Maximillian Alvarez:  On Wednesday, Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking to a large crowd at an outdoor event on the campus of Utah Valley University. Kirk was a close ally of President Donald Trump, a far-right influencer, conservative political activist, and founder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that advocates for conservative politics on high school, college, and university campuses, which also created the professor watch list, a site that has been used for years to surveil, doxx, and harass academics the group accuses of being politically biased. Horrifying videos of Kirk being shot in the neck and the crowd racing away in panic immediately flooded the internet and mainstream media. Kirk was pronounced dead shortly afterwards, leaving behind his wife, Erika, and their two children.

Now, we are recording this on the afternoon of Sept. 11, and as of right now, Kirk’s killer is still at large. Authorities posted images earlier today of a person of interest, and asked the public for help in identifying the individual. Law enforcement officials also said that the weapon used has been recovered and described as a high powered bolt-action rifle.

Kirk had become one of the most prominent voices of the MAGA movement. His assassination has sent shockwaves throughout the entire country. But the reaction to Kirk’s death on the right, from President Trump to Elon Musk, to far-right influencers like Chaya Raichik and Laura Loomer, suggests that we are sailing into very troubled waters in this country.

“The left is the party of murder,” Musk said on X Wednesday. “The Left are terrorists,” Loomer posted. In all caps, Raichik posted on X, “THIS IS WAR.”

And on Wednesday night, president Trump made a public address from the Oval Office. Here’s some of what he said:

President Donald Trump [recording]:  This is a dark moment for America. It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

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.

My administration will find each and every one of 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.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Again, we still have no idea who the shooter is and what their motivations were, but that hasn’t stopped the formation of a thunderous chorus of powerful people across the right and far-right spectrum calling for retribution.

And that is what we are going to focus on in today’s segment. And to help us break this all down, I am very grateful to be joined on The Real News today by three guests: Shane Burley is a journalist, organizer, and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He’s the author, co-author, and editor of numerous books, including Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It.

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept and the author of the book Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life. She’s the associate director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism graduate program at the New School for Social Research in New York.

And Jared Holt is the co-host of the podcast Posting Through It. He is a journalist and research analyst who has covered political extremism and hate movements in the United States for nearly a decade.

Thank you all so much for joining me on The Real News today. It is a very dark day in the country, but I’m truly grateful to have you all and to shine the light of your brilliant insights onto this moment when our audience desperately needs it.

There is, frankly, a frightening amount of misinformation and conjecture flying around right now. So, I wanted to use this first section to break down who Charlie Kirk was and what we definitively know and what we do not know about his assassination yesterday. So, Shane, why don’t we start with you, and then, Natasha, we’ll go to you.

Shane Burley:  Thanks so much for having me. So, I think, thinking about it this morning, it’s really hard to imagine, certainly, a second Trump term, but even, to a degree, a first Trump term without Charlie Kirk. He really helped to redevelop what a young, youthful, really far-right Republican Party could look like at a time when young people were not actually getting involved in these campus organizations. He created one that really brought people in and then pushed them further and further right.

So, as he matched Trump’s rhetoric and what became the MAGA movement, he was really able to bridge that and build a movement that just wouldn’t have happened before. So, the idea if we’re talking about a young GOP base or young right-wing men in particular, that really wouldn’t have happened without Charlie Kirk.

And he moved the Overton window quite a bit. The way that he talked about politics is something you would’ve found in the fringes of the right maybe five or 10 years before, and he helped mainstream it. He helped bring it onto Fox News, helped bring it into Newsmax and other places, and really helped establish that that is going to be the way that the right talks about politics. Just [inaudible] close to openly racial politics, openly transphobic politics, and certainly anti-immigrant politics.

Natasha Lennard:  Absolutely. Just following on from Shane, for those viewers and listeners who had never heard of Charlie Kirk for some reason before today, they could look at the news cycle, from right-wing news to liberal mainstream news, and get the sense that this was some generous, open-hearted man invested in young people getting together and organizing and developing spaces for robust debate and discourse and speech.

Notably, The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein lauded Kirk for his approach to politics as if he were mainly invested in the project of debate. What Charlie Kirk did was, largely, go from campus to campus and beyond and motivate young white men, and somewhat young white women, but particularly young white men, into the revanchist politics of the right today. Very much openly Christian nationalist, and antitrans to the extreme, anti-immigrant, and racist, and did a lot of work to normalize those positions as a center for the political right. So it’s no time to be whitewashing the political project to which he was reliably devoted.

He did make much of this “debate me” shtick with 19-year-olds he would meet when he would go on college campus tours. But this was essentially a 31-year-old man condescending to 19-year-olds, whilst, in fact, committing himself reliably to everything that is so troubling about Trump’s authoritarian second term.

And what that does, indeed, is not open up debate. This is not about opening up debate. It’s about making the very people who are allowed to be in the body politic of this country at all smaller, whiter, more patriarchal, meaner, and yes, less inclusive. So yeah, just really agreeing with Shane there.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Jared, I want to bring you in here too. Anything else you want to add about who Charlie Kirk was and what we know and don’t know about his assassination on Wednesday?

Jared Holt:  Yeah, I’ll start. I think Shane and Natasha covered the brunt of Charlie Kirk, but a couple other things I want to add in here. I feel like another thing that these obituaries and mainstream media have omitted about Charlie Kirk is the fact that he was a central leading figure in efforts to overturn the results of a democratic election in 2020. He is not a patriot. His career was built on contempt for this country and most of the people in it, particularly minorities and our immigrant communities.

Another thing to know about Charlie Kirk is that the reason anybody knows who Charlie Kirk is, is because when he was younger, fresh out of high school and looking to get into conservative politics, he managed to charm the right-wing mega-donor class. So much of early Turning Point USA and early Charlie Kirk lore, I guess, if you will, was a dark money project. This was not somebody who was authentically popular. Eventually, he did catch on and attain sincere popularity with conservative audiences, but he kind of faked it till he made it.

And I feel like that’s important to note. He has been portrayed in so many of these obituaries as this sort of sincere, genuine freedom fighter kind of guy, and maybe people disagreed with him, but you have to respect him, that sort of thing. But this is a professional operation. He is a provocateur, is how I saw him, not as somebody who was interested in a good-faith debate, but somebody who was willing to poke the bear and push things to the extremes, all with the goal of embarrassing people or stirring up audiences against various outgroups and targets of the conservative movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that that’s an area of Kirk’s legacy that all four of us have dealt with at one point or another. When I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, this was when Turning Point USA was really becoming a political force on campuses, and the professor watch list was something that we were all aware of. I knew many people who ended up on it and some who got disciplined by their universities just for being accused of what TPUSA was accusing them of without any real investigation. This was not something that any of us who genuinely championed robust, intellectual, good-faith debate saw as that. Because if you ran into any TPUSA folks on campus, that’s not what they were looking for. They were looking to oust you as some radical Marxist who was indoctrinating their students and needed to be doxxed and harassed into silence.

So it came as a shock to many of us who knew Kirk that way and TPUSA that way to be confronted with so many people saying that he was a champion of good-faith debate. And that does not go into the realm of speaking ill of the dead or pretending that we can’t be honest about the situation that we’re in right now.

I have so many folks who are conservative in my family, in my friend circles, people I’ve reported on in sacrifice zones around the country who are genuinely heartbroken about this, and my heart is broken for them. It’s broken for this country. It’s broken for the same reasons that I think a lot of us are feeling like this desperate desire to return to a place where we can talk to each other in terms that aren’t so black and white and so violent, but we can’t in this country, and Charlie Kirk had a big hand in creating that political surround that we find ourselves in where we can’t really cross the aisle and talk to each other across our political differences. If we don’t reckon with that legacy, we’re not going to get to the place so many of us want to get to.

And that is not the place where we are currently going in this country, and I want to focus us on where we are headed after this world-shaking political assassination. Again, there is still a lot that we do not know about Kirk’s assassination, and the suspect is still, as of this recording, at large. However, it is quite clear that the MAGA faithful and far-right influencers are responding as if they know for certain what happened, who’s at fault, and what must be done in response.

And so with the time that we have left, I want to focus specifically on how the right is responding to this and the dark political possibilities that are quickly approaching on the immediate horizons.

So, Shane, let’s start and go back to you.

Shane Burley:  I think one of the first things to bring up here is that, just as if there wasn’t a young MAGA movement without Charlie Kirk, there also wouldn’t have been the big wave of campus repressions that saw in ’23 and 2024 without the foundations laid by the professor watch list and the logic that was presented of the campus as this dangerous place that was attacking free speech and required someone to come in with an illiberal voice to balance things out.

And I actually think that’s going to actually have consequences on campus. Remember where he was killed, it’s in the place that was his war zone and where he said was dangerous. And so, I think that will just ramp up what he started 10 years ago. So, I think that’s going to continue.

One thing that people have to remember is that Charlie Kirk did have enemies to the right. This is actually a big part of his story. Starting in 2019, the Groyper movement, Nick Fuentes, really made their name by going to Turning Point events and demanding that Charlie Kirk answer for Zionism in Israel, and whether or not he’s being paid by Jews, or different framings.

And that has actually been a really consistent piece of the American far right’s story about Charlie Kirk. It’s actually in a lot of ways where neo-Nazis and certain people in the very far right distinguish themselves from the mainline far right that Charlie Kirk represented. Until the end he maintained a pro-Israel stance, even though he started to flirt with a lot more of the Israel-critical crowd. So, it’s possible that there’s someone to the right.

There’s also the fact that Charlie Kirk constantly changes positions to match those in power. So he would take a populist tone one day, he’d switch it when Trump switched. He’d be pro-exposing Epstein one day and then try and dissuade people from looking at it another day. He’d be about voter integrity one day and then would deny ballot integrity another, free speech one day and not the other. So it’s really actually hard to say who he betrayed here.

But nonetheless, it’s about a narrative and about justification for repression. And so when I hear something like this, the first thing I hear is that the right is going to use this to justify really serious repression against social movements, against activist groups. Of course, they always understand political movements on the left as having to be controlled from above, to have a vertical alliance. So, they assume that any kind of activist, anyone talking about racism, something like that, they must somehow be involved and so they’re going to have to use equal force. At a time when national officers, when National Guard troops are being sent into cities, this is going to be another pretext for it.

And so, I’m concerned about not just what’s going to happen on campus, but how this will be used to actually target and use group cases or justify really serious investigations into activists of all sorts.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s not forget that the federal occupation of Washington, DC, was effectively a response to a DOGE staffer, AKA Big Balls, getting beat up in DC. So, we’ve got some precedent here.

Natasha, please hop in.

Natasha Lennard:  Yes, I think we heard Trump’s own statement, saying this is a dark moment for America, and I think true, but for, of course, entirely the opposite reason. But the rhetoric that Trump himself is using, already saying he wants to go after rhetoric — He used the word “rhetoric.” He, of course, used the word “terrorism.” He talked about contributing to this crime.

And again, it is worth reiterating many, many times, at the time of speaking, we have no idea who this shooter is, absolutely no idea at all. But immediately in unison, Trump and his acolytes jumped to blame the radical left. And by the radical left, they quite literally mean anyone from leftist mutual aid kitchen to Bill Gates.

So it is a really open season, but obviously, the concern is the way in which activist communities can and will be targeted as a point, not of aberration from what we’ve seen before, but escalation in terms of, as you’ve all been saying, repression on campus.

We saw one of the responses worth noting last night, Christopher Rufo from the Manhattan Institute, the man behind turning critical race theory into a boogeyman who, along with Kirk and others, is responsible for so many of the censorious attacks on higher education and scholarly speech that we see today, he quite openly and explicitly called for a return of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI-style attacks on the left. So we are talking COINTELPRO, assassinations, and dissimulation and targeting, the worst sort of McCarthyism, the eras that had been condemned as really dark times in American history are being openly called into revival now, in the name, we are told by our centrist leaders, of a man who supposedly adored free speech.

So I think one thing I want to end with is that this isn’t a moment for our leaders, progressive or self-identifying progressive leaders, to forego their duty of ensuring that the most vulnerable in these moments are protected from the very world that Kirk and his ilk want to see called into being, which, again, is a whiter, crueler, less inclusive world.

Jared Holt:  What I will add here, again, like the previous question, Shane and Natasha, two brilliant people took a lot of words out of my mouth, but something I want to note is I’ve been tracking the far right for a decade now, and I cannot tell you how many times I have heard figures associated with these movements talking about retribution and civil war and retaliation. Violent rhetoric is a feature of these movements, and it was part of a problem — A lot of these obituaries are presenting Charlie Kirk as a victim of political division and violent rhetoric, and I think he was a major contributor to the problem. And like you said, I’m not trying to speak ill of the dead, but I do want to speak honestly about it. That has to be acknowledged and understood if we’re talking about him.

What’s different this time about this surge of violent rhetoric is that the people promoting it have institutional power. They have a vice grip over the federal government and can act on it in a way that they didn’t beforehand. And they are pursuing this agenda anyway, whether it is sending military to liberal-coded cities, including my home of Chicago, although it’s not clear if they’re going to go ahead with that after getting some pushback. We saw the incident where they exploded a speedboat that they claim was full of Venezuelan drug traffickers, is the official story. No due process, no way to check this claim because everyone’s dead, and it’s illegal.

And they just keep pushing the limits. They keep making clear they don’t really care about the courts or the traditional thresholds of institutional power that would normally be there to check it. The Republican Party at large is not interested in reigning things back right now. And for the last several years, right-wing media has been — Well, really the last decade, but especially the last few years — Right-wing media has been really harping on these narratives that there is some kind of imminent violent threat radiating from the “radical left,” which can be defined, as Natasha said, as loosely or as specifically as possible, depending which one of these guys you ask.

This event, to me, all things considered, almost feels like the climax of that narrative arc. They’ve been hyping this up. They’ve been really stretching themselves thin to villainize all kinds of random people, especially transgender people, trying to portray them as some kind of violent, murderous threat to conservatives that have to be acted on. And here you have an extremely high profile, extremely gruesome, awful event that happened to one of the movement’s figureheads, and to somebody who spent a lot of time and effort promoting those exact narratives.

So what comes next? I’m not sure. It seems this administration has made up its mind about who is to blame for what happened to Charlie Kirk. Even though, as we’re recording this, we know that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. We have an idea about how it happened, where the gunman was, what weapon was used. We have a photo of a suspect that they’re asking for help tracking down.

And then we have a conflicting report, some internal chatter that says that messages associated with transgender and anarchist ideologies, whatever that means, that could mean anything if you don’t specify, were found on bullet casings. That was conflicted. A senior law enforcement official told The New York Times this morning that that conflicts with other reports and is not confirmed and people should not be running with that.

Trump’s remarks, so many influencers’ remarks have decided that this “radical left” is responsible for this shooting. And, I don’t know, if they arrested a white supremacist, and it turned out he was the — Because, as Shane pointed out, there’s plenty of people to the right of Charlie Kirk that hate his guts. It’s not outside entirely the realm of possibility at this point that we’re recording that it’s possible, I guess, I don’t know. But even if they arrested somebody like that, I don’t know if it would stop this trajectory that they’re on.

And I think what’s most alarming — And I’ll end this here — Is what Trump said, basically blaming not anybody specifically or any specific group or whatever, but saying that Charlie Kirk died because people called him a supremacist, a Nazi specifically is what Trump said. That’s First Amendment-protected speech. That is not violent speech, that is not a threat, that is a criticism — a very extreme criticism of somebody, but a criticism of somebody.

If this administration tries to act in a way where people who criticize the supremacist elements of its agenda, the supremacist ideology and rhetoric of its top proponents, that can get us in a very dark place very quick. We’re already in a dark place, but if you flip your history books back to the ’60s and 70s in this country in terms of left-wing movements or social progressive movements, things can get a lot darker from here.

Maximillian Alvarez:  My dearly departed comrade and colleague Eddie Conway was locked up for 44 years and framed by COINTELPRO. He was a Baltimore Black Panther. Those are the casualties. He’s one of so, so many of that dark period.

I want to end on a rapid fire one more round around the table, because you all have studied the right, the far right, from the activist level to the donor level for years. You are authorities. You have seen this stuff up close. And as you all said, we don’t know where things are going to go, but we do know that the far right elements that you have been studying are now mainstream in the Republican Party, that that party has a stranglehold on the levers of power in our government from all three branches, that the media ecology that we’re in has shifted dramatically, and tech platforms are owned by people who are also part of the MAGA coalition, and algorithms are driven towards that type of ideology.

So I wanted to ask if we could glean from your years of research and studying the right and far right, if you could talk to folks watching this and listening to this right now who are afraid, who are anxious, who are angry, who don’t know what is going to happen next, what lessons could you offer on how to navigate this moment? What is not going to work if what we don’t want is more violence and death and civil war? Do you have any final thoughts that you want to leave folks with about where we could be headed in this country and how to carry ourselves so that we don’t end up in the darkest of possible outcomes?

Shane Burley:  I can kick us off on this optimistic note. The first thing I want to say is that what really struck me when I heard the news, my immediate response was that this is going to be bad for a lot of people. This is going to be a justification to raid people’s homes, to comb through people’s social media, to try and pass legislation to target people.

Historically, when something like this happens, a lot of what people are scared of is vigilante groups coming out. And I think that that is still a viable threat, whether this is formal groups like the Proud Boys or less formalized groups, particularly at big public events. And I think, obviously, being well coordinated and having safety plans and addressing that, I think that’s really important because those are still a threat.

But what’s different in 2025 is that I just don’t think that Proud Boys or a small neo-Nazi group is the primary threat. I think that the far right has much, much bigger militias than that, and they have ICE deputization, or they’re border patrol, or they’re coming in as the National Guard, and that’s a much different question. If people spent the last 10 years asking, how do we keep ourselves safe from the far right? I don’t think that those answers really dealt with the National Guard, with bolstered police forces, with militarized federal officers.

And so I think the questions and the answers are just going to be different now, because what’s possible is different now. What the courts can stop is much smaller. What’s available within the GOP to create friction is less.

And so it is hard to answer that question. I think what you ultimately get back to is that you deal with some of these, as productive as you can, as a crisis situation. What gets through people through those things? Being connected with their communities, being bonded with organizations, with their neighbors, knowing what people have, having other people know what you need. Basically, having strong relationships that allow you to coordinate for those things.

And then if we’re talking about the threat of political violence, the answer to that is mass movements that have the power to actually change things. The reality is that shooting Charlie Kirk will not stop the politics of Turning Point USA. But millions of people organizing, putting pressure on institutions, going to the streets, those things actually can stop that. They can actually shift the tide entirely.

And so, ultimately, that kind of movement is the same answer as what keeps us safe in this situation: It’s getting together with other people, it’s talking about it. It’s envisioning a different future, and trying to coordinate together as a mass of people. And ultimately, that’s exactly what Charlie Kirk was not doing. He was not trying to make a mass democratic movement that represented everyone. He was trying to create an elitist, top-down government that privileged only certain kinds of people. So I think the answer to this crisis is to build exactly what Charlie Kirk wanted to destroy.

Natasha Lennard:  Yeah, I just completely agree. I would also say, especially for maybe some of our younger listeners and viewers, the government does not have a sense of humor. Please don’t be stupid online. So I think just being aware of what you’re putting out there, just very practically, not a time for stupid jokes. Because, yes, indeed, the problem is not just state-sanctioned vigilante violence.

And I think we definitely have to also have noted that, in the last 30 years, by far the majority of politically motivated attacks, or at least how they’re understood and studied in terms of data, by far,they have been committed by the far right and cis men. So whatever narratives are going to be spread to the country, which also Kirk himself was invested in dissimulation campaigns about, that remains true. So, that sort of vigilante is state-sanctioned at this point, vigilante violence has been a constant threat. But right now it is, I think, the state itself and its mechanisms of oppression, as we have seen in this country before, being reweaponized, revived with this ability to weaponize a justification wherever they can find it, we will continue to see.

And so for that reason, Shane’s suggestions are all the more important because they were the very thing that we have needed in response and will continue to need in response to authoritarian escalations anyway, which is community protection of the most vulnerable, not presuming that we’ll be saved by the courts or the Democratic center.

Jared Holt:  Yeah, I will echo what Shane said. I don’t know what to tell anybody to do, and I don’t know that it’s really my place to be handing out advice, but I do think there is merit in hard times with making your world a little smaller. And by that I don’t mean tuning out. I mean investing your energy in the things around you. You could write a letter to your congressperson, or you could go show up at a local government meeting and be one of the three people that showed up that day, which means you’ve got a whole lot of influence right now. You’ve got a pretty big voice, and it’s on issues that might affect your neighborhood.

And also organizing with other like-minded people locally, alternative media is great. Sharing that with people, getting more honest and unfiltered perspectives to people that really convey the truth about this situation at a time where a lot of media is glossing over it or seeming to walk around with their hands over their eyes and fingers in their ears pretending that the house is not on fire, if you will.

But the other thing I also want to say, again, to echo a point Shane made, Turning Point USA is not stopped. The far right is not stopped because somebody killed Charlie Kirk. It shouldn’t have happened. That sort of thing should not happen. We should not celebrate that, as some people online have. And like Natasha said, the police, the government, they don’t really have a sense of humor. So people might’ve been joking around or poking some fun or whatever, but it is just not a good idea. And it’s also just kind of gross, in my opinion.

I do the work I do and have done for the last decade because I feel personally driven because I want to live in a world that is more accepting, that is safer, and that can produce sincere and needed change to make sure that everybody can enjoy a good life, the freedoms and joys that a good life can contain.

A vision towards a positive future like that I do not think can include violence. A future where everybody is safe and happy and secure and can live their life to the fullest is not one where people are getting assassinated in broad daylight over political attitudes — And I’m no fan of Charlie Kirk, I think that has been evident here, but that is not the future. That is not the way forward.

I think the future is building strength through solidarity and actually organizing and supporting each other through this hard time, and identifying those little points of friction, those little small acts of refusal we can all do, because authoritarianism requires collaboration and complacency. And I think even if it doesn’t feel like much on the individual level, keeping our guards up and saying no and making our voices known is worth something.