The Kirk Crackdown Is Underway

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The Kirk Crackdown Is Underway

 

Sept. 16, 2025

Thomas B. Edsall

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/opinion/trump-charlie-kirk-crackdown.html

 

President Trump and his allies are capitalizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk to open up fresh attacks on liberal institutions, donors and foundations. They seek to portray many on the left as traitors.

 

Appearing on Kirk’s podcast on Monday, less than a week after Kirk’s death, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, denounced

 

The organized doxxing 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, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.

 

“With God as my witness,” Miller then declared,

 

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. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

 

Trump and his allies have long exploited “emergencies” to push divisive measures. Now he claims that left-wing terrorism is a greater threat than terror perpetrated by the right, a demonstrably false assertion.

 

Over the last three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute and the International Center for Counter-Terrorism have amassed evidence showing that right-wing violence is more prevalent than violence from the left.

 

“The current administration is perpetuating a narrative that erases right-wing violence, including Jan. 6, and blames the increased political violence on only one side,” Jay Childers, a professor of political communication at the University of Kansas, wrote by email in response to my queries.

 

Within hours of the assassination of Kirk on Sept. 10, Trump placed the blame for political violence squarely on “the radical left” in televised remarks:

 

A tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.

 

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.

 

On Sept. 12, Trump went beyond dismissing the threat posed by right-wing political violence to arguing that right-wing extremists are in fact justified. Asked about violence perpetrated by those on the right, Trump didn’t hold back during an appearance on “Fox and Friends”:

 

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. They’re saying, “We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”

 

The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.

 

Trump and his MAGA followers have not just turned Kirk’s murder into a political weapon; they are trying, with some success, to use it to build a national movement to publicly out everyone who criticized Kirk on social media after his death. They are also trying to persuade  employers to fire Kirk’s critics.

 

“A campaign by public officials and others on the right has led just days after the conservative activist’s death to the firing or punishment of teachers, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming,” The Associated Press reported on Sept. 14.

 

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, the wire service noted, “posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk’s assassination. ‘This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,’” Duffy wrote on X.

 

In their article “Trump Escalates Attacks on Political Opponents After Charlie Kirk’s Killing,” my Times colleagues Tyler Pager and Nick Corasaniti reported that Trump and his supporters have initiated “a broad crackdown on critics and left-leaning institutions.”

 

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, Pager and Corasaniti wrote, warned “that his agency was closely tracking any military personnel who celebrated or mocked Mr. Kirk’s death, and Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, suggested the administration would strip visas from individuals who celebrated Mr. Kirk’s death.”

 

Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, said he would use his congressional authority to seek immediate bans for life from social media platforms for anyone who “belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” adding in a posting on X: “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked out from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I’m starting that today.”

 

Trump and Miller have claimed that the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations are financing violence on the left.

 

“We’re going to look into Soros because I think it’s a RICO case against him and other people because this is more than protests,” Trump told Fox News. “This is real agitation; this is riots on the street — and we’re going to look into that.”

 

On Sept. 13, Laura Loomer, a Trump confidant, posted on X: “I have to say, I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is, and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are.”

 

Not to be outdone, Miller posted on X on Sept. 14: “In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized.”

 

Sam Jackson, a professor of emergency management and homeland security at SUNY-Albany, emailed a response to my questions:

 

Trump, Loomer and many others are using this event to justify crackdowns on political opponents, broadly described as “the left.” The political right in the United States has long tried to argue that the political left is responsible for more violence than the political right. That simply hasn’t been true for decades. Lots of folks have surfaced a lot of evidence to illustrate that the far right has been responsible for more violence in the U.S. than the far left, including violent deaths.

 

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on political violence, described by email the importance of Kirk’s murder:

 

The Kirk assassination is the most consequential assassination of an American political leader since the 1960s. It reflects the groundswell of support for political violence in our center’s (the Chicago Project on Security and Threats) most recent national survey conducted in May, which found the highest levels in the four years we have conducted quarterly surveys on the topic.

 

Our survey shows that 39 percent of Democrats agree that the “use of force was justified to remove Donald Trump from the presidency,” while 24 percent of Republicans agree that Trump “was justified in using the U.S. military against protesters against the Trump agenda.” This represents support for political violence by tens of millions of Americans — the second defining aspect of the era of violent populism in America.”

 

Pape contended that

 

There are powerful reasons to worry how Republicans will react to the assassination of Kirk, but the main one is simply the most obvious: Kirk was beloved by millions of Republicans and now many millions more. As America saw after 9/11 in our politics leading to 70 percent of the public supporting the invasion of Iraq on flimsy evidence: mass sorrow can evolve into mass anger and then mass willingness to pursue aggressive policies that can lead to spirals of violence beyond anything imagined before the event.

 

In February 2024, the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a study I alluded to earlier, its “Global Terrorist Threat Assessment 2024.” The center found that in the United States, “Violent far-right perpetrators, such as white supremacists, anti-government extremists and violent misogynists, have committed the most U.S. terrorist attacks in recent years, but violent far-left perpetrators such as antifascist extremists, anarchists and violent environmentalists have also orchestrated a growing percentage of terrorist attacks.”

 

The center analyzed 831 terrorist attacks in this country from January 1994 to December 2022. In recent years, the study found:

 

Violent far-right extremist have been responsible for 94 of the 108 terrorism fatalities (87 percent) in the United States in the past five years. This included 2022, when 18 of the 19 fatalities occurred during far-right terrorist attacks.

 

Of the 71 terrorist attacks in 2022, 69 percent were perpetrated by those on the violent far right, 20 percent by the violent far left, 3 percent by Salafi-jihadists and 8 percent by ethnonationalists.

 

The most recent study of political violence is the Sept. 11, 2025, report, “Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States, by Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

 

“Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on U.S. soil since 1975,” he writes. “Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.”

 

Because the 9/11 attacks “obscure other trends and are plausibly distinct,” Nowrasteh recalculated the data excluding the attacks. Doing so “reduces the number of murders to 620 from 3,599.”

 

The exclusion raises the right-wing share of murders in terrorist attacks “from 11 percent to 63 percent (391), the left-wing share from about 2 percent to 10 percent (65), and the unknown/other share to 1 percent.”

 

Terrorism since 2020, Nowrasteh wrote,

 

paints a slightly different picture. Since Jan. 1, 2020 (total 81), terrorists have murdered 81 people in attacks on U.S. soil. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders (44), Islamists for 21 percent (27), left-wingers for 22 percent (18), and 1 percent had unknown or other motivations.

 

Nowrasteh did not include the deaths associated with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for the following reasons:

 

Ashli Babbitt was an attacker/terrorist. I didn’t include her because I only count those who murder victims. One attacker/terrorist from a drug overdose. He wasn’t a victim. One police officer died of a stroke the day after. The official report was that his death wasn’t a homicide. Four police officers died by suicide afterward. I didn’t count them.

 

Katarzyna Jasko, a professor of psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland,  and lead author of a 2022 study, “A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-wing, Right-wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World,” emailed her reply to my questions.

 

She contended that the claims about left-wing violence by Trump and his allies “are not justifiable.” In recent years, she added, “far-right extremists have been responsible for more cases of political violence than far-left extremists. As our research shows, their attacks are more violent than those by left-wing extremists.”

 

The study found that

Among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals. By contrast, we found no such difference between Islamist and right-wing individuals.

 

In terms of violent behavior, those supporting an Islamist ideology were significantly more violent than the left-wing perpetrators both in the United States and in the worldwide analysis. For the U.S. sample, we found no significant difference in the propensity to use violence for those professing Islamist or right-wing ideologies.

 

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment’s program on democracy, conflict and governance, pointed out in an email that over the past six decades there has been a reversal in the ideological character of political violence:

 

In the 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights activists and leaders were murdered by far-right racists. The murders discredited those in the center who worked within the system to get civil rights legislation and who preached nonviolence, and it helped activists who said that self-defense was the only way communities could protect themselves. So in the late 1960s, violence moved to the extreme left and spread to a variety of causes.

 

Since the early 1990s, Kleinfeld continued, “actual violence has risen, largely from the right. While it has grown somewhat from the left — especially with regards to violence against property such as business harm from protests and attacks on Tesla dealerships — the numbers are just not comparable.”

 

The response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Kleinfeld argued, poses significant risks: “What is most dangerous is when violence starts to get framed as defensive — because that is when more normal people start engaging. The concern with Charlie Kirk’s murder is that it may push the United States over that edge.”

 

Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland and an author of the Jasko paper cited above, wrote in an email:

 

Kirk’s death was obviously a very sad and worrying development. On the other hand, the administration seemed far less concerned about the recent deaths of the two Democratic legislators and their spouses from Minnesota. I cannot imagine how lionizing Kirk is going to reduce the growing polarization in the United States.

 

In fact, Trump and his allies are determined to intensify partisan hostility.

 

At 7 p.m. on Sept. 10, the day Kirk was killed, Laura Loomer posted on X:

 

Charlie Kirk’s death will not be in vain. I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death. I’m going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.

 

If Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Miller and Loomer have their way, America will take another step toward becoming a McCarthyite state with the ever-present danger that your colleagues and friends will report your offhand quick-reaction social media posts to government authorities.

 

As terrible as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, this way of honoring it is repellent.