The US on the edge after Charlie Kirk’s killing

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, how Charlie Kirk's killing is being weaponized in the US.

0:24he was the face of a movement a ferociously right-wing Christian nationalist who inspired a generation of conservative youth Charlie Kirk toured campuses whipping up culture wars actively courting controversy but when he was killed last week in a horrifying public shooting his death became something else entirely. If you thought that my husband's mission was powerful before you have no idea. You have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country. You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife. The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.

1:12In the hours that followed, social media lit up. But it wasn't just Kirk's widow and TikTok influencers. It was the president himself.

1:22Ed Pilkington:The problem we have is on the left. And when you look at the agitators, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place, that's the left, that's not the right. And this wasn't just mourning. It was fury. The Democratic Party has literally turned into a terrorist organization. And no, I am not exaggerating. Charlie Kirk's a casualty of war. We're in this country. We are. Well, there's no question that we're clearly facing asymmetric civil warfare. One of the key aspects of that is political assassinations. Irrespective of who the killer was, what he actually believed in, or why he did it, a single message has begun to echo.

2:15Charlie Kirk's killing is a call to arms. And in his death, Trump's administration is ramping up its crackdown on left-leaning groups, organizations, non-profits, people who protest, people who tweet.

2:30Ed Pilkington:the last message that charlie kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence that was the last message that he sent me from the guardian i'm noshin Iqbal, today in Focus, a dark chapter in America.

3:02Ed Pilkington, you're the chief reporter for The Guardian US. The killing of Charlie Kirk last week dominated news coverage, both where you are and here in the UK. Kirk was a 31-year-old right-wing activist and influencer. He was widely credited with delivering Trump the youth folk. He founded Turning Point USA, which toured schools and college campuses, converting the youth to his particular brand of Christian conservative politics. Last Wednesday, he was speaking at Utah Valley University to a crowd of about 3 ,000 people. What happened? It was at about 2.30pm on Wednesday afternoon local time when Kirk was just answering a question paradoxically about mass shootings in America.

3:49and a single shot rang out. There was pandemonium, the thousands of people in front of him on the campus lawn, scattered in all directions, screaming.

3:59Ed Pilkington:You guys OK? There's been a shooting. And Kirk slumped to the left and was quickly taken away. And he was pronounced dead, in fact, by a post by President Trump on his true social media about a couple hours later. The shooter initially escaped, and a pretty frenzied manhunt then followed. How did that unfold? What we know from information put out by detectives, including video, was that the suspect in the shooting ran across the roof on which he had been lying and scaled down the roof and then ran across the campus car park and into a wood. According to the allegations raised by Utah police, He then drove about four miles to his home in southern Utah, into a sort of pretty rural part of the state.

4:50The Trump administration and Kash Patel, who is director of the FBI, have tried to claim that they had a historic victory in catching the suspect. In practice, it was old school. It will take time to know to what extent the information we've been given is credible. but the account given is that he confessed to his father that he was involved in the shooting and that the father working with a friend of the family who was a pastor and himself linked to law enforcement then worked with the family to persuade Tyler Robinson to give himself in and they then went to a sheriff's office and he was arrested.

5:34Well, on Tuesday, Tyler Robinson was charged with the killing of Charlie Kirk. And I'm sure we'll find out plenty more in the coming hours and days about him, what groups and message boards he was embedded in online, and his motivation if there is a coherent one. But at this point, what do we know about his story? The suspect, Tyler Robinson, who's 22 years old, a white male. He's an interesting individual. He's never been in trouble before. He comes from a pristine middle-class background. They lived in a six-bedroom suburban house in southern Utah in a small town. Very religious, conservative background.

6:16His parents were registered Republicans. And he too, along with his parents, were Mormon. He was an A-grade student, perfect scores at school, and got into good university, Utah State, on an engineering track. But he only studied one term, and then he flunked out of college. People talk about him being at a video games, Call of Duty. He kept himself to himself, which is a phrase I've heard many, many times in terrible stories like this. And lots and lots of rumors flying around about him. He did scratch, hey, fascist catch, we're told, on one bullet casing. There has been talk about him being radicalized from the left.

6:59And many people on the right have been pushing that line very, very hard. But again, caution is the name of the word at this point. We know from the past that shooters like this are often influenced by a mishmash of different ideologies. It's not black and white. Very, very confused and confusing influences on them. On Tuesday, we got a whole lot more information from the county attorney prosecuting the case. He gave a press conference and he said that Robinson would be facing seven counts, including aggravated murder, which carries the death penalty.

7:36Ed Pilkington:Also, following the press conference, I am filing a notice of intent to seek the death penalty. I do not take this decision lightly, and it is a decision I have made independently. Along with the press conference, a 10-page charging document has been put out on Tuesday, and it outlines the basic facts and it's going to be poured over in the next hours and days and weeks by many people seeking the motive in this terrible murder. The document says that Robinson's mother, who was the first to sound the alarm that he might be the suspect, had explained to detectives that in the last year or so Robinson had become, quote, more political and begun to lean to the left.

8:21He'd also become more pro-gay and trans rights oriented, the document says, and it alleges that he'd begun to date his roommate, a transgender woman. That had led to discussions between Robinson and his father, who Robinson described to his roommate as pretty diehard MAGA. In a discussion with his family before the shooting, Robinson had mentioned that Charlie Kirk would be appearing in public and accused Kirk of spreading hate. Later, the document goes into details about how the parents persuaded Robinson to give himself up, and it says that when asked by the parents why he did it, Robinson had said, quote, there was too much evil and the guy spreads too much hate, apparent reference to Kirk.

9:11The texts with the roommate are also likely to be poured over intensively in the coming days and weeks. And they were sent after the shooting happened. The document notes that Robinson left a note to his roommate under the laptop saying, I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it. The roommate asked him why he had done it.

9:35Ed Pilkington:Robinson, why did I do it? Roommate, yeah. Robinson, I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out. If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence. Well, there was this extraordinary statement made by the governor of Utah saying that he'd been praying that the shooter wouldn't be, and I quote, one of us, that he had hoped that he might be, quote, from another state or another country. For 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn't be one of us. That somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country. Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for.

10:27Now, as you said, Robinson is a 22-year-old Utah native, very much a product of 21st century America. How have people reacted to the revelations about his identity? Well, it's impossible to overstate the sheer shock and bewilderment and confusion that has spread across the country. it has to be said, they have fallen very, very quickly, I mean, even instantly, into very polarised, deep buckets with people responding incredibly differently to the killing according to their own personal political views. It sort of feels like a cliche to say it when we talk about polarisation, because the US, like many countries right now, wrestling with social and political upheaval, it does feel really polarised.

11:18Ed, what role did Charlie Kirk play in escalating that tension. Yeah, I mean, I've been in America very close to 20 years. And, you know, I look back and think when I first got here, there was a sense of an American politics sort of coherence. You know, there were fierce disagreements, politicians fought each other, it could be quite ugly, but it was sort of within one basket. And then now all that's changed. And within that change, Charlie Kirk was undoubtedly an influential figure. As you said, was founder of Turning Point USA, the largest conservative youth group in the US. And he founded that in 2012.

11:56And that was three years even before Trump famously came down the golden staircase and launched his first presidential campaign. So in a way, he divined even before Trump that there was a shift going on. One way of putting it is that he saw that social media was opening a door to views that had previously been marginalized, and that young people in particular were open to persuasion in adopting those views and particularly his attack on what he called woke ideology on campuses. So he was a pioneer of that. Well can you give me a flavour of what he talked about and what he said? What exactly were the things that he was known for?

12:36I think he did two important things. One he brought many many young people towards the right and into the MAGA, Make America Great Again tent of Donald Trump. And we saw that happening big time in November's presidential election last year, where there was a notable swing of young voters aged 18 to 29 to Trump. And then in terms of his particular views, I think what he did was he surfaced views that, you know, they've always been around. They've been prominent in specific circles of American society, but he brought them towards the mainstream. The spiritual battle is coming to the West. And the enemies are, wokeism or Marxism, combining with Islamism, to go after what we call the American way of life.

13:23And the American way of life is very simple. I want to be able to get married, buy a home, have kids, allow them to ride their bike till the sun goes down, send them to a good school, have a low-crime neighborhood, not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school. And I'll just rattle off a few. Women, the role of women is to have children and to be at home. The role of men is as breadwinners. America is a Christian country. Increasingly, he moved towards that position and it became central to his argument. Not having them have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.

14:02That's important. We want the American way of life. which is, by the way, Christendom. Christians, our sacrifice, our toil, our vision. There is no official religion in America, so his argument runs against the Constitution. He amplified the great replacement theory, the idea that white Americans were being diluted by the incoming minority immigrants. On race, he called George Floyd a scumbag and Martin Luther King a bad guy and said that the Civil Rights Act that overthrew Jim Crow laws was a mistake. This shows they were actually better in the 1940s. It was bad, it was evil. But what happened?

14:45Something changed. Really out there, very, very unashamed racist comments coming from him. But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. And he was, again, unashamedly and openly anti-transgender and spoke often against gay marriage. So a lot of very contentious, offensive attitudes for many people. And he was out there about it.

15:28Anyone watching his debates or listening to his podcast can see that he's a really competent orator. He's very polished. He's a great performer. But how did he manage to find himself connected to Trump himself? And how did he manage to turn Turning Point USA into this organization that's funded by tens of millions of dollars by donors and secret backers? Whatever you think about the views that he was communicating, he did it in a very powerful way. and that involved skillful use of social media. He was on top of memes. His podcast became one of the most listened to in the country. I think his adversarial technique of going straight face-to-face with those he considered his rivals or his opponents was in itself in tune with the spirit of the age and it played on social media and he flew.

16:19But what about his background? What can you tell me about that? He came from a prosperous, largely white suburb of Chicago. His parents were, I think in his description, moderate Republicans. His father was an architect, his mother a counselor. He went to college but left after a term. And I think it was around then that he started to garner the idea that his basic conservative leanings of his opinions were not considered acceptable on American campuses. in the sense that he wasn't acceptable almost. So it was almost a personal reaction to that, that he founded when he was only 18, this group Turning Point USA, which he managed to grow very, very quickly into a whole universe of political organizing.

17:08He also turned himself into a huge media figure with his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. He never ran for political office and he was not given a position by Trump in the administration. but it was clear that Trump admired him greatly. He would appear at Turning Point USA conventions, and I think Trump was something of a mentor to Kirk. He encouraged him. He introduced him to very wealthy donors. Turning Point's budget escalated incredibly. And in return, as we've been talking about, Trump got this guy who could mobilize young, particularly young male voters, who were feeling a bit lost, angry, like no one was looking out for them.

17:56That's an opinion that Kirk helped to encourage, that young white males were among the most discriminated people in America. And he fired them up and he got them to the polls. And so that was a gift to Trump. It was a symbiotic relationship. Over time and more recent years, he's been representing himself as a slightly more cuddly, softer family figure. He's tallied with Christian nationalism. And he's played up the fact that he's a family man. He married Erica Kirk, who was herself a podcaster, and they've had two children, the last born most recently last year.

18:39Well, his killing comes at a time when political violence really seems to have escalated in the US. Ed, what has that looked like in recent years? And what do you think is driving it? I think any discussion about political violence in America needs to begin with the fact that it's as American as apple pie. You know, this is a country with four sitting presidents who have been assassinated. But I think what we've been seeing in recent years has come slamming back. There's a survey done by the University of Maryland that shows that just in the first six months of this year, there have been more than 500 plots of terrorism or even acts of terrorism and targeted violence with a sort of political edge.

19:18And that's a 40 % increase on the same period last year. So this stuff is happening. In 2017, Steve Scalise, a top Republican in the House, was shot as he was practicing baseball for a congressional game. In 22, Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer, a really gruesome event in their home after a break-in. This June, we've had a terrible event in Minnesota where a Democratic lawmaker and her husband were killed and another Democratic lawmaker shot and injured. If you widen the lens a little bit, you also see we've had a resurgence of far right groups. It's particularly the far right.

20:02They seem to be more organized and strategic than similar extremist groups on the left. And then, you know, you've got to say we've got Trump himself, right? He whipped up the insurrection of the US Capitol. We're seeing judges complain that they're facing a complete mushrooming of threats against them. And these are particular judges who have opposed Trump's executive orders since he got back to the White House in January. And then, of course, is Trump the victim of political violence with the attacks that happened against him last year during the presidential election?

20:38Ed Pilkington:That chart's a couple of months old. And if you want to really see something that's said, take a look at what happened.

20:48So it's happening on many different levels, against individuals, with a resurgence of groups, and with Trump both instigating and being the victim of this political violence. And if you put all that together, it's just a feeling that, wow, this is getting really quite serious.

21:14pretty much as soon as this news broke there was this striking attempt by republican senators by fox news by the president himself to frame this escalating political violence in america as the fault of the so-called radical left. Now, there's been a lot of rhetoric about being at war and the idea that calling people fascists is allowing violence to flourish in the US. What do they mean? Yeah, one of the things that have struck me about these last few days since the terrible shooting has been how really uniquely different it's been if you look back on American history. I mean, the pattern has been some terrible event happens in America.

21:57It's the role of the U.S. president to try and calm things down and call for unity. You know, Abraham Lincoln with malice towards none, with charity for all towards the end of the civil war. And even Biden, Joe Biden, days after the January 6th insurrection, he called for unity. So it's almost a national tradition, not Trump. Absolutely the opposite. How do we come back together?

22:19Ed Pilkington: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. The radicals on the left are the problem and they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy. Immediately, he was talking about revenge, about retribution, blaming it entirely on the radical left. So we have to treat that alone with a huge caution at this point. But Trump hasn't held back. He's gone out there saying the left is vicious and horrible and that he's going to move to act against them. Steve Bannon, who was his former White House advisor in the first term and is now a huge podcaster, is now calling Trump a wartime president and saying the left has declared war on America, again, with no evidence of that.

23:08And Elon Musk, you know, never wanted to be left out of the party. he goes the left is the party of murder so there's all this talk going on and as ever with trump the talk should be taken seriously because you know he's now the most powerful person on the planet and he's showing his willingness to put talk into action and in terms of that you ask who who might that be who would he go after well he's already going after groups on the left he's going after Act Blue. Act Blue is the main fundraising channel of the Democratic Party. He's going after various left groups in Washington who have been leading the sort of legal push to try and stop him acting in unconstitutional and totalitarian ways.

23:53He's saying he will remove their non-profit status. We've seen him going after the universities. So he's already doing this stuff. And the fear now, which is very, very strong in progressive and left circles, is that, wow, this is just the start. And that this event, this killing of Charlie Kirk, will be the start of something even bigger than what we've seen so far. And a lot of people are very scared about that. And now he's suing the New York Times for an audacious$15 billion, claiming that it has become, quote, the mouthpiece of the radical left Democrat Party. Yes, it all feels like it's gathering speed.

24:33The attack on the New York Times widens his assault on the media in the United States. And then it's happening on other levels, too. On Monday, J.D. Vance, the vice president and several other top White House officials, including the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, broadcast an episode of the Charlie Kirk show from the White House.