How the Right Turned Charlie Kirk's Murder Into a Propaganda Masterclass

Moments like this one are what their political/media machine was built for, and they are ready to go berserk.

The moment Charlie Kirk was shot, the American political right swung into action. What they accomplished over the ensuing days was a masterclass in propaganda, demonstrating how well they deploy the media machine they built and how powerful that machine can be.

People in the conservative movement were unquestionably shocked, saddened, and angered by Kirk’s murder. But since they are part of a political movement, they instantly turned those emotions to political purpose. And there’s something else we can’t ignore: They could not be more excited. This isn’t to say they aren’t grieving, or that they wanted this particular murder to occur. But they’ve been waiting for a moment like this one.

I want to be clear who I’m talking about when I refer to “the American political right,” especially since one of the key components of their disinformation campaign is to ascribe beliefs, words, and actions to “the left” that almost no one, and certainly no one of influence, actually holds. I’m not talking about random online jerks with 100 followers on X. I’m talking about the closely intertwined political-media complex, which includes:

• Officials in the White House and throughout the executive branch

• Republican members of Congress and their staff

• Staff of conservative organizations

• Elected officials and political activists at the state level

• Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, and the other right-leaning cable TV outlets, as well as writers for conservative op-ed pages

• Right-wing podcasters, newsletter and website writers, radio hosts, and social media influencers

Roughly speaking, that is “the right,” people with the ability and the tools to seize attention and exercise influence over not only the millions of people in their audiences but over the entirety of our political debate. The system they spent decades building — which started as an alternative to mainstream sources they felt were ignoring them, and grew to dwarf those mainstream sources (let alone the left’s tiny counterpart) in importance — exists so that it can be activated in moments like this one.

They knew their message right away

The first component of the right’s message was as follows: All our opponents are to blame. “They” did this.

Within minutes of Kirk’s shooting, people on the right began repeating that his murder was an act of “the left.” They came to this conclusion even before we knew who the suspect was, let alone what his motives or ideology might be (which are still less than clear). He as an individual was irrelevant, because the fault, they said, lay with everyone from centrist Democratic members of Congress to think-tank scholars penning analyses of Medicaid work requirements to any random 16-year-old who thinks Donald Trump is a jerk. They are all “the left,” and they all killed Charlie Kirk.

“This was a political assassination by the left on the most prominent and important young voice in conservative America,” said Rachel Campos-Duffy, Fox News pundit and wife of the Secretary of Transportation. A Republican member of Congress addressed “The Democratic Party,” saying that in contrast to the civil tone Republicans took when Joe Biden was president, “you tried to kill our president twice. You actually killed Charlie. Enough is enough.” Popular radio host Clay Travis said, “They couldn't out-debate Charlie Kirk, and so they tried to kill him.” Senator Mike Lee of Utah said, “They just created a million, 10 million, 100 million Charlie Kirks. They haven't seen anything yet.” “They are at war with us!” said Fox’s Jesse Waters. “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us! And what are we gonna do about it?” “This could have been the greatest mistake these people have ever made,” said Eric Trump.

What about the fact that the vast majority of political violence in recent years has come from the right? Fake news, apparently. “When the left realizes that they're losing arguments, they resort to this violence,” said Donald Trump Jr. “I see the constant 'the violence goes both ways.' And it does not. The violence is going one way.” “When the left” can’t win debates, said Sen. Joni Ernst, “the only way they can silence those voices is through violence. That’s how Charlie met his end.”

And the president himself, when asked a softball question about how he might help reduce political violence coming from anywhere, responded that radicals on the right “are radical because they don't want to see crime,” while “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”

The next step was to begin targeting anyone who had the wrong reaction to the news of Kirk’s murder. Every prominent liberal you can find — Democratic politicians, influential media figures — denounced Kirk’s murder, even if some of them added that he should not be lionized as some kind of saint but seen for the person he really was and the beliefs he really held. But since conservatives could not find anyone of any importance who “celebrated” the news, they went searching for ordinary people who did — and of course there were, because there are hundreds of millions of people on social media and you can find any abhorrent idea expressed by some of them. The statements made by that miniscule number of people were then attributed to all liberals. Here’s how Brian Merchant describes it:

Shortly after Kirk’s killing, a blogger in Musk’s orbit, Tim Urban wrote that “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination. Such unbelievably sick people.” Musk quoted the post, and insisted “they are celebrating cold-blooded murder.” The evidence supplied was a few tiny accounts and dumb posts with one to zero likes apiece.

Another prominent conservative commentator replied to AOC’s call for nonviolence by saying, “Your followers are celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination all over Bluesky. Hundreds of thousands of bloodthirsty Democrats, delighted by the political violence that you've incited.” The Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams called this purported celebration of violence “unconscionable.”

Of course, it wasn’t really happening. Not on any scale that was materially different from what was taking place on X or elsewhere, anyway. I spent a considerable amount of the week on BlueSky, too, watching the trending topics, searching keywords, doomscrolling, etc. (I also have dummy accounts on both platforms not algorithmically tailored to my typical browsing habits.) I can say with confidence that the reaction was similar on both platforms—the vast majority of posts ranged from ‘violence is never the answer’ to ‘nothing good will come from this’ to highlighting pointed quotes of Kirk’s about gun violence. You could find a few on both platforms along the lines of “he deserved it” but they were the obvious and clear minority.

Elon Musk, I remind you, has 226 million followers on X. Libs of TikTok, an incredibly influential X account with 4.4 million followers whose creator, Chaya Raichik, is an adviser to Republican politicians, has been posting one target after another of ordinary people who said mean things about Kirk, so they can then be deluged with harassment and death threats.

And that’s what’s happening all over the country: Conservatives are amassing lists of people who said the wrong thing about Kirk on social media in the hopes of getting them fired or worse, and it’s working. While some of these people did actually post something repellent of the I’m-glad-he’s-dead variety, in many cases they just quoted Kirk’s own words without comment — and lost their jobs. One example: A professor at Austin Peay University was fired for sharing a screenshot of a 2023 article in which Kirk said, in the wake of a mass shooting in which three children and three adults were killed, that “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” The firing came after Senator Marsha Blackburn posted her own screenshot of the professor’s Facebook page, with the caption “What do you say, @austinpeay?” My former colleague Karen Attiah was fired from the Washington Post for essentially the same thing, posting Charlie Kirk’s own words (including that prominent Black women “do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously”) without comment.

Among the consequences of this highly successful effort to force everyone in America to not just condemn Kirk’s murder but to act as though he was a kind of saint is that both ostensibly non-political institutions and even some liberals have felt compelled to join in the tributes. Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Maura Healey of Massachusetts ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in his honor. Moments of silence for him were held at NFL games.

And the news coverage has been absolutely overwhelming; from the sheer quantity of it you’d think Charlie Kirk had dominated political life in America like no figure in a century, even though most Americans had probably never heard his name before last week. On Monday morning, I counted 112 articles on the New York Times website about Kirk published in the five days since the shooting (not counting those that mentioned him in passing). Like so many other news organizations, the Times deployed dozens of reporters to explore every imaginable aspect of the story — not just the details of the investigation but what his relationship with Trump was like, what his fans are feeling, what happened on social media in the aftermath of his killing, and more. As a point of comparison, I ran a search for “Jimmy Carter” in the Times in the five days after he died; they published just 66 articles on the former president in that time.

This is what they always wanted

The next step was to deploy institutional power to take revenge on “the left,” now that it has been charged and convicted of Kirk’s killing. This is what Republicans are doing with an enthusiasm that is almost impossible to overstate.

Listen to Stephen Miller, the second-most powerful person in the federal government, snarling that “we are going to do what it takes” to destroy their political enemies and vowing that “the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law to take away your freedom.”

On Monday, the New York Times reported the following:

“On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.”

The Monday edition of Kirk’s podcast was broadcast from the White House, where Vice President JD Vance acted as guest host and a number of administration officials came to praise Kirk and promise vengeance against the left. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out — and, hell, call their employer,” Vance told listeners. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people,” said Miller.

The Deputy Secretary of State tweeted a request for people to give him names of foreigners who expressed happiness at Kirk’s killing so they could be barred from entering the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “If you are here on a visa and cheering on the public assassination of a political figure, prepare to be deported” — though that seems to apply only to Kirk (he made no such pledge after the assassination of Melissa Hortman in Minnesota, perhaps because he would have had to deport Sen. Mike Lee) Meanwhile in Congress, Chip Roy, one of the leaders of the far right, is demanding that House leadership create a select committee to investigate “The money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.” Rep. Clay Higgins said he would demand from the tech companies an “immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

Kirk’s killing is being used as a justification for everything from shutting down liberal nonprofits to unleashing internet trolls on random citizens to more aggressive gerrymandering (“Kirk’s death reinvigorates Republicans’ redistricting race,” read a Politico headline). But mostly, the killing has given everyone on the right who wants it permission to indulge their most bloodthirsty fantasies. “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 say we are,” said Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who decides whether people in the administration can keep their jobs.

This all came at a moment when the right was beginning to lose a bit of its joie de vivre. As much as they enjoy watching masked agents brutalize immigrants or seeing Trump dismantle the Department of Education, when your side is in power, the excitement and intensity of rebellion can fade away. They've been in something of a low gear in the propaganda wars, forced to pretend they give a damn about what font the Cracker Barrel logo is in. But now they are re-energized, feeling a new purpose and focus as once again they tell themselves that they are warriors ready to smite their enemies with the sword of righteousness.

To sum up, this was the strategy the right has deployed in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder:

1. Blame everyone on the left for the crime, even before the identity of the suspect was known

2. Deify Kirk beyond all reason

3. Pursue and punish anyone who spoke about Kirk or his death in ways they didn’t like, ruining ordinary people’s lives in the process to create an atmosphere of fear

4. Take the opportunity to deploy government’s power against their opponents, using Kirk’s killing as the justification

The effectiveness of this strategy is made possible by the resources they already had: a complex and integrated right-wing media system; dominance of social media; a culture of unanimity among all parts of their movement, ensuring that key messages are repeated over and over verbatim; and the successful intimidation of the mainstream media.

I don’t know how far this will go. But I do know that the most powerful people in politics and media on the right are positively incandescent with a combination of rage and glee. They have their martyr, their bloody shirt, their Horst Wessel, their Reichstag Fire. And they are going to use it for everything it’s worth.

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