Waving the Bloody Shirt

We don’t know who killed Charlie Kirk. We do know who’s trying to exploit his death.

At this point what do we know about who killed Charlie Kirk, and why?

Nothing. And we may never know anything. In part that’s because there appears to have been a rapid degradation in the FBI’s effectiveness since Trump appointees took over and prioritized political loyalty over competence.

The fact that Kirk was a right-winger doesn’t mean that the shooter was a left-winger. There are many possible stories you can invent about what may have motivated the assassination. What we do know is that no prominent Democrat has called for violence against Republicans, and no prominent Democrat has celebrated Kirk’s death.

Whoever did this, there’s just no rational way you can blame this on “the left.”

Also, whatever motivated this murder, it’s simply a fact that over the past decade right-wing extremists have killed many more people than left-wing extremists:

And Trump — who has repeatedly incited mob violence since his first campaign — clearly wants to use the Kirk killing as an excuse for more violence and intimidation. “We have radical left lunatics out there,” declared Trump, “and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” An utterly malign appeal to mob violence from a sitting president, particularly outrageous since no one knows who killed Kirk and why.

And let’s be clear: everyone — Republicans, business leaders, and more — who decided, in effect, to forget about Jan. 6 helped set the stage for this malignancy.

So while we want to know what lay behind Kirk’s assassination, the important story right now is Trump’s intent to use the killing to incite violence against anyone who stands in his way.