After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, many Americans are realizing that political violence in the United States is undeniably on the rise.
Kirk was shot in the neck during a public appearance at a university in Utah on Wednesday. It was a shocking and graphic murder but it was not unique.
Last summer saw two assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, one of which led to a trial playing out in federal court in Florida this week.
Only three months ago, a religious fanatic with a kill list assassinated Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman.
Last December, a gunman killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
And in 2022, in San Francisco, a man obsessed with right-wing conspiracy theories attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer, during a home invasion.
“We really need to take stock of what’s happening,” Alexander Reid Ross, a geographer and lecturer at Portland State University who studies political extremism, told Raw Story.
Ross said he was seeing celebration of violence on “far-left, irony-poisoned hipster social media accounts,” making light of Kirk’s murder by joking that “he brought debate to a gunfight” and similar jibes.
That trend carried over from the celebration of Luigi Mangione, the alleged United Healthcare assassin.
“Right now, there is an entire culture of celebrity assassins, and it seems to have spilled over from the far right to the left,” Ross said.
“We see the iconic image of Luigi Mangione as a saint. That is directly attributable to the sainthood complex of far-right and nihilistic mass shooters. We’re seeing the spread of a kind of enabling culture of political violence that just did not exist on this level 10 years ago.”
On Wednesday, in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's murder, Trump did little to calm waters, blaming “the radical left” for comparing “wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.”
He later said Kirk was “"an advocate of nonviolence” and “that's the way I'd like to see people respond.”
‘Full accelerationist’
So does Kirk’s murder mark a tipping point into a spiral of violence?
Early reporting that ammunition linked to the shooter was engraved with markings signifying antifascism and support for transgender people is fueling right-wing calls for retribution — notwithstanding caution from at least one law enforcement source “that the report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.”
Some neo-Nazis are heralding Kirk’s death as an opportunity for accelerationism — the idea that a moment of heightened political tension can open the door to tit-for-tat violence, creating conditions for revolutionary upheaval.
“Killing one of us is one thing,” an American neo-Nazi in Ukraine wrote on Telegram hours after Kirk’s death. “Killing one of the biggest conservative MAGA influencers is another.
“If the s---libs are going full accelerationist with the n------, then maybe I need to return to America.”
Users on another Telegram channel that caters to a transnational cohort of neo-Nazis who support Ukraine were at first divided, with some faulting Kirk for supporting Israel — or, in a contradictory swerve, speculating that an agent of Mossad carried out the hit because Kirk was perceived as wavering in his support for Israel.
Others worried that Kirk’s death would overshadow the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee who was murdered on light rail in Charlotte, NC last month — a galvanizing event for the white nationalist movement that the Trump administration has also sought to exploit.
On Thursday night, one channel administrator offered an assessment of Kirk’s death.
“Kirk’s shooting is good for us,” the administrator wrote. “A gatekeeping cuckservative Jew shill got iced by maybe a left-winger. He will be remembered as a martyr for the cause and this shooting (along with the murder of the Ukrainian girl) will cause outrage and radicalize people to our side.
“Expect a retaliatory action on a prominent left-winger soon in some way, shape or form to come. The s--- has hit the fan now.”
‘Reckoning we need’
Mainstream MAGA figures have also linked the deaths of Kirk and Zarutska as part of an effort to paint the political left as an implacable foe.
Christopher Rufo, the intellectual architect of the right’s assault on diversity, equity and inclusion, posted on X early on Wednesday: “The psychotic trans shooter gunning down Catholic kids in Minneapolis. The psychotic black homeless man stabbing the beautiful woman in Charlotte. And now an assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk.
“The reckoning we need is more profound than you can imagine.”
Around the same time, Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysian right-wing influencer with 1.2 million followers on X, posted: “Charlie Kirk wasn’t the first victim in this war. He was the second. The first victim was Iryna Zarutska. This is war.”
Prior to Kirk’s shooting, white nationalists organized a rally for Zarutska in Huntington Beach, CA, scheduled for Thursday. After Kirk’s death, fliers advertised the rally as “Justice for Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska!”
“All nationalists need to mobilize in their cities tonight,” Ryan Sanchez, a neo-Nazi with ties to Southern California and Arizona, wrote on Telegram. “Our people are enraged, they need leadership and protection from the terrorist left.
“… Things are moving. Act accordingly.”
During the rally at the Huntington Beach Pier, participants chanted, “White man, fight back.”
In other posts, Sanchez wrote, “Iryna’s death cries out for vengeance,” and, “Death to the left.”
In response to left-wing accounts cautioning followers to avoid the rally, Sanchez gloated that “social media accounts are now warning all Leftists to evacuate Huntington Beach after sundown.”
‘Eruptions’
Despite such rhetoric from the right, Ross cautioned that there is no reason to assume an escalation of political violence is inevitable.
Researchers have studied tit-for-tat violence between the far-right English Defense League and Islamist groups in the UK, to see if “acts of violence lead to a downward spiral,” and the results were somewhat unexpected.
“That theory is not fully substantiated, because it seems that societies tend to have a kind of settling systemic function in that spirals of violence tend to exhaust themselves rather rapidly, unless there’s an actual full-blown war happening in which one side fully believes they cannot continue fully without destroying the other,” Ross said.
“The tit-for-tat killings tend to be eruptions that happen over the course of a few weeks and subside. And they subside into a current that continues and breaks out again.”
Political violence in the U.S. is not at the level and frequency as the period in Italy known as the “Years of Lead,” from the late 1960s into the 1980s, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland around the same time, Ross said.
But that doesn’t mean people should be complacent.
“Random assassinations and assassination attempts, even these kind of mass shootings that are happening — these are very bad, and they might even show a direction toward that low-intensity conflict,” Ross said.
“They’re more like signs of broader acceptance of violence. If that culture becomes sort of mainstream, then you end up with that very high level of social conflict. The biggest warning signs are the cheapening of assassination deaths and the lionization of assassins.”