Charlie Kirk's Shooting Death: America's Reichstag Fire

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler had been named Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag, the home of Germany’s legislature, burned to the ground. A mentally impaired Dutch Communist named Marinus Van Der Lubbe was accused and ultimately convicted of arson. But Hitler and his fellow Nazis insisted that there was a much broader conspiracy that had burned the Reichstag, involving not only German Communists but the Soviet Union, and on that basis he got the Reichstag to pass the so-called “Enabling Act” that made Hitler absolute dictator of Germany for the next 12 years.

On December 1, Sergei Kirov, right-hand man of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, was shot to death at the Smolny Institute in his home town of Leningrad (since given back its original name, St. Petersburg). As Hitler had done with Van Der Lubbe and the Reichstag fire, Stalin used this as an excuse to purge the Soviet government of all the people who had sided with his former rival, Leon Trotsky. The Kirov assassination led to the so-called “Great Purge” from 1936 to 1938, in which hundreds of thousands were summarily executed or sent to camps in the Gulag.

From the moment Right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while making a speech at Utah Valley College on September 10, Trump and his supporters have made it clear that they intend to use Kirk’s death in the same ways Hitler used the Reichstag fire and Stalin used the Kirov murder. Trump began the process by releasing a video the day of the murder in which he said, “For years, 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,” Trump continued. “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.”

Trump continued with a litany of political crimes allegedly committed by people on the Left against people on the Right. “From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health-care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical Left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he said.

Note that he didn’t say a word about political violence committed against centrist, liberal, or Leftist politicians by members of the Right. He didn’t mention the murders of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark on June 14, 2025 or the attempted murders of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife the same day. Nor did he bring up the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in San Francisco October 28, 2022. According to the Wikipedia page on the Pelosi attack, the perpetrator, David DePape, “had embraced various far-Right conspiracy theories, including QAnon, Pizzagate, and Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen election in 2020. Online, he made conspiratorial, racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic posts, and pushed COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.”

According to a study by the Right-wing Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute – hardly the sort of organization that would be in the business of whitewashing the political Left – 74 percent of all reported incidents of political violence in the U.S. in 2024 involved Right-wing perpetrators and centrist, liberal, or Leftist victims. But reality doesn’t matter to a master of public persuasion and media manipulation like Donald Trump, especially now that the six Right-wing revolutionaries (commonly mislabeled “conservatives”) on the U.S. Supreme Court have essentially given him blanket authority to do whatever he likes, the Constitution be damned.

In the week or so since Charlie Kirk’s murder, the “politically correct” line has been to decry political violence on both sides and assert that “political violence has no place in American life.” That’s historically untrue; as Jamil Abdullah Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown, said in 1967, “Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.” The U.S. won its independence in a war in which between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans were killed. It achieved dominance over the North American continent through a genocidal campaign to wipe out the Native population. When Edward R. Murrow interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1940, Hitler said, “I don’t know why you Americans make such a fuss about the Jews. I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.”

On the Fox & Friends show on September 14, host Ainsley Earhardt tried to get Trump on the P.C. line about the Kirk shooting that political violence is wrong no matter who commits it or why. “What do we do about our country?” Earhardt asked Trump. “We have radicals on the Right and Left, people are watching videos and cheering, some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

Trump was having none of it. Instead he gave this combative answer that made it clear he thinks political violence from the Left is despicable, but political violence on the Right is not only justified but righteous. “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble: I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “Radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime. Radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want Transgender for everyone, open borders. Worst thing that happened to this country.”

Trump had already sent that message on January 20, 2025. There’s been a lot of talk about all the things he promised to do on his first day back in the White House that he didn’t do, like lower consumer prices (they’ve gone up) or end Russia’s war against Ukraine (it’s still going on, and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is escalating it with drone fly-overs over Poland and Romania, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] and therefore countries the U.S. is sworn to defend militarily against attack).

But the big thing he did do on day one was pardon 1,500 people who’d committed political violence on his behalf on January 6, 2021 in support of his illegal attempt to remain President despite having lost the 2020 election. That created a cadre of people who’d not only demonstrated their willingness to commit political violence on behalf of Donald Trump, but many of them went on social media to declare their willingness to do so again if Trump should ever need them. It sent a signal to the entire nation; it was Trump’s way of saying, “I’m totally on board with political violence as long as you commit it for me.”

And other voices on the Right are seconding Trump’s aggressive agenda and going even further than he has. “Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire,” wrote Right-wing influencer Matt Forney on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “It is time for a complete crackdown on the Left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO [the ‘Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations’ law]. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.”

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, renamed it X, and let back on a lot of the Right-wing hate-spewers the previous owners had banned, posted, “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die.”

Fox News host Jesse Watters, who replaced Tucker Carlson and often seems determined to prove he can be even meaner, said, “They are at war with us. What are we going to do about it?”

Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, a Right-wing think tank whose Web site defines its mission as “to keep America and its great cities prosperous, safe, and free,” said, “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

Even Trump’s hatchet woman Laura Loomer, who reportedly during the last weeks of Charlie Kirk’s life was questioning his loyalty to Trump over his insistence that the Justice Department should release all its files on the late alleged child sex abuser and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, said in the wake of Kirk’s murder that the government should “shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization. No mercy. Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence.”

It’s Not Just Words, It’s Actions

Not surprisingly, the radical Right in America has gone far beyond just demanding that the government suppress the Left, or what passes for an American Left, in an unconstitutional campaign of intimidation. They’re also going about it themselves, putting up Web sites claiming to identify 30,000 online posts that said less than reverential things about Charlie Kirk, and they’ve already got at least 30 people fired from their jobs or put on administrative leave for their posts about Kirk.

Todd Rokita, attorney general for the state of Indiana, put up a post on X calling on state residents to report people who make adverse comments on Kirk or his legacy online. His post read, “Hoosiers: If you have evidence of Indiana educators or school administrators making comments that celebrate or rationalize the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we need to hear from you. These individuals must be held accountable—they have no place teaching our students. Submit evidence through the Eyes on Education Portal. Together, we can expose hate, protect students, and empower parents across Indiana.”

Matthew Dowd, a former news analyst at MS-NBC (the supposedly “liberal” alternative to Fox News) who had previously worked as a policy analyst for Republican President George W. Bush, was fired for posting online that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”

Spokespeople for Comcast, MS-NBC’s parent company, called Dowd’s post “an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.”

The Washington Post, whose former reputation as a bastion of liberalism and press freedom is being systematically destroyed by its current owner, Amazon.com founder, multibillionaire and Trump suck-up Jeff Bezos, likewise fired columnist Karen Attiah for a post she made to Substack. While Attiah mentioned Kirk only once in passing, she did speak out “against political violence, racial double standards, and America's apathy toward guns.”

PHNX Sports, an online sports news site based in Arizona, fired reporter Gerald Bourquet for having posted, “Refusing to mourn a life devoted to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence. Truly don’t care if you think it’s insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died.”

Hannah Molitor, who worked for the Next Door nonprofit in Milwaukee, Wisconsin promoting early childhood education, was fired over a post she put up that read, “What happened to Charlie Kirk is horrible and no person should ever lose their life to gun violence," she wrote. "However, just realize that one side of the aisle is actively fighting to bring an end to unnecessary deaths by gun violence and it was not the side Charlie was on. Yes I am making his death political, no I do not care. If all you do is spew hate, you’re bound to get some in return.” Molitor told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that in addition to being fired, she got death threats, including one which contained a photo of a gun as well as pictures of her home.

Also in Wisconsin, Elkhorn School District superintendent Jason Tadlock reported receiving over 500 voicemail messages and e-mails demanding he fire West Side Elementary School associate principal Cynthia Rehberg for allegedly posting online that Kirk “deserved what he got.” Tadlock traced the campaign against Rehberg to Ryan Fournier, national chair of Students for Trump. Rehberg in fact had posted no such thing, and Fournier later admitted that he’d got his facts wrong, but Tadlock told the Journal Sentinel that he was still getting voicemails and e-mails demanding that Rehberg be fired.

These tactics are familiar to anyone who’s studied the history of the American Right. They are the same ones used in the so-called McCarthy period, named after the so-called “anti-Communist” Senator from Wisconsin who served from 1946 to 1957, to target university professors, Hollywood entertainers, and anyone else who seemed overly sympathetic to the Left and its ideologies. While I find such tactics equally reprehensible used by Leftists against the Right – I probably raised some hackles when I described the #MeToo movement as “Left-Wing McCarthyism” – for the most part it’s the Right that demands and pressures private employers to fire people for having politics they disagree with, not the Left.

Ironically, one of the most powerful voices against using the power of both government and the private sector to target the livelihoods of people you disagree with was Charlie Kirk himself. Showing a better understanding of what the First Amendment means than President Trump or Attorney General Bondi, he wrote in a 2024 social media post, “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Hatred of Free Speech When It’s Against Him

Within a week of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, President Trump was on his way out of the U.S. for a state visit to Great Britain. He was scheduled to be received by the royal family for a series of private events at Windsor Castle. Trump did not agree to make the usual speech a visiting foreign leader makes to the House of Commons, reportedly because he didn’t want to have to face hostile questioning from Members of Parliament exercising their right under British law.

Before he left, Trump gave a news briefing at the White House in which he said, “I’m not so sure,” to a reporter who asked him whether protesters against him are protected by the First Amendment. (They are.) Trump then went on to a rambling account of the night he went to dinner at a Washington, D.C. restaurant – the first time during either of his Presidencies he’s ever eaten at a restaurant in the nation’s capital that he didn’t own – and was accosted by four women protesters complaining about the U.S.’s support of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza.

“And they’re women, in many cases women,” Trump said. “In many cases they’re professional agitators. I had one the other night. I had four the other night, all in one group, total phonies. They started to scream when I got into a restaurant, oh, something about Palestine. And I said, ‘Well, we’re doing a great job about peace in the Middle East. I get lots of awards for that, with the Abraham Accords.’ But a woman stood up and started screaming. And she got booed out of the place, too. People, a lot of people in the restaurant. I went there to show how safe it was, and it was safe. And the woman, she was just a mouthpiece. She was a paid agitator. And I’ve had a lot of them. And I’ve asked Pam [Bondi, attorney general] to look into that in terms of RICO, bringing RICO cases against them, criminal RICO. Because they should be put in jail.”

Think about that for a moment. The President of the United States of America just called for using a law designed as a weapon against organized crime – the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) – to prosecute and imprison four women who confronted and allegedly insulted him at a restaurant. Trump’s bizarre assertions that all those who protest against him are “professional agitators” and “total phonies” who are being paid to do so reminded me of the way Southern racists of the early 1960’s used to blame the civil-rights protests on “outside agitators.” Many of them said the Jews were the ones behind the movement because they couldn’t conceive of African-Americans being able to organize it on their own.

Attorney General Bondi echoed Trump’s hatred of the First Amendment when she appeared on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller – one of Trump’s most vile henchmen – and said, “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, after what happened to Charlie, in our society.” Katie Miller asked her, “Do you see more law enforcement coming after these groups who are using hate speech, putting cuffs on people, on the basis that some action is better than no action?” Bondi replied, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. And that’s across the board.”

That bit about Bondi threatening to prosecute “anyone with hate speech … across the board” is so much B.S. If she asserts that power, and her prosecutors can actually secure indictments (a number of grand juries in Washington, D.C. have refused to indict defendants in cases where they allegedly assaulted police officers and immigration agents, including one that faced felony assault charges for throwing a sandwich at an ICE agent), you can be sure she’ll be targeting actual or alleged Leftists heavily and Rightists not at all. Reportedly some genuine conservatives have expressed concern over Bondi’s willingness to prosecute people for mere speech, but you can bet, given the pattern we’ve seen throughout both Trump’s presidencies, that sooner or later they’ll fall in line with Trump’s repressive agenda and start making apologies for it.

Kirk’s Killing Capped a Crazy Week

In one of those weird historical coincidences, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at the end of a week that had also seen three of the five justices of the Supreme Court of Brazil convict the country’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro, of illegally staging a coup to remain in power after the people of Brazil voted him out of office. Trump had already imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil and said the reason was they were daring to prosecute Bolsonaro for what Trump himself had done on January 6, 2021.

It was also the week when Ryan Routh, the alleged perpetrator of the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump on September 15, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida, went on trial. Routh acted as his own attorney, and the judge assigned to his case was Trump appointee and groupie Aileen Mercedes Cannon. (Judge Cannon was the one who drew jurisdiction over the case brought against Trump for allegedly illegally retaining classified documents when he first left the White House in 2021. Her bizarre rulings on her behalf earned her two smackdowns from the federal appeals court in the area.) During the first day of the trial, Routh launched into an opening statement that invoked Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Putin, and was shut down by Judge Cannon. Later, during a cross-examination, he congratulated one of the Secret Service agents who apprehended him.

When – after a false alarm on September 10 in which FBI director Kash Patel announced that a suspect in the Kirk killing had been arrested, only having to walk that back when that man turned out to be innocent – a genuine suspect was finally arrested two days later, America’s Right-wing culture warriors probably thought they’d hit the jackpot. The arrestee turned out to be 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a Gay man who was living with a partner who was undergoing gender transition. No doubt they started licking their lips with glee at the prospect of being able to blame the death of their hero on both Gay and Trans people.

There’s no evidence that Robinson’s Trans partner, Lance Twiggs, had any involvement in whatever he might have done, and they’ve been fully cooperative with the government’s investigation, but America’s Right-wing culture warriors won’t be dissuaded by the facts. Indeed, just minutes before he died, Charlie Kirk had been confronted by an audience member who asked, “Do you know how many Transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” “Too many,” Kirk responded, invoking the widely held and totally erroneous belief among Right-wing Americans that Trans people are uniquely dangerous and violence-prone.

Though many observers, including Trump himself, credited Charlie Kirk with helping Trump win back the White House in 2024 by mobilizing young voters – especially young men – to vote for him, no doubt Kirk will be even more valuable to the American Right in death than he was in life. Kirk’s many reprehensible views – including his belief in the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” that holds there’s a worldwide Jewish conspiracy aimed at getting people of color to reproduce more than white people so they will ultimately take over the world, and his racist statement that he feared for his life whenever he got into a plane with a Black pilot – will fade into the dust or be conveniently flushed down the memory hole.

In life, Charlie Kirk was a potential embarrassment. In death, he will become a martyr. Trump had already begun the process of his canonization when he said on September 10 – well before there was a serious suspect in the case – “Charlie was the best of America, and the monster who attacked him was attacking our whole country. An assassin tried to silence him with a bullet, but he failed because together, we will ensure that his voice, his message, and his legacy will live on for countless generations to come. Today, because of this heinous act, Charlie’s voice has become bigger and grander than ever before. And it’s not even close.”

On April 5, 2023, Charlie Kirk made a statement about gun violence in which he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” That made me think of the similar karmic debt paid by the late comedian Sam Kinison, who used to ridicule laws against drunk driving – until he was killed in an accident caused by a drunk driver. If Charlie Kirk had to get shot at all, I wish he’d merely been wounded, not killed, so he’d have had a chance to re-evaluate his position on sensible gun regulation the way President Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, became an advocate for gun laws after he was wounded in the attempted assassination of Reagan in 1981.

Or maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe he’d have worn whatever shrapnel remained in his body as some sort of twisted badge of honor and cast himself as a martyr for the cause of unrestricted access to guns. We’ll never know. What we do know is that President Trump, Attorney General Bondi, and those who fill out the second Trump Administration won’t waste a minute in exploiting the death of Charlie Kirk to extinguish what few bits of political freedom still remain in this country and use it to advance the cause of turning Trump from a Constitutionally limited President into what he’s always wanted to be: America’s Führer.