potential ideological motive behind the attack. But instead of waiting for facts of the case to emerge, many conservatives quickly to jumped to conclusions in the immediate aftermath.
Shortly after Kirk was shot, Elon Musk posted on his platform X, “The Left is the party of murder.” Fox News host Jesse Watters said, “They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us.” And conservative activist Christopher Rufo made a call to crack down on left-wing groups. “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Rufo posted on X. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
Most alarmingly, President Donald Trump, in an Oval Office address later that evening, echoed those sentiments. “Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said. “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 today, and it must stop right now.”
Trump also hinted at the kind of crackdown that his administration might impose in the wake of Kirk’s killing, saying they would find “those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
There are two major problems with the right’s rush to blame the incident, and political violence more broadly, on the left. First, even if the shooter turns out to be a left-wing extremist — certainly within the realm of possibility — the urge to immediately blame the left before facts emerge is reckless. As we learned from the assassination attempt on Trump last year on the campaign trail, shooters