The Aftermath of Political Violence

Americans are processing the murder of Charlie Kirk. Political leaders across the spectrum are condemning the violence. Some are trying to point fingers. Plus:

Ian Crouch 
Newsletter editor

In the immediate aftermath of an act of political violence, when even the basic facts of the case remain in doubt, so much can feel out of control. “What politicians can control,” the New Yorker staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells pointed out this morning, “is how they respond.”

In the day since the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah, many high-ranking officials have decried political violence and called for unity. “The beating heart of a free society is the ability for citizens to engage in political life with no fear of violence,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, posted on X. “Once we lose this freedom, few will step forward, and our entire democratic experiment unwinds into chaos and recrimination.” Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican of Oklahoma, told CNN, “We in this country have faced some very difficult times, and, every time we’ve been at our worst, we’ve been able to hit a reset button and recover. And I hope, be it the rhetoric on the right or the left, that we can reset out of this.”

Yet others in the Republican Party, even before an alleged shooter had been identified or apprehended, were quick to make potentially incendiary claims. “Y’all caused this!” the Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida, yelled at Democrats yesterday on the House floor. Last night, Donald Trump, speaking by video from the Oval Office, singled out “those on the radical left” as espousing dangerous rhetoric, and, as Wallace-Wells writes, “made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned.” Speaking today, Representative Bob Onder, of Missouri, went further. “There is no longer any middle ground,” he said. “Some on the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people but their ideology is pure evil.”

Antonia Hitchens, a staff writer who covers politics for The New Yorker, heard examples of that anger, and even calls for vengeance, from members of the conservative movement whom she spoke with on Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., following a vigil held for Kirk at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic church near the Capitol, and at Butterworth’s, a restaurant that has become an informal MAGA clubhouse. The mood there was dark. Kirk had been a significant figure in the movement, especially among young men and women—more powerful perhaps than many people realize. “I feel his importance was second only to Trump—and his long-term importance would have been greater,” an incoming member of the Administration told her. Several people emphasized how Kirk had been a unifying force in the MAGA coalition, and that his killing, beyond inspiring rage, would also leave a void to be filled by bad actors. “There are malignant parts of the right begging for an excuse” to promote violence, one person said. “Charlie was the bulwark against that.”

For more: read Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s full column on the threats of political violence and Antonia Hitchens’s reporting on the MAGA reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.