The Real Charlie Kirk

After the fatal shooting of right-wing personality Charlie Kirk on Wednesday afternoon the rhetoric on the right hastily 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 leadership 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 various hurriedly 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 countless 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 assistance 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 Chosen on the far-right responded to Kirk s killing by declaring that war had arrived In the wake of the shooting numerous 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 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 productive podcast running a very achieving 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 attendee conservative groups and then also interfaces to a few degree with administration executives 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 agenda in particular 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 invariably 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 attainable 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 practicable So the elimination of trans people from residents life as far as is manageable through plan 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 promptly the entire Trumpian right has jumped to demonize and lambast the entire broader left as somehow responsible And so it s a dangerous moment AL We re going to touch on that but first I ll go back to you Ali What was it about Kirk that was so enticing about his message and made and drew younger voters to him in particular AB Yeah On particular base level it was just oratory like just a radical scale the ability to speak very well and speak convincingly and reduce complex ideas to this very simple palatable way of speaking I was just watching his memorial show and the COO of Turning Point USA was talking about how one of his earlier conversations in the organization with Charlie as they were founding TPUSA was specifically to create this it was to make what they called like a battle tank instead of a think tank And not just develop new ideas and policies but develop this very convincing and palatable way of presenting it to make it more convincing to young people And to get the quote that he mentioned was average Americans to engage with it and want to engage with it too Add on to what Natasha was saying earlier the way that this manifested was both in I think more conventional and moderate ideas of conservatism especially initially Then as his project grew and as the years went on he started to become much more extreme but he still retained this influence in the more moderate conservative world And I think that was really his value was that he had a foot in understanding what was going on in the far-right internet and like figuring out how to in a very savvy way incorporate that into his project and speak to those people while also being respectable enough to get meetings with Don Jr and the White House And be seen as this more mainstream figure in a way that a lot of people with those views really can t fully do and can t fully stay in the mainstream AL Natasha in the aftermath of the shooting there s been a lot of discussion about whether this will exacerbate political violence in the United States I also want to mention just as we re talking about political violence and mass shootings within hours of this happening there was a shooting at a high school in Denver that has been overshadowed in much of the coverage First how do you each define political violence and where does hateful speech racist antisemitic homophobic transphobic speech and the political effects of that speech fall here Natasha I ll start with you NL I ve invariably taken quite a kind of capacious view when thinking about political violence to the extent that after an assassination a shooting like this when we see politicians across the political spectrum but even including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez putting out messages and they re now platitudinous at this point along the lines of political violence has no space in this country it s both misplaced and kind of risible This country is the home of so much political violence structurally so through its foundations in Indigenous slaughter slavery exploitation dispossession mass shootings seen nowhere else on the planet and rates of incarceration seen nowhere else on the planet So we can t help ourselves to any space within this country that is not in particular way ordered by and drenched in histories and continuities of political violence Which makes it all the more dangerous in moments like this when events and dramatic events and high-octane events can be so weaponized to place the fault and the origins of political violence in one small corner as we ve seen the right instantly do But I do think in terms of if we are thinking just empirically numbers wise which we can t ignore it remains the episode by a vast degree that the majority of politically motivated violent attacks in the majority of archetypal way of thinking about it are still to this day committed by members of the far right and almost all cis men That remains true despite far right alleges to the opposite AL Ali I want to bring you in here too How do you define political violence And I ll bring up this question too about where hateful speech and the effects of that speech fits into this picture if at all AB Yeah I mean I think that there are tiers I think that the majority of clear conventionally understood one is acts of physical violence that specifically bring harm onto individuals So you know like assassinations fighting or targeting people And then there is a tier of a different type of violence that doesn t show up in studies And I think is still pernicious and bad but it s a distinct thing where you engage in this otherizing or marginalizing rhetoric that can both I guess in its own way feel violent but then more importantly can induce or create the conditions to produce violence toward others But yeah I think generally when I m talking and thinking about political violence especially right now I m thinking of it in the context of ascendant like assassinations or in years of led context where there were these attacks and acts of terrorism in Italy or things like that AL Tash after news broke that Kirk was shot and then died influential right-wing personalities went on social media to declare war on the left even though at the time the suspect and motive were still unknown Then Donald Trump issued a video amplifying those messages and stated in the broadest terms that his administration would go after the radical left and the organizations that backing them A large number of on the right are calling Kirk a martyr which is a very loaded word And I ll just note as of this recording the suspect is still unknown but the FBI has circulated a photo of a person of interest But Tash how is this language being weaponized NL We are seeing language weaponized so swiftly We re seeing an almost immediate transmutation of an act of about which we know at this time at the time of speaking almost nothing into a clear and highly and swiftly pronounced and declared political campaign So you have people like Laura Loomer calling essentially open season on the broadest framing of who could count for left And blaming the entire left and anyone associated with it for this shooting Related Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk s Killing to Attack the Left Donald Trump specifically in his constituents address spoke of the rhetoric as being responsible spoke of terrorism So all the words promptly marshaled speak to a very serious threat of political repression You also had the Manhattan Institute s Christopher Rufo famed of discipline for turning critical race theory into a boogeyman across the country and informing the attacks we see ongoing in higher guidance he very specifically called in no uncertain terms for a return of J Edgar Hoover s approach to crushing left wing political activism So these are open calls to revive selected of what had been condemned as various of the darkest points of U S th century history COINTELPRO-style tactics McCarthyite repression And you have influential figures in Trump s universe saying we are not even pretending this isn t exactly what we re calling for I find it a very dangerous moment AL Ali you ve covered Kirk and the broader right What do you make of this How language is being weaponized in this moment and as Natasha is speaking to historically AB There s like two different columns of things that I m concerned by and one of them is this rhetoric inducing literal violent backlash And there being like a spiral of violence that people have talked about that in addition to these big influential people who are the preponderance vital here you can see this echoing down in less influential but still notable posters on the far right who maybe won t do things themselves but have notable followings who are encouraging even more directly violent sentiment And then the other column Natasha talked about too is state repression And this is being used as justification to just add a little bit onto what you stated already 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 and trying to ride them as hard as they can So Edward Coristine being attacked the DOGE employee was a little bit of the justification as to why federal agents went into Washington D C Charlie Kirk getting killed is a much bigger deal than that That potentially gives them a bigger chip to use and I don t see why they won t given their track record so far AL Ali conspiracy theories over Kirk s shooting sprang up instantly online We also saw this in the episode of the shooting of the two Minnesota lawmakers earlier this summer and with the shooting of Donald Trump last year What do you make of the way in which the absence of facts and information misinformation and disinformation spreads at present and the way in which it is politicized Related Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Way of life and the Mirror World AB I think about this a lot and I don t I want to have better answers for this than I do But my basic answer is that it s concerning It s not good And I ve observed this other people have observed this My colleague Charlie Warzel has written about this in different strategies But it increasingly seems like or just seems like for lots of people conspiracy theories are just the fundamental mode by which we process large mainstream hard-to-understand events in the news And that there s perpetually a very very notable set of people that will promptly come up with chosen conspiracy theory I saw on Threads this conspiracy went viral that this is a false flag that is intentionally set down And Charlie s life was essentially sacrificed to allow the Trump administration carte blanche to do what it wants I think that the genesis point of this is political and it s a sign of a society that is very unequal and unstable but I just don t feel confident in understanding wholly what s generating it but I do feel confident it s not good AL Tash what are your thoughts NL Yes just following on from what Ali commented It s what drives this very conspiratorial moment and the leaps to assign a certain political narrative so fast in the absence of knowledge I think it would take libraries to really really pick apart But I think what we can say already is that we don t yet know who the shooter was But we already know that whoever it does turn out to be we are living in a moment with an authoritarian leadership that will weaponize this moment either way and have decided to do so So the facts of the matter of lesson are vital but will any sort of revelations regardless of who the shooter is shift this administration the Trump regime and his acolytes plans and policies and desires and inaction to further repress dissent left-wing voices marginalized voices trans voices Absolutely not They ve made this clear This is not about what certainly happened This is about finding any opportunity to further escalate the white nationalist project which is inherently violent and indeed is the water in which such stochastic violent events can occur Break AL Natasha the killing happened when Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University How does the location of a college campus for this shooting affect the nature of the response given the role of colleges in historical social movements NL I ll admit ignorance about any of the histories and specifics of this Utah college campus I think you know Kirk so much of his work so much of his activism was centered around college campuses and holding forth and taking spaces there and producing a kind of a youth movement around his revanchist project the rights revanchist project Obviously we are at a moment and have been particularly in the nearly two years of genocide Israel s U S -backed genocide in Gaza that campuses have become a site of political struggle and a site particularly of major conservative repression against left-wing speech against pro-Palestinian speech And the idea that they are and this is a claim the right have been making people like Christopher Rufo on the forefront of this for years even before Trump s second term and throughout the Biden administration that college campuses are this threat this site of massive communist liberatory vulnerability to United States of America s freedoms Of lesson we are at a moment of and I teach at university in New York years of the neoliberalization of the university now further imperiled by far-right control censorship and attacks on academic freedom in the majority extreme methods we ve seen since McCarthyism at least So to have more grounds for censorship alleged alleges for demands for defense on campuses is no good thing of program But I just think we are likely to see more weaponization more mischaracterizations from the right about university life in general Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent AL You know we touched on the issue of mass shootings as a uniquely American phenomenon I mentioned this shooting in Colorado which was the th shooting to take place at a high school this year There is such a disconnect between how numb we have become to that kind of political violence where I don t even think we consider do we consider a mass shooting political violence or do we just consider it a function of where we are I don t know if either of you have thoughts on that AB Yeah I mean it s born of politics and it s related to politics I think it s central to not lose sight of that distinction about how it is something that s clearly like rot of what happens or is related to what happens in Washington Maybe to make too obvious of a point I personally do think about it differently in that it seems to be making a sort of different point in majority of cases Sometimes there s crossover but I guess it just depends AL Tash There is no apolitical or unpolitical mass shooting event in this country NL I think we can talk about the fact of mass shootings in the U S as an unequivocally political morbid symptom that won t stop without political intervention But I agree with Ali We can talk about politically motivated attacks in terms of what the politics of a given shooting involve in terms of motivation in terms of consequences And again with this particular shooting the first aspect of who the shooter is and whatever motivations they might be we don t know So yeah I think it s worth making those distinctions but there is no apolitical or unpolitical mass shooting event in this country AL For both of you I just want to ask for your final thoughts and what s missing from this conversation that we haven t touched on already AB I guess one of my final thoughts is that I m concerned that this widens the aperture for the likely kinds of violence that can reverberate back into politics We re already in an uptrend More political violence has happened over the past several years than the past decade than it did prior It s at historical heights that we haven t seen in decades But it was contained it was bad but it was mostly contained to elected representatives with maybe particular small exceptions or in the development of Luigi Mangione a CEO who s in a formal position of power Kirk retains power and influence but I think is in a less formal role and 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 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 AL Tash NL Yes I would agree And any escalations especially given the asymmetries of power and indeed the asymmetries of gun power in this country mean that any sort of escalation and spiral further toward that direction puts those who are already more vulnerable at higher vulnerability And again political violence or politically motivated violence even in the majority of traditionally understood terms the sorts of which is tracked by the ADL historically which is the conservative Anti-Defamation League still has far-right motivated attacks against masses of people and against minorities as the overwhelming majority So I think that we are not seeing a specific trend away from that but any sort of escalation is dangerous and all the more dangerous at this moment What we do not need is the whitewashing of Charlie Kirk s politics to make it sound like he was open-minded What we do not need is the whitewashing of Charlie Kirk s politics to make it sound like he was open-minded invested in a broad and robust residents in which people have equal access to speech learning and learning That is not the man who was killed the previous 24 hours Nor is it the job of Democrat leaders to scramble into those hagiographic performances at a moment where they should be attending very very speedily to their constituents and their most of vulnerable constituents to protect them from the very kind of world that various of Charlie Kirk s worst supporters and worst defenders in his life would have needed to see come into being And again that is a world that is crueler whiter and less inclusive of huge swaths of millions of Americans and the people that live here And I think that s who we should be protecting and thinking about right now AL Thank you both We are going to leave it there We really appreciate you taking the time and thank you for joining me on the Intercept Briefing AB Thank you so much It was great NL Thanks AL That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing We want to hear from you Share your story with us at -POD-CAST That s - - You can also email us at podcasts theintercept com This episode was produced by Laura Flynn Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief Chelsey B Coombs is our social and video producer Fei Liu is our product and design manager Nara Shin is our copy editor Will Stanton mixed our show Legal review by Shawn Musgrave Slip Stream provided our theme music You can aid our work at theintercept com join Your donation no matter the amount makes a real difference If you haven t already please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts And tell all of your friends about us and better yet leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find our reporting Until next time I m Akela Lacy Thanks for listening The post The Real Charlie Kirk appeared first on The Intercept