2 unhappy indicators on the effects of the assassination of Charlie Kirk 

It’s been fewer than 100 days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It will take years to know the implications of one of the most historically significant events of 2025, but the early returns are not encouraging.

Two data points from this week: 

1) Kirk’s widow, Erika, had a summit with one of her late husband’s former competitors in right-of-center media, Candace Owens. It was a bid to stop Owens’s public conjecture about alleged assassination plots. She says these schemes may have included insiders from the Kirks’ organization and/or Zionists trying to stop him from condemning Israel. Also, apparently, maybe the government of France. 

That Owens’s share of the media market is sufficient for Erika Kirk to feel obliged to treat such insulting claims with this level of deference tells us a lot on its face. You don’t have to think it’s crazy to believe in conspiracy theories to know that it is absolutely bonkers for Kirk to feel she had to make such a concession. A world in which “the Israel lobby” can get away with public murder and pin it on a patsy but can’t manage to silence one kooky podcaster doesn’t make much sense. 

Such is the power of “forbidden” knowledge. The harder “they” try to refute it, the more evidence there is that the theorist must have been on to something in the first place. This points to a deeper fracturing of the right and the unwinding of the MAGA movement — still largely undefined beyond its support for President Trump.

So lesson one is that the initial comparisons between the killing of Charlie Kirk and that of Martin Luther King Jr. may prove sadly prescient. King’s 1968 murder marked the end of the constructive period of the Civil Rights Movement and resulted in a long, painful period of division and unrest on the left. For groups like the Black Panthers, King’s death was proof that working through the existing system had failed and that radicalism and violence were the only answers.

The killing of Robert F. Kennedy two months later had a similar effect on the far-left, anti-war movement that Kennedy was trying to lead. The riots of 1968, including the bedlam at that year’s Democratic National Convention, were expressions of the frustrations of angry, radicalized, often malinformed young people who were not willing to be told to wait in line anymore.

Kirk was a much less significant figure in American life than King was, and the circumstances of the members of his movement are vastly superior to those of Black Americans in 1967, and viewpoint discrimination on college campuses is not a commensurate threat to being drafted for deployment to Vietnam. But it may be reasonable to expect that the effects will be similar on a smaller scale. 

Owens and Nick Fuentes aren’t exactly Huey Newton and Jerry Rubin, but it sure feels like the nationalist right is eating itself in the way the radical left did back then. That was good for Republicans, just as the current right-wing Jacobinism will be good for Democrats. But it’s all bad for the country.

2) Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were found murdered in their Los Angeles home Sunday evening. Reiner was almost as famous for his left-wing politics and activism — and his particular antipathy for Trump — as he was for his movies and acting. A little bit before 10 a.m. Monday on the East Coast, the president weighed in, posting on social media that the crime was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.”

About an hour after that, police announced the arrest of the Reiners’ troubled 32-year-old son for the grisly slayings. The timing is significant here. When the president blamed Reiner for his own murder, it was widely known that it had been a brutal attack but not yet that it seemed to be a domestic tragedy. That means the best explanation for why the president would post such a thing — other than sheer pettiness — is that Trump suspected the killings may have been politically motivated and wanted to get ahead of the story by telling MAGA that Reiner probably deserved it. 

In the wake of the Kirk assassination, Trump, his administration and his movement went on the hunt for those of any stature who had even suggested Kirk had it coming. A number of people lost their jobs or were forced to issue public apologies for saying similar things about Kirk as Trump said about Reiner. It was for some an undoubtedly righteous-feeling anger channeled into a “teachable moment” about such sentiments always being unacceptable. But for others, it was a chance to punish political enemies and exert power. We did not need Kirk’s murder to teach us about hypocrisy, but Trump’s effort to blame the victim in Reiner’s case and the reactions to it are still instructive.

Lesson two is that mirroring is a powerful force in politics at all times, but particularly right now. 

Trump’s snap reaction to the murder of one of his long-standing foes was to do almost exactly what he and his movement had condemned among radical progressives in September. Had Reiner actually been murdered by a deranged MAGA member it’s easy to see how right-wing brain rot would have absorbed and deployed the argument to insulate its devotees from any of the kind of contemplation and introspection that the far left avoided after Kirk’s assassination. Trump may have denounced the anti-Kirk rhetoric at the time, but he obviously saw its utility. 

That’s the thing about a race to the bottom: There is no bottom. You can always go lower.