Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.”
This remark from 31-year-old conservative influencer Charlie Kirk has been much invoked since he was killed at Utah Valley University last week. But judging by the flood of unguarded partisan talk since Kirk’s assassination, the reverse may well be the case.
America’s left and right are both guilty of talking in bad faith and not listening to each other as they seek to score points. In fact, talking is making things much worse. Moderate appeals for unity and calm, including from former President Barack Obama and Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox, are struggling to be heard above the clamor.
A Red Scare-style retribution is in the air now. As each battling side fails to see humanity in the other, a political doom loop of deepening political polarization, partisan anger and political violence seems to beckon — and Europe likely won’t be immune.
Of course, there has been unsparing vitriol coming directly from senior figures in the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has promised to go after the so-called “NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” citing the Open Society Foundations funded by philanthropist George Soros — a go-to populist bogeyman on both sides of the Atlantic — the Ford Foundation as targets.
Without substantiating his claims, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — never one to defuse a grenade — has blamed Kirk’s assassination on a “vast domestic terror movement” and pledged to utilize the full clout of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to dismantle leftist networks he says are inspiring political violence. This, even though the FBI has found no ties to any such network in Kirk’s killing, which was seemingly carried out by a lone wolf. If Miller were serious, there are plenty of far-right networks worthy of close scrutiny for ties to violence, including to the insurrection on Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, individual journalists like Elizabeth Spiers, who highlighted Kirk’s often less-than-civil discourse in an article, have been picked on for their columns. And Trump himself hasn’t held back, blaming the “radical left” for the assassination even before an arrest was made — much like some were quick to tar everyone on the right for the assassination of Minnesota Democratic lawmakers, Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in June.
Arguably, some on the left have, indeed, displayed a breathtaking lack of human sympathy for a young man deprived of his life, two young children deprived of a father and a wife deprived of her life partner — an indifference that’s stuck in the craw of Trump aides, many of whom were close friends with Kirk. And by doing so, they are foolishly aiding and abetting the hard right in its bid to paint liberals and the broader left as — in the words of tech billionaire Elon Musk — “the party of murder.”
America now seems set for another ugly episode of what late historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed the paranoid style of deep conspiracy-mongering, disinformation and scapegoating. Think the Salem witch-hunts of the 17th century; the Know Nothing agitation of the 1840s and 1850s, with Catholics falsely accused of subverting civil and religious liberty; and, of course, the Red Scare of the 1950s.
The Kirk assassination is almost certainly going to offer a pretext for further crackdowns by an administration that’s been skirting democratic norms and — for all its talk of defending free speech — seeking to emulate the cancel culture it so fiercely decries.
It won’t be bound to one side of the Atlantic either. MAGA ideologues see themselves as warriors, fighting not only a national battle but a civilizational, politico-cultural crusade that needs to go beyond America’s shores to be successful. And they’re keen to export their revolution.
European nations have their own ugly political dynamics underway too — one of grievance and resentment. Much like in the U.S., the continent’s liberal and centrist politicians have been all too ready to dismiss the real grievances causing many to turn to right-wing populism and nativism, fueled by economic and status anxiety, and a sense of dispossession and dislocation amid great social change.
There are differences, to be sure, but Europe’s populists see just as much reason and potential gain to marry their causes and learn from each other as their American counterparts. Hence, far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson enlisting Musk to speak at his U.K. rally last week, and the youth wing of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy choosing to focus on Kirk’s legacy at its upcoming conference.
Furthermore, Europe has been experiencing an alarming descent into extreme political acrimony and violence as well. Britain has seen two lawmakers, Jo Cox and David Amess, murdered since 2016. Last year, there was an attempt on the life of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico — the first on a head of government since 2003. And in May, the German government reported that police recorded 84,172 politically motivated crimes in 2024 — the largest number since records began in 2001 and a 40 percent increase from 2023, itself a record year. Much of the rise was fueled by right-wing extremism.
Academics who study political violence warn that we’re likely on the cusp of more political violence. “Political assassinations come in waves,” Arie Perliger, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s School of Criminology and Justice Studies, told the Conversation.
“I’ve looked at political assassinations in many democracies, and one of the things I see in a fairly consistent manner is that political assassinations create a process of escalation that encourages others on the extreme political spectrum to feel the need to retaliate,” he said.
CORRECTION: This article was updated on Sept. 18 to correct the details of the assassination of Melissa and Mark Hortman.
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