Why It Matters That Charlie Kirk’s Killer Came from the Left

After Tuesday’s press conference by Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray laying out extensive excerpts from text messages that Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer sent to his transgender romantic partner, as well as other evidence collected in the investigation regarding his reasoning for deciding that “I had enough of his hatred,” progressive commentators are in a bind. Their collective push to deny that the killer acted out of left-leaning political motives has collapsed. Sure, they can still get gullible people who don’t read widely to buy that the assassin might have been a white-supremacist “groyper,” or just to focus on the fact that his family members were conservative, religious Republicans (as if young leftists aren’t often people angrily alienated from their families). But anybody who deals even glancingly in facts and evidence, and who ventures outside of the left-wing bubble, is going to know that it’s dishonest agitprop.

That effort was always a high-risk play. Sure, before we knew the details, it was possible that Kirk’s killer could have come from the far right, but it was never the likeliest outcome, and the people pushing the narrative had to bet heavily on him never being caught (this is the strategy that has allowed some of them to continue, three years later, to claim that the Supreme Court Dobbs leak must have been the work of a conservative). They were also betting on the Katrina media strategy: If you can swarm enough voices saying the same thing, you can create the appearance of a set of facts before the evidence is available, and that’s all people will remember. They may not be wrong that this will work with some audiences. There are still liberals who paint John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the result of a “climate of hate” in Dallas in November 1963, even 62 years after we learned that he was killed by a guy who literally defected to the Soviet Union.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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After Tuesday’s press conference by Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray laying out extensive excerpts from text messages that Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer sent to his transgender romantic partner, as well as other evidence collected in the investigation regarding his reasoning for deciding that “I had enough of his hatred,” progressive commentators are in a bind. Their collective push to deny that the killer acted out of left-leaning political motives has collapsed. Sure, they can still get gullible people who don’t read widely to buy that the assassin might have been a white-supremacist “groyper,” or just to focus on the fact that his family members were conservative, religious Republicans (as if young leftists aren’t often people angrily alienated from their families). But anybody who deals even glancingly in facts and evidence, and who ventures outside of the left-wing bubble, is going to know that it’s dishonest agitprop.

That effort was always a high-risk play. Sure, before we knew the details, it was possible that Kirk’s killer could have come from the far right, but it was never the likeliest outcome, and the people pushing the narrative had to bet heavily on him never being caught (this is the strategy that has allowed some of them to continue, three years later, to claim that the Supreme Court Dobbs leak must have been the work of a conservative). They were also betting on the Katrina media strategy: If you can swarm enough voices saying the same thing, you can create the appearance of a set of facts before the evidence is available, and that’s all people will remember. They may not be wrong that this will work with some audiences. There are still liberals who paint John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the result of a “climate of hate” in Dallas in November 1963, even 62 years after we learned that he was killed by a guy who literally defected to the Soviet Union.