President Trump and his allies are capitalizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk to open up fresh attacks on liberal institutions, donors and foundations. They seek to portray many on the left as traitors.
Appearing on Kirk’s podcast on Monday, less than a week after Kirks death, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, denounced
The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.
“With God as my witness,” Miller then declared,
We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.
Trump and his allies has long exploited “emergencies” to push divisive measures. Now he claims that left-wing terrorism is a greater threat than terror perpetrated by the right, a demonstrably false assertion.
Over the last three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute and the International Center for Counter Terrorism, have amassed evidence showing that right-wing violence is more prevalent than violence from the left.
“The current administration is perpetuating a narrative that erases right-wing violence, including Jan. 6, and blames the increased political violence on only one side,” Jay Childers, a professor of political communication at the University of Kansas, wrote by email in response to my queries.
Within hours of the Sept. 10 assassination of Kirk, Trump placed the blame for political violence squarely on “the radical left” in televised remarks that night:
A tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible, 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.
On Sept. 12, Trump went beyond dismissing the threat posed by right-wing political violence to arguing that right-wing extremists are in fact justified. Asked about violence perpetrated by those on the right, Trump didn’t hold back during an appearance on the Fox and Friends television show:
I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, “We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”
The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women sports, they want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.
Trump and his MAGA followers have not just turned Kirk’s murder into a political weapon; they are trying, with some success, to use it to build a national movement to publicly out everyone who criticized Kirk on social media after his death. They are also trying to persuade their employers to fire them.
“A campaign by public officials and others on the right has led just days after the conservative activist’s death to the firing or punishment of teachers, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming,” The Associated Press reported on Sept. 14.
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