Even a traumatic assassination can’t stop the right’s infighting
Following the shooting death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, tension within the conservative movement over who ultimately bears responsibility, and the tone in which the blame is communicated, are beginning to boil over. While Kirk’s shocking demise on camera during a Utah stop on his college speaking series jolted the right-wing movement into momentary unity through grief, in the days since the shooting, a split has formed between Republicans who responded with calls for vengeance and those who instead urged unity.
Kirk’s killing seems to have shocked the consciousness of conservatives in a way few other acts of gun violence have done. Even Alex Jones, who was infamously ordered by a court to pay for calling the Sandy Hook school shooting a false flag operation and accusing the dead children of being crisis actors, uploaded a video of himself distraught at the news of Kirk’s shooting and blinking away tears in his car. The suspected shooter is a 22-year-old white man raised in a staunchly conservative household with guns. Although investigators have not determined a motive for the assassination, right‑wing media, pundits and some Republican politicians were swift to blame leftist rhetoric broadly.
“They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we gonna do about it?” Fox News host Jesse Watters asked on his show Wednesday night.
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” Elon Musk wrote on X.
“We have to have steely resolve,” conservative political strategist Steve Bannon said on his show “War Room,” before adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
In a speech delivered Wednesday night from the Oval Office, President Trump appeared to agree: “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
