How Charlie Kirk's murder is being weaponised by his own side

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0:56evidence that statistics show America's violence comes from the left. Nearly a week on from Charlie Kirk's death, we're starting to see a pattern that MAGA, President Trump, Vice President Vance are using his death, capitalising his death to go after their political opponents. Welcome to the news agents.

1:22The News Agents. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And that was J.D. Vance, who has taken the place of a man he calls his good friend, Charlie Kirk, on what would have been Charlie Kirk's own podcast this week. And I think the kindest way to see some of the comments that we're going to hear is through the lens of grief, perhaps. There is no question that J.D. Vance was close to Charlie Kirk. There is every understanding that it was Charlie Kirk who petitioned Trump as a candidate for president to put J.D. Vance in that role. And so I suppose the way this makes the most sense is if you think that J.D. Vance is in a deep state of grief and wants to take whatever feels like the revenge for his dear friend would be.

2:14The trouble is, when you're the vice president, it's not just like you're screaming into the void. Your words have actions. And he essentially said in this podcast, it was a vow that he would dismantle institutions on the left that he claims promote violence and terrorism. He's already denounced two of the country's most prominent liberal foundations. He is going after whatever he decrees to be a radical left group. This does not come in isolation. We saw in the immediate wake of Charlie Kirk's appalling murder, President Trump himself take to the airwaves, obviously in perhaps himself in a state of some grief, but doing in the first half of the speech what presidents normally do in this situation, what we saw his predecessors do in this situation, say that violence is appalling, that political violence is appalling, send his heart out to Charlie Kirk's family, who of course must be and have been suffering terribly.

3:17But then Trump did something that I think that no contemporary president, possibly no other president in American history would have done, which is immediately turn a corner. And instead of doing the thing that American presidents and political leaders do, which is to try and take the temperature down, he decided to try and put the temperature up by blaming explicitly, on the basis of that time, of no evidence, and we still, to this day, right, nearly a week on, can't be certain yet of the motives of his murderer, lots and lots of speculation, but not much evidence from the authorities yet, he decided to blame far-left groups and say that, uniquely, the far left has a particular role, has a unique role, has a sole responsibility for the ratcheting up of political tension and the use of political violence in the United States.

4:05Now, we know statistically that that is wrong. In fact, according to the US government's own data, they say that the right and far right are responsible for the majority of politically related violence in the United States. Obviously, one can immediately think of one of the biggest moments of political violence in American history itself, which is January the 6th, where Trump's own supporters literally went to the Capitol saying, hang Mike Pence, the then US vice president. Trump decides to come back to office and release all of the people who were responsible for that. But this isn't just a rhetorical thing.

4:38We're seeing from the president's top staff, including Stephen Miller, going on Charlie Coke show with Vance and talking, I think, in one of the most chilling ways that I've heard a politician or public official speak in my lifetime. There's incredible sadness, but there's incredible anger. And the thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion. But focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause, is one of the most important agents of change in human history. Probably showed that. Amen. And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

5:25So let me explain a little bit what that means. So I've got 30 seconds. So be quick, Stephen. The organized doxing 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 and incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast domestic terror movement. And with God as my witness, 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.

6:02It will happen and we will do it in Charlie's name. Absolutely chilling, as you say, the idea that Trump's deputy chief of staff talks about the uprooting of an organised campaign behind Charlie Kirk's murder and the threat of uprooting and dismantling these terrorist networks. But I think even before you get to chilling, what it shows is a massive lack of understanding in what has just gone on in America over the shooting of Charlie Kirk. And as we said last week, that shooting was absolutely abhorrent. And some of the remarks that came from President Trump were before there was any known shooter, known identity behind the killing, which does make it feel more like a justification for something that they kind of already had up their sleeve.

6:54they kind of already had planned. But the more that we get to know about this 22-year-old man, Robinson, the more, frankly, confusing the whole picture becomes. What do we know about him so far, the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk? We know that he grew up in a Mormon family. We know he grew up in a Republican family. We understand they didn't have many Democrat friends. OK, that doesn't necessarily mean He couldn't have leanings one way or the other. But as soon as you actually look into what we've understood on any level about the messaging he put on those bullets on the casings, what you start to understand is that this is not remotely about right or left.

7:40This is about gaming memes. This is about nihilistic sort of denial of self or motivation or sense of purpose. you have to go quite deep to understand some of the kind of weird internet jokes that have been written down like he puts notices bulge oh whoa what's this that comes from an internet sex joke about furry role play when he says bella chow chow bella chow is an anti-fascist song which has also been really brought into the present by things like money heist you know cassidy papel the netflix films and all the rest of it. Hey, fascist comes from, I think, hell divers too. In other words, you have to be pretty well versed in a lot of fairly deep internet gaming to understand even a quarter of the messaging that he was trying to inject if those bullet casings tell us a story about motive.

8:34And you know what? Guess what? It doesn't break down into left or right. It doesn't break down into gay or not gay. It doesn't break down into family background or political beliefs. It suggests that he came from a very heavily, deeply sort of rabbit hole existence, which was majorly online, which probably talks him being a loner, being somebody who didn't know where he was going, what he was doing, what his sense of purpose was. And I think as soon as the administration ignore all of that ignore anything that sort of talks to what is clearly obvious to much younger people you know to the sort of staffers around the people in power who could understand what is going on here a bit better it just feels like they're using this to tell whatever story they had pre-planned and this is what i mean and i sort of hesitate in some ways to use this term um because i've no doubt at all that some of the people involved including perhaps Vance, Miller, others, are genuinely aggrieved, genuinely in mourning, shocked by the death of their friend.

9:42It must be an appalling event and a senseless event. I am nonetheless, well I don't know if I'm surprised or shocked, but nonetheless their reaction I think is deeply disturbing, because I think that part of their reaction beyond their human grief is clearly a weaponization of his assassination that's what we're seeing because a rational person looking at this might think and try and analyze and try and reflect on the tenor of politics overall and what may have led to this moment as you say amy we do not know the political motivations of the alleged assassin maybe he will be left-wing maybe he'll be right-wing i mean who knows what we can see is that or what is i think probably beyond doubt is that on some level he will have been radicalized he will be a radicalized person.

10:30And the key central point is, is that all of American politics, and increasingly because we pick it up through osmosis, British politics, as we were discussing yesterday with the Tommy Robinson rally and Elon Musk role, is becoming increasingly radicalised. And the point is, is that MAGA and the way it talks about politics, the tone and tenor in which it talks about politics, is part of that radicalisation. I mean, I was on that Piers Morgan show panel on Friday And I sort of couldn't quite believe my ears because I was listening to a group of kind of, you know, MAGA people and influencers and so on, genuinely sitting there trying to tell me and trying to tell the audience that all political or most nearly all legitimisation of political violence comes from one side.

11:14And I'm sat there thinking, this is crazy. I've sort of gone on there to sort of say, well, you know, clearly political violence, wherever it takes place and legitimisation is a problem wherever it happens. and the argument seems to be and it's the argument that vance has been making and trump has been making that the problem just comes from one direction or one thing which is the left or the center left or whoever calling them fascist or nazis or whatever it is and that that raises the temperature and you know you're sat there thinking hang on a minute okay yeah i mean you can make an argument about whether it's appropriate to call trump or whoever a fascist or a nazi or far right or whatever you could say that acting in an authoritarian way is worse than being called an authoritarian but leaving that to one side i mean you know we've talked so many times look at the general tone of kind of maga x maga social online accounts we are constantly told by these people that the end of western civilization is just around the corner as a result of liberalism and progressive politics they constantly say that liberals liberalism progressivism whatever is destroying our cities their cities are a dystopian hellhole they say that liberals and charlie kirk himself said this again not justifying anything but charlie kirk himself said this he they constantly say that the great replacement theory is a real thing and vance himself comes over to the uk and says that freedom of speech is about to be destroyed at any particular moment and so you're like i'm sorry who's raising the temperature here who's raising the temperature here this is a phenomenon which is going on going on in politics generally and if you are sat there day after day after day week after week basically predicting as i say the end of western civilization which is something that is constantly, that is where the politics of the right has moved to, then you really can't say that the only group in society which is perhaps letting themselves get a little bit too heated by the use of the word far right or fascism or whatever, is the progressive left.

13:06That is crazy. Yeah, it's kind of a brilliant weapon to say we are allowed to act with fascist tendencies, authoritarian tendencies, dictator tendencies. But you can't call us. But you can't call it out. You can't call it out because then you are inciting violence. By the way, we can call you far left as much as we want. We can call you a communist as they did with Kamala Harris the whole time as much as they want. We'll be looking at the causes and the consequences of Charlie Kirk's death a little more in a moment.

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14:42I think you're also pointing to something that is genuinely confusing for us, which is, are the people in the Trump administration just not seeing the stuff that's happening on the left? Are they not seeing the violence and the murders on the left? Are they generally not aware of it? I mean, you mentioned Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband last week. There was a moment in the Oval Office where Trump was trying to answer a question. He talked about lowering the flag for Charlie Kirk. And one of the reporters there said, why didn't you lower it for the Democrat Melissa Hortman, the congresswoman who was killed in Minneapolis, again, murdered in cold blood on her doorstep.

15:24And Trump doesn't know who they're talking about. The name doesn't even register. Just listen to the clip. In retrospect, given all of the moving ways that this White House has paid tribute to Charlie Kirk, do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Horman, the Minnesota House Speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well? I'm not familiar. The Minnesota House Speaker, a Democrat, was assassinated this summer. Well, if the governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that. But the governor of Minnesota didn't ask me. I didn't. I wouldn't have thought of that.

16:05But I would have if somebody had asked me. People make requests for the lowering of flag. And oftentimes you have to say no, because it would be a lot of lowering. The flag would never be up. Had the governor of Minnesota asked me to do that, I would have done that. I mean, just replay that in your mind. The first thing he says is, I'm not familiar with that. Why isn't that name as familiar to him? It's a congresswoman. She was elected to Congress and she was murdered in cold blood. Why doesn't he know that name? And then he says, no one asked me to. It didn't occur to me. Why didn't it occur to him?

16:36So is there an absolute blind spot where you just think that people on the left, people not far left but standing for the Democratic Party, it's OK for them to disappear? It's OK for them to be murdered, but not somebody who is your close friend. It makes absolutely no sense. And the other thing that's really complicated is how they then managed to square all this with, drumroll, free speech. Pam Boddy, the actual attorney general, gave her thoughts on free speech and hate speech. Let's just have a listen. There's free speech and then there's hate speech. and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie in our society.

17:17Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people so we show them that some action is better than no action? We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting... So guess who is a real fan of free speech and allowing even the stuff that he called hate speech to flourish, Charlie Kirk. And he has repeatedly said, in America, there is no such thing as hate speech. They have different laws to us. The First Amendment. There is no such thing as hate speech. So she, in his name, is trying to stop the very thing that he wanted Americans to understand.

17:58I mean, we've called out the hypocrisy before, but it does strike me that they're going to get in a real tangle over this because they are now in the name of a free speech activist trying to ban free speech. Except they won't, Willem, because they'll just declare that this is different. I mean, that's what's extraordinary about the last 24... I mean, well, the last week. I mean, to see the MAGA movement discover that actually there should be some limitations on free speech after all. Although it feeds into what we've already said, which is, you know, so often with these so-called free speech champions, what they really mean is, I'm free to say what I like, but you're definitely not free to say what you like.

18:39Now, I would actually agree that some of the reaction and some of the, you know, if you're employed by the federal government, whatever, if you've posted a video where you glorify or justify the murder of anybody, absolutely outrageous and disgraceful. And I can absolutely see a situation in which you would lose your job, for sure. But this cuts against exactly the intellectual thrust of everything these people have always argued. I mean, to see this weekend, for example, I mean, it's not just about hate speech and limitations on free speech. To see the Magari also discover their inner cancel culture, which is, I mean, you know, some people may have seen over the weekend a very unfortunate incident, very stupid young man.

19:15The incoming president-elect of the Oxford Union become a massive core celeb. He obviously sent some WhatsApp, which appeared to show that, you know, he's sort of celebrating or making fun of Charlie Kirk's murder. Awful, terrible, stupid student. Stupid thing to do. I'm sure he regrets it enormously. But all of the sort of online right in the UK and the US calling on the Oxford Union to dissociate themselves, make sure that he doesn't become the actual Oxford Union president, just this silly, stupid debating society at Oxford University. But not only that, but then pulling up his academic record, trying to cancel a guy suggesting that he's a DEI.

19:49I mean, this was online bullying and discrimination of the kind of highest order being done on a transatlantic political level. Yeah, and close to home. We've just had Trump now calling out a lawsuit on The New York Times for$15 billion. He's such a fan of free speech in his own backyard that he now wants to sue The New York Times for an article it wrote because it endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 campaign. And he hopes to get$15 billion out of that. The one thing I would say, though, and I actually think in all this discussion, the thing that has possibly shocked me the most is that we have given up even mentioning guns or gun control.

20:32You know, the whole shooting incident happened on a campus with what we understand was a young man with a rifle and a very good aim. And yet nobody is even bothering to talk about guns. Nobody's even talking about the weapons. Nobody's even talking about the idea that you might cut down the actual violence, whatever the rhetoric is, whatever the language is. Because call me naive, but 10 years ago, we were covering every single kind of school shooting in America and trying to think which would be the one, which will be the one that brings whoever is in power to the place where something changes.

21:09You know, would it be Sandy Hook, which involved six and seven year olds? Would it be the Parkland shooting, which involved students, young university students? Would it be the one that involved people in a nightclub in Orlando? You know, we haven't even bothered to start that conversation this time around. We've completely given up on ever expecting America to do anything about its gun culture. And I think the chilling thing about this is that this isn't just confined to what Vance is saying or even what Trump is saying or what Miller is saying. You know, the whole administration is now gearing behind the efforts in Charlie Kirk's name, in the name of his appalling assassination, his appalling murder, to weed out, to extinguish, to suppress political dissent from within the administration and without.

21:55So, you know, we even saw, you know, Pete Hexeth, Defence Secretary, going to Congress. No, no, he's not the Defence Secretary. Sorry, sorry, you're right. The War Secretary. I mean, sorry, but that plays to the point. Because that's not chilling at all, is it? Because it plays to what feels like a militarisation. Yes, completely. Exactly. Sorry, the war secretary and some of his underlings saying his agencies are closely tracking any military personnel who celebrated mock Mr Kirk's death. Deputy Secretary of State is saying the administration is going to strip visas from individuals who celebrated Mr Kirk's death.

22:24And you might think on one level, OK, fair enough, that's awful. But who's going to decide that? Who's going to be judge, jury and executioner as to what celebrating Charlie Kirk's death is going to be? And you've got, you know, Republican representatives going to Congress saying that they're going to seek immediate bans for life, bans from social media platforms for, again, anyone who belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And again, you can have an argument about what these rules should be. But A, clearly, well, that is cancelling people. And B, what are the rules of that going to be? And again, the feeling that there is just this authoritarian streak in the United States right now that scares people.

23:00And again, it feeds exactly into that conversation we've just been having. Why is it that people are becoming radicalised? Why is it easier to radicalise people? Why are so many people becoming desensitised to political violence? Well, one of the reasons is, is because people are scared. People are scared by the sorts of things that they're hearing from the administration right now. I was thinking yesterday, imagine when Jode Cox was killed and she was killed by a far-right thug who literally screamed as she was walking down the street, Britain first, right? Far-right thug. Which is the name of a far-right organisation.

23:34Indeed so. Imagine if David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time, and remember this was taking place in the midst of... It was a week before the Brexit. The referendum. Imagine if David Cameron had come out and weaponised that assassination in the name of Remain in the way that Trump had done. That was what the equivalent would be. It would be him saying, trying to associate this with the Leave campaign, trying to say that we're going to use the mechanisms of the state, the institutions of the state to go after people we think who have celebrated her death or connected with the leave campaign that would be the equivalent that would be the equivalent and that would have been abhorrent it would have been wrong it would have been disgusting and that is basically the equivalent of what we're seeing today from the trump administration yeah i mean when you look at the kind of actions that vance is talking about taking now and as i say you know at the very beginning, I would have allowed for a certain amount of anger and that sense of reprisal and that sense of grief that comes from losing a friend.

24:33But he's now talking about rethinking, for example, the tax treatment of foundations on the left. In other words, he doesn't like George Soros's Open Society. He doesn't like the Ford Foundation. He thinks that if they've written articles he disagrees with, then that has to go into their pockets. And you get to a point where you're sort of looking at the spread and you're starting to add up a few of the pieces. And you've got Trump saying, well, I'm going to bring the military, I'm going to bring the National Guard onto the streets of the cities that I think are dangerous. Not the dangerous ones statistically, but the ones that he thinks are dangerous, which tends to be the blue states.

25:20Then you've got Vance saying, I'm going to take away money from the organisations that I think are behind whatever he called a domestic terror network. Then you've got the attempt to shut down the press. You're trying to gag places like the New York Times for writing articles and for what it puts on its front page. And it does seem that if you add all these together, what you get are the tentacles of a state that no longer trusts its citizens. it's basically deciding that autocracy and authoritarianism is the only way that America can survive. And then you're being asked to say, oh, well, that's all being done in the name of sorry, free speech, sorry, an attempt to kind of let America flourish.

26:09And Trump's about to come over here. We're going to talk about that later, perhaps. But Trump's coming over here and our prime minister is terrified that he's going to talk about Britain's free speech problem? I mean, in what world does he not just tell Trump to look at his own backyard? And look, I think there is often hypocrisy on every side when it comes to political violence, when it's done against your own side versus the other. I mean, you know, I think, do the right have a point when they say, well, the left didn't seem to have a problem with political violence, OK, not murdering people, but disorder when George Floyd was killed?

26:42I think that's a fair enough point. And, you know, was it the case that, you know, journalists on the left or liberal left or whatever would have looked was looking at the time and going well that's terrible disorder or because of the way the kind of left looks at those things do they say well that's a sort of legitimate response to all these structural problems i think that's fair enough and i can see that hypocrisy but then if we're actually going to move on from this it is necessary for every side to reflect and that is not happening at all and what's really tragic about it as well is that actually these ideas around political violence are actually at quite an elite level.

27:12I mean, there's been so much academic research and polling done in the United States, which shows that actually the tolerance for political violence for both Democrats and Republicans is very low. But the really interesting thing is, is that both Democrats and Republicans believe that the other side does tolerate political violence. Indeed, even though that two to three percent of Americans think that political violence is OK, Democrats and Republicans both estimate between 20 and 30 percent of Democrats and Republicans think it's OK, that the other side think that it's okay. So that shows the polarisation which is taking place in American society, right?

27:45And the fact that elites like Vance and Trump are feeding this propaganda that the other side thinks that political violence is okay when the truth is in America. Neither side, actually, the vast majority of people don't think it's okay. Yeah, completely right. I mean, all I'd say is that I don't think the polarisation of political thought is what was at play with the murder of Charlie Kirk. I mean, we do not understand the motives, and that is part of the problem that some young man who had access to a gun seems to have felt so kind of nihilistic about his life or the world or the state of things that he didn't really know what his political ideology was he didn't know you know there is nothing that says he was left or right you know there's a complete mishmash of everything that went into what he seems to indicate he thought and that's the problem and whilst politicians are talking about the left and right they're missing all of that well that's the hypocrisy because i remember again going back to joe cox example i remember what did nigel ferrari say after that she said he's just a nutter he's just a nutter and that's fine but if that's your explanation then it has to be your explanation for everything full stop yeah for everything for everyone either the political environment and framework does make a difference to people or it doesn't and really the only coherent position is to decide that it's one or the other of course as always you can hear more coverage about charlie Kirk, particularly in the run-up, of course, to his funeral this weekend on LBC.

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