Charlie Kirk was not yet pronounced dead when conservative Republicans began assigning blame to Democrats on Capitol Hill — and then the shouting began.
As the House of Representatives convened for a vote, it planned to first hold a moment of silence and prayer for the conservative youth activist who led Turning Point USA and had become the face of the right-wing youth movement that supported President Donald Trump.
But as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) sought to read a prayer, Democrats pushed back.
“The Southern Baptist in me, that’s not what we do,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told The Independent. “We pray to God, then we pray out loud.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida yelled at Democrats across the aisle, “Y’all caused this,” which could be heard on C-SPAN cameras.
“Pass some gun laws,” one Democrat shouted back.
Rep. Brittany Bettersen (D-Colo.) attributed the affair to a misunderstanding. Just hours after Kirk’s shooting, news reports came out about a shooting at Evergreen High School in Jefferson County, Colorado.
“She was asking for somebody to read a prayer for him, and they were screaming out, what about the people of Colorado at the same time that she was saying, and also the people, the students in the school,” Pettersen told The Independent. “So I think that the it was misconstrued, the response from Democrats was, what about these additional people?”
But by then, the tempest had boiled over and vitriol abounded, as conservatives immediately sought to blame the Democrats for the death of one of their most influential leaders.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told reporters: “Democrats own what happened today.”
Kirk organized young conservatives for more than a decade. He had been an ally on many of the channels that Republicans frequent including his podcast, events TPUSA hosted and his closeness with the Trump family. In response, even before police apprehended a person of interest, conservatives sought to find somebody to blame for his apparent assassination at Utah Valley University in Orem.
“This hatred and that we’re preaching out here is not it’s not helping,” Burchett told The Independent. “MSNBC claiming that it was, you know, somehow his own fault, and this kind of nonsense, and that they need to lose their license.”
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.) came out even more forcefully and excoriated the media for Kirk’s death.
“You need to stop advocating and start reporting, you guys are fueling political violence,” he told The Independent.
No Democratic elected officials celebrated Kirk’s death. Former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, California Governor Gavin Newsom and plenty of other Democrats denounced his shooting as an act of political violence. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the shooting “horrific” when speaking to The Independent.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) expounded more on Kirk’s death and the rising political violence.
“My heart goes out to Charlie Kirk’s family. What a nightmare this whole thing is,” he told The Independent. Raskin was quick to point out that Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the Minnesota state house, had also been killed in a seeming political assassination.
“It’s just out of control across the country, and so is this,” Raskin told The Independent.
Still, some Democrats used the event to highlight the proliferation of guns in America while others pointed to how Trumpism coarsened US political discourse and primed the pump for such a shooting. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said violence is never justified while adding, “I think there are people who are fomenting it in this country. I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it.”
And when asked about whether Democrats should dial it down, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told reporters “Oh, please. Why don’t you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he’s posted and every ugly word.”
Meanwhile, by the time Kirk had been pronounced dead, conservatives had already begun to shape him into a martyr despite nothing being known yet about the shooter, who was still the subject of an intense manhunt hours after the murder.
The anger conservatives expressed bore striking similarity to the rage they expressed after Trump’s shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which came just days before the Republican National Convention. That shooting turned Trump into something of a messianic figure on the right, an image Trump wholly embraced on the campaign trail and at his inauguration.
Other Republicans generally said that the temperature needed to come down.
“I think many, many elected officials need to recognize that their rhetoric does not help when you constantly demonize the other side and both parties are responsible for this,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.). told The Independent. “But the bullshit has got to stop because people are people are getting killed.”
The House of Representatives, of course, is no stranger to political violence. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders supporter shot House Majority Leader Steve Scalise during a congressional baseball practice, which led to Sanders immediately denouncing the shooting as it happened.
In 2021, Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. In 2022, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their California home. Those are just a handful of the times political violence befell the lower chamber.
But this time, many Republicans and conservatives want to find a culprit. To them, this is a moment where they are closing rank and seeing Democrats as not only their political opponents, but their political enemies who should be forced to exit public life.
What comes next is undetermined but it will likely be driven by rage and a desire for retribution.
