--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Over the weekend, flags from the McDonald's at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a transgender pride flag in West Hollywood, California, to flags all over our nation's capital flew half-staffed for Charlie Kirk. Coldplay's Chris Martin sent love from a concert in London. South Koreans were out in the street chanting. The world was mourning a pretty divisive guy, but the Trump administration wasn't satisfied. They're doubling down on retribution. So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell. Call their employer. We will absolutely target you, go after you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's dive into what we know about Charlie Kirk's murder and the response from the Trump administration. I'm joined today by Zach Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox.com. Zach, thanks for being here.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Thanks for having me, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We still don't fully know what motivated the alleged shooter, but that doesn't seem to be stopping the Trump administration from ramping up their response. Whom is it that they blame for the murder of Charlie Kirk?
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Well, you know, it's interesting. A lot of the time, the language they use is they. They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and of God's merciful love. They did this. They killed Charlie. And they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy. The they is not very well defined, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. From what I can tell from listening to a lot of what they have to say, and listening especially to J.D. Vance guest hosting Charlie Kirk's radio show where he hosted Stephen Miller and a bunch of other notable folks to talk about this, they seem to believe that there is a wide-ranging web, a cell, but bigger than that, right, of left-wing organizations and individuals who work to inspire hatred. targeting them personally.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: That's right. And when you listen to Vance talk about it, his closing monologue in that show, he talks very personally about how it's a threat to leading right-wing figures, not just because he was friends with Charlie, but also the way that he talks about Trump's assassination. Donald J. Trump escaped an assassin's bullet by less than an inch. Our House majority leavers, Stephen Scalise, came within seconds of death by an assassin himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach, you've written about the history of right-wing violence in the US. Is it true that people on the left are more violent than the right in the United States?
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: No, it's not. And the key thing to look at is actual data on political violence, specifically politically motivated murders. And there was a recent attempt to tally this by Alex Narasta, who is a scholar at the Libertarian Cato Institute. And what he found was if you exclude 9-11, which because 9-11 is such an outlier that it makes everything else look small by comparison, political violence in the US is overwhelmingly perpetrated by people on the political right, a majority.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. And the Trump administration is now proposing a crackdown on people and groups they say are part of the problem. What are they proposing the country does about this problem that they characterize as them? Very much us versus them.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: Very much us versus them. You mentioned firings. I mean, the first wave of the response has been an overwhelming attempt at what can best be described as cancellations, right? You know, we're familiar with the concept of an ordinary person saying something that offends someone's political sensibilities and losing their job over it, right? That's what I take that term to mean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's been a huge wave of those since then. We will absolutely target you, go after you. This morning, some harsh critics of Charlie Kirk are now looking for new jobs. Cobb County schools placing an unknown number of employees on leave after officials said the workers made comments on social media about the conservative activist who was killed last week.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: I read through some tweets by Libs of TikTok, who's an account that's famous for sort of doxing and trying to get punished liberals that are, or leftists who have allegedly bad opinions. And Libs of TikTok has been working overtime after Charlie Kirk's murder to try to get people fired. They canceled and debanked us for saying men can't get pregnant. They're getting fired for celebrating assassination.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This distinction is important. We are not the same. This person reportedly works for Social Security, and he's calling for white people to be killed. Our tax dollars pay his salary. He needs to be investigated at FBI.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: She, the author Haya Reitschik behind it, will say, is this acceptable to you, a person's employer, when she tweets about whatever their comment is. Make these lunatics famous. And sometimes they are justifying violence. Again, I find it abhorrent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are talking about people who will often say things like, People will tell you to have respect for someone who spent their whole career making sure others couldn't live equally, happily, or safely. Or Charlie Kirk is not a martyr for the gospel of Jesus Christ. These are things that are well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse about a public figure.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: And it seems like at no point has the top of this administration, the president, the vice president, someone like Stephen Miller, acknowledged that this is a problem that both parties have had to deal with in recent years, if not since the dawn of time in this country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I haven't heard a lot of talk about Paul Pelosi. And we'll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi who ruined San Francisco. How's her husband doing, by the way? Anybody know? Or Josh Shapiro. Or the deceased Minnesota lawmaker, Melissa Hortman. Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota House Speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well?
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: I'm not familiar. The Minnesota House Speaker. No, it's not. That's not what's happening here. Because that would – those facts, those incidents contradict the story that's being told, which is, as Vance said in the clip that you played, which is of a uniquely violent left whose institutions deserve to be targeted by the state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I suppose there's like lots of levels of irony here in the response from this administration. But one of the most tragic ones feels to me that they're overlooking what most Americans agree on in a moment like this. Like maybe not every single person wants to come out and mourn Charlie Kirk. Maybe not every single person believes what Charlie Kirk believed. But more Americans than any other aspect of this assassination here can agree on, I think, one thing, which is that we shouldn't do this to people. We shouldn't go out there and murder people because we disagree with them. That's un-American.
--:-- Zach Beauchamp: And yet, here we are blaming the left and leftist institutions and leftist thinkers. And what's that going to lead to? It feels like the most obvious answer is like more violence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, violent episodes tend to last for a while once they start. And I'm very worried. What the Trump administration is talking about, the language they're using, the measures they're proposing in response, will continue to escalate political violence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beauchamp is the author of The Reactionary Spirit, How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. Denise Guerra made our show today with help from Devin Schwartz, Jolie Myers, Laura Bullard, Danielle Hewitt, Patrick Boyd, and Adrian Lilly. And myself, I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained. Thank you.
