The right is using stories about the alleged killer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to push their narrative about the left—mangling reality to silence dissent and encourage political retribution against the right’s ideological foes.
Similarly, conservatives have been whitewashing and sanitizing Kirk’s legacy of racism, misogyny, and conspiratorial thinking.
Unsurprisingly, the parade of dishonesty is being led by President Donald Trump, who rushed to connect the shooter to the left. In a video released after Kirk’s death, Trump claimed that the fault lay with the “radical left.”
Charlie Kirk hands out MAGA hats at a Utah college event on Sept. 10, moments before he was shot and killed.
Trump, who has spent his entire time as a public figure demonizing his detractors, complained that the left has been “demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”
Media outlets owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch have been at the forefront of using the killing to promote the right’s narrative about the left. In particular, they’ve tried to connect transgender people with the shooting, as part of the false narrative that mass shooters are frequently trans.
The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has been criticized by groups like the Human Rights Campaign for reporting that the ammunition used by the shooter had expressions of “transgender and anti-fascist ideology,” apparently echoing a storyline created by the Trump administration.
Brooke Singman, a reporter for the Murdoch-owned Fox News, claimed that “sources” told her the alleged shooter “lived with his transgender partner.” The New York Post, which is also owned by Murdoch, claimed that “his trans boyfriend proclaimed support for Biden on social media, and that the shooting was the latest “committed by trans people and advocates.”
Murdoch-owned outlets have spent years—in concert with the Republican Party—demonizing and attacking trans people for the crime of existing.
In reality, what is known about the alleged shooter is that he was knee-deep in online meme culture and had easy access to the gun that was used to kill Kirk. There’s far more evidence that the suspect was influenced by memes than the image of a pro-trans leftist that the right is pushing. But the truth is not something they can collectively use as a cudgel against the left.
The left hasn’t embraced political violence. Leaders of the Democratic Party do not regularly call for violence or praise violent rhetoric. That has been the domain of leaders like Trump, right-wing officials and activists, and conservative media outlets like Fox.
The right is projecting once again, but this time it’s using that projection to shut up dissent and silence the opposition.
