NERMEEN SHAIKH: A manhunt is underway in Utah after the prominent far-right activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Wednesday as he spoke before a large outdoor crowd at Utah Valley University on the first stop of his fall campus tour. Kirk was 31 years old. He founded Turning Point USA when he was just 18, which grew into the largest right-wing youth movement in the country. He was a close ally of President Trump and one of the most influential young voices in the MAGA movement.

Police believe Kirk was killed by a single shot, possibly fired from a nearby roof. Kirk was shot as he was responding to a question by an audience member about how many transgender individuals have been mass shooters.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: There’s a lot, right? I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

CHARLIE KIRK: Counting or not counting gang violence?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Great.

AMY GOODMAN: Police have not yet identified the shooter, but on Wednesday night, President Trump blamed the shooting on, well, what he called the radical left.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 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.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: During his address, Trump referenced several other attacks on public figures, including attempts on his own life, but made no mention of any Democratic politicians who have been the target of political violence. The shooting of Charlie Kirk comes less than three months after a Trump supporter assassinated Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home.

Meanwhile, a number of prominent right-wing figures are already calling for Trump to target left-wing groups. Elon Musk wrote on X, quote, “The Left is the party of murder.” The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo wrote on X, “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos,” end-quote. Meanwhile, the far-right influencer Laura Loomer also wrote on X, quote, “The best way President Trump can reinforce Charlie’s legacy is by cracking down on the Left with the full force of the government. … Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence. We can’t allow for these people to live among us in society.”

AMY GOODMAN: These comments come despite evidence the vast majority of political violence in the United States is committed by the far right. Last year, a unit of the Department of Justice published a major study on domestic terrorism. It found, quote, “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” unquote.

We’re joined now by Jeff Sharlet, who’s written extensively about political violence. He’s journalist, author and professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. His latest book is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. His most recent post on Substack is “The Struggle is Long.”

Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Jeff Sharlet. First, if you can respond to this horrific moment yesterday? As he was taking questions from the crowd, the assassination, one bullet to the neck. Talk about your response.

JEFF SHARLET: I think — I think we’re in a moment of great peril. The minute I heard this, spending the time that I do amongst right-wingers and reading right-wing media and fascist media and understanding their imagination of the moment, which is — look, I’m not going to take away — they’ve lost one of their own, and I don’t doubt some of them mourn him. But you also see a certain amount of glee rippling through that world. The language that I keep seeing is “the gloves are off,” “everything’s on the table,” “it’s on,” “now it’s time to do it,” right? So, there’s a sense in which, rather than mourning their fallen comrade, they’re seeing it as — some are seeing it as a license to further escalate political violence.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Jeff Sharlet, if you could just provide some broader context? Explain who Charlie Kirk was and the kind of extremely broad influence that he had. I mean —

JEFF SHARLET: Yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — some have commented that, in fact, he was more important for Trump than some of his Cabinet secretaries.

JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, I really think this is — he’s one of the great, underestimated figures outside right-wing organizing circles. And that’s because he had a three-hour, daily — a three-hour talk show. He had a bigger presence on TikTok than most political figures. And so, he was misunderstood as an influencer — and he was that — but primarily and fundamentally what he was was an organizer, and a very, very effective one. You know, political analysts quibble over how much — how essential he was to swinging so much of the youth vote to Trump, but there’s no question that he was a huge, huge part of it.

And he did that by transforming far-right youth politics in America. The previous organizations had always been built around ideology, whether it was a kind of a William F. Buckley conservatism or libertarianism. And Kirk’s insight was absolute devotion to the great leader, cult of personality — a central tenet of fascism. His politics would change. His enemies were Trump’s enemies, whoever that was that day. He was, in so many ways — and I think Trump viewed him this — as the son he really wanted to have, a figure of tremendous influence. And I think that’s important for us to understand, because the scale of the right-wing reaction is going to be — is going to correlate with that.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Sharlet, talk about Turning Point USA. What is the significance of this organization, and his role in building it?

JEFF SHARLET: So, he founded it in 2012, and at the time, he was kind of a tea party Republican.

AMY GOODMAN: Eighteen years old, right?

JEFF SHARLET: Yes, he was a young guy. He decided to drop out of college. I think a lot of people make a lot of that, and he couldn’t even go to college. What the guy could do was organize and charm rich, old white men and raise money. And he did it. And he grew and grew it, and then took a turn toward Christian nationalism. It had originally been largely secular. It had originally been somewhat indifferent to or agnostic on LGBTQ+ rights. But he would see the moment. He was very good at — like his, you know, his hero, Trump — at sort of tacking ever rightward, wherever the current would take him. He built it to this behemoth that has chapters on hundreds and hundreds of college campuses.

I think it’s worth noting, because you’re seeing some people saying, “Well, you know, I disagree with what he said, but he was a champion of free speech. He died debating.” Look, the fact that he was murdered doesn’t change the fact that he also — he was an opponent of free speech. There’s no other way to cut it, for a man who created something called Professor Watchlist, School Board Watchlist, to name and frighten people from teaching, who advocated restrictions on what school teachers could teach, who called for — and there’s a clip you can see online — who called for the televised public executions, and he had a pretty broad category in mind. But what was really chilling was he wanted this to be required viewing for children. And you can look at this clip, and you can see his colleagues. They’re sort of trolling, but Kirk, again and again, pulls it back to seriousness, and he says, “No, no, no, this isn’t a joke. This has to be a holy experience, a teaching experience for children, watching enemies be killed.” That is not a champion of free speech.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, his main issues: immigration, women’s rights, abortion, gun control — a major one. As you’ve talked about, he repeatedly praised the Second Amendment. This is, well, going back to April 2023.

CHARLIE KIRK: You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am — I think it’s — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth 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.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Charlie Kirk speaking on his podcast in June, discussing mass deportation, what he called Project 10 Million, which would launch a soft civil war, he said, in the United States.

CHARLIE KIRK: I’m telling everybody we need to do Project 10 Million. Project 10 Million is removing the 10 million alien invaders in this country. We have 25, 30 million. Ten million is going to be a big number in four years, which is basically going to launch a soft civil war in the major cities. That’s why what’s happening in New York is so important, which we’ll talk about later in the show. That’s why what’s happening in L.A. is so important.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Charlie Kirk. Jeff Sharlet, your response?

JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, you know, you said his big issues, and you gave a list. I would say his big issue was singular: It was whiteness. And he would express it in any number of different kind of ways. When he spoke of immigration, he was a subscriber to the conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement” theory. And he was explicit in his very old-school antisemitic ideas that mysterious Jewish donors were funding an effort to dewhiten America.

He was radicalizing even further rightward before his eyes. Until 2023, he would praise MLK; afterwards, he started calling the Civil Rights Act one of the great wrongs of American life. And he would engage in openly racist talk, saying that — I don’t even like to give it voice, but saying that Black women didn’t have the mental processing power to hold a position — these positions of responsibility, and if you saw one in such a place, she had stolen that job. Again and again, it came into whiteness. And he clothed it in a Christianity that was unrecognizable to so many Christians of real faith. It was — it was an extreme language. And as with Trumpism in general, it was — it was mutating and moving ever rightward right before our eyes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Jeff, you wrote, right after the shooting, soon after the shooting yesterday, Wednesday — you warned people not to celebrate. You wrote, “If I have any credibility with you from twenty years of reporting on rightwing and fascist movements, please listen when I beg you not to celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot. Don’t celebrate it, don’t mock it.”

On the one hand, you saw quotes, tweets, people on social media doing that. On the other hand, this morning, you’ve commented on this piece, and I’d just like to read an excerpt, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein writing this morning, quote, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election,” Ezra Klein wrote, again, this morning in The New York Times. So, if you could comment on that?

JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, I mean, here’s a really, to me, very simple fact: Murder is murder. You don’t celebrate it. You don’t need to mock it. But you also don’t euphemize. You don’t whitewash the dead.

Kirk did not practice politics in the right way. He boasted of fomenting the J6 insurrection. As I said, he called for televised executions. He used the most vile language. He practiced a McCarthyism on campuses. This is not free speech.

There is no need in speaking — we can speak against political violence without somehow twisting ourselves around to defend others who spoke for it. We don’t have to imitate Kirk’s violent rhetoric, nor do we have to cover it up. We have to name it accurately, accurately as what it was. We have to name the murder of Kirk accurately as what it was: an assassination, a murder.

And, you know, I said if I have — if my, whatever, 20 years reporting gives me any credibility. A whole lot of people told me it doesn’t. We’re in a moment where I understand the anger of — people want to celebrate it. They think — I hear people saying, you know, “What more can fascism do? There’s already troops in our cities. We’re already there.” And I say there’s more they can do. There’s more that they’ve written of doing. And the struggle, I think — the struggle is to, at every step of the way, name as accurately the moment we are in, such that we can resist the tide toward full civil war that people like Charlie Kirk seem to be interested in pulling us into.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to be talking about troops in the streets of the United States in just one minute. But Charlie Kirk was going to be coming to Dartmouth — is that right, Jeff Sharlet? Just in the next few weeks, he was set up to debate Hasan Parker, the — Hasan Piker, I’m sorry — and that was sold out immediately.

JEFF SHARLET: Yes, and I have to admit, I’m not teaching this term, so that was news to me. And I don’t have anything to say to that, other than the recognition — let’s also not fool ourselves. I think there’s a temptation to say, “Oh, the only people he was able to pull onto his side were a few know-nothings.” No, he was able to move a real youth vote. He was able to turn a lot of young people toward the right. Despite his racism, he managed to find a perverse way of fooling a number of young Black people into believing him. He was an effective organizer.

That’s not a tribute to him. I want to be really clear. Sometimes we make the mistake of saying someone is good at something, that the good at doing what they do means that they’re good. And he was no good. But he was — he was effective, and his organization goes on past him.

AMY GOODMAN: Hasan Piker said, “This is a terrifying incident,” before Trump announced Kirk’s death. He said, “The reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome.” Jeff Sharlet, I want to thank you so much for being with us, joining us from Canton, New York, journalist, author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. His latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. His most recent post on Substack, “The Struggle is Long: On Charlie Kirk and resisting the momentum of civil war.”