The reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk lays bare the exclusionary boundaries of “the people” in the United States and the divide between unacceptable violence against “us” (Republicans/conservatives) and acceptable violence against “them” (Democrats/liberals).
In my first “Letter to America” three months ago (June 4, 2025), I mentioned the ambiguous and fungible nature of the demos in democracy or, in English, “the people”—what scholars call an empty signifier, a word whose meaning is vague or mutable depending on context and purpose. In some social contexts and for some political purposes, “the people” may refer to all humans within a country’s borders (borders themselves being arbitrary and changeable), the citizens of a country (which would exclude “undocumented immigrants”), or a particular race (say, white), religion (say, Christian), language (say, English), sexuality (say, straight), or even gender (say, male) within a country’s population.
No matter how it is conceived, “the people” is a fundamentally exclusionary notion: some people are “the people” and some are not, and “we the people” have rights—and virtues—that “they not the people” lack. There is no doubt that America has possessed a highly oppositional sense of “the people” from its earliest days: indigenous nations were not “the people” until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Blacks were not “the people” (or were each 3/5 of a person) for most of the country’s history, immigrants were not “the people” (and sometimes officially excluded, as in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, or Trump’s current mass deportation project), Jews and Muslims were not “the people,” and even women were not entirely “the people” politically until they achieved voting rights in 1920, if not later.
However, recent events have illustrated in stark relief how Republicans and conservatives view “the people,” that is, who is one of us and who is one of them. I refer, of course, to the murder of Charlie Kirk, which is condemned by all decent folks, despite his odious opinions and baleful influence on American youth. I write this letter two days after the killing and on the same day as the arrest of the alleged gunman, at which time we know basically nothing about his motivation or ideology.
Before knowing any details, Republicans and conservatives have been quick to circle the wagons in defense of one of us against one and all of them. The commentary has been, frankly, chilling, as it is intended to be. Trump ally and MAGA mastermind Steve Bannon, for instance, from his “War Room” (which was set up long before this tragic event), declared that Kirk “is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.” Alex Jones, another warrior and disgraced host of “Infowars” (does one notice a pattern developing here?) accused “the Left” of targeting Trump and “calling for violence” while aiming to “shut down populist free speech and conservative/nationalist voting recruitment on college campuses”—clearly an affront to us. Jesse Watters, a Fox News functionary, also cited the attempts on Trump’s life (especially by Thomas Matthew Crooks, the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, who was apparently a registered Republican), saying on air that “They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?” Lara Loomer, who for some incomprehensible reason has Trump’s ear, concluded (typically, without evidence) that Kirk’s killing was “a professional hit” by leftist “terrorists.” More bluntly, Elon Musk, a former water-carrier for MAGA and Trump, branded them (again, the Left) as “the party of murder.”
Republicans and conservatives have long directed their “war rooms” and “infowars” against what Trump has repeatedly dubbed “the enemies of the people” including not just Democrat/liberal politicians (more than a few of whom have been arrested or threatened with arrest since his return to power) but journalists, activists, and anyone who defies us.
Watters’ question stands: what are we (the innocent people, the good people, the people, that is, from theperspective of Republicans and conservatives) going to do about them (the guilty people, the bad people, not the people, or, in other words, the murderous, bellicose Democrats and liberals)?
According to a Time article (de Guzman and Jeyaretnam 2025), the chorus for bloody vengeance is growing on the right. Conservative podcaster Patrick Casey asserts, “It’s time to bring the hammer down on the left.” Right-wing influencer Matt Forney advocates for “a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act]. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism.” Elsewhere, his solution was banning the Democratic Party, closing CNN and MSNBC, and holding military tribunals.
Another influencer (of which there are apparently legion), Christopher Rufo, advises “to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.” Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, wants to invoke the Insurrection Act and label the left in open rebellion. Right-wing media figure Auron MacIntyre adds that the time for reasonable dialogue is over: “Tomorrow I want to see lists. Domestic terror leaders in organizations like Antifa and BLM scooped up in the middle of the night Doors kicked in, the FBI swinging through their windows.” William Wolfe, director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, takes the lovingly Christian position that “The. Left. Must. Be. Destroyed.”; “The goal for Republicans in the next ten years shouldn’t just be to win elections, but to destroy the Democrat Party entirely and salt the earth underneath it.” In a slightly less incendiary voice, Republican Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana recommends that anyone who “belittled” the assassination or spoke ill of Kirk should be banned from social media for life, while they should also be stripped of their business licenses and permits, blacklisted, expelled from school, and “canceled with extreme prejudice” as the “sick animals” they are.
Naturally, Trump himself has been at the forefront of the assault on them for their crimes against us. He remarked,
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the worst mass murders and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now…. [He then vowed to find] each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone who brings order to our country.”
For good measure, he plans to award Kirk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor reserved, according to law, for individuals who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States or (2) world peace or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”
It goes without saying that such hysterical rhetoric is dangerous; in fact, reportedly, Russian and Chinese bots are busy stoking anger and encouraging violence. It also goes without saying that, despite Republicans’ vociferous protests, most recent political violence has been committed by us conservatives against them liberals, including the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul, the assassination of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and the attempted murder of state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, and of course the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, with its chants to kill Pelosi and Trump’s own vice-president Mike Pence. Indeed, Republicans and conservatives have long directed their “war rooms” and “infowars” against what Trump has repeatedly dubbed “the enemies of the people” including not just Democrat/liberal politicians (more than a few of whom have been arrested or threatened with arrest since his return to power) but journalists, activists, and anyone who defies us. Kirk himself endorsed what he called a “soft civil war” against Democrat-led cities like Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Chicago, which was already afoot in Trump’s military occupation of those places before the latest event.
Finally, it goes without saying that the outrage at political violence is not equally directed at both sides. Where were the demands for vengeance, the insistence on rounding up and punishing, the appeals to canceling and crushing the perpetrators of violence against the Pelosis, the Hortmans, or the Hoffmans? Or when ordinary civilians—children, parishioners, shoppers—are gunned down? It is a purely rhetorical question, because the answer is plain to see, in, for instance, the celebration of conservative darling Kyle Rittenhouse’s vigilante shooting of three protesters in 2020.
The painful truth is that Republicans and conservatives are not upset with political violence in general; one might argue that they are not upset with violence at all. According to commentators like Adam Serwer (2021), cruelty and sadism are their governing principles. But they are incensed when anyone obstructs their campaign of utter political and cultural domination, a campaign that is laced with threatened and actual violence (and other punitive behavior short of violence, like defunding or outlawing) by us conservatives against them liberals.
But woe unto them if they commit an act of violence against us. South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace is a shining example: while decrying the killing of Kirk, she was visibly offended that a journalist would bring up the attacks on the Hortmans and Hoffmans. This is about us, she seemed to convey, and any harm to them is irrelevant, non-existent, or well-deserved.
The greatest irony is that Kirk infamously excused gun violence in some 2023 remarks. A few (or 33,000 in 2024, down from 47,000 in 2021) gun deaths are “worth it,” he taught, a reasonable price to pay for our other freedoms. But the feverish reaction to Kirk’s death proves that the price is only tolerable when the gun death is one of them, not one of us.
References:
De Guzman, Chad and Miranda Jeyaretnam. 2025. “‘This is War’: Trump and Others on Right Call for Crackdown on Left After Charlie Kirk’s Murder.” https://time.com/7316315/republicans-far-right-reacts-charlie-kirk-death-blame-left-crackdown, accessed September 12, 2025.
Serwer, Adam. 2021. The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America. New York: One World.
Image: Constitutional Convention, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
