The usual ultra-MAGA elected officials dialled up the rhetoric to 11 immediately: “The Democrats own this,” Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from deep red South Carolina, said in an interview outside the Capitol shortly after the shooting.
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On the left, from what I could discern on my platform of choice, Bluesky, the reaction was a bit more measured. I saw some refusing to mourn Kirk by pointing to his attacks on trans people. This quote by Kirk, from 2023, was spread widely: “It’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.” But most of the sophisticated figures on the site decried the violence.
One prominent X poster and Elon Musk favourite, Tim Urban, wrote shortly after the shooting: “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination. Such unbelievably sick people.” That was plainly not true.
The sad thing is that, if this was a political assassination, it was an effective one. It took out an effective communicator. However, right-wing media will no doubt keep the focus on the tragedy, correctly sensing it will be a powerful cudgel to portray the left as murderous. We also have an administration that is not shy about using governmental force in extralegal ways with little provocation. It’s likely that Charlie Kirk’s killer will do more harm than Charlie Kirk ever could.
Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.
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