Minutes after right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at an event in Utah on Wednesday, far-right influencers and extremist communities lit up social media with calls for violence against the left.
Kirk, the cofounder of the conservative youth organizing group Turning Point USA, was shot and killed while taking questions at a TPUSA event held at Utah Valley University. Law enforcement officials said late afternoon Wednesday that a “person of interest” was in custody, but that individual was later released. No motive has yet been reported by authorities.
Despite this, many far-right influencers and Republican officials immediately blamed the left for carrying out the shooting. In some extremist groups, members called for civil war and violent retribution. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” said Alex Jones, the influencer and school-shooting conspiracy theorist, during a livestream on his Infowars channel.
“For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” said President Donald Trump in a taped address posted to his Truth Social account. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in the country today.”
Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, who had his sentence for seditious conspiracy with regards to the January 6 Capitol riot commuted by Trump earlier this year, announced on Infowars that it was time to restart his militia group in order to provide public protection for figures like Kirk.
“I’m going to be rebuilding the Oath Keepers, and we will be doing protection again,” said Rhodes. “If my security team had been at that event, if they had been up there on the high point, looking for potential threats, they would have saved Charlie Kirk from being shot.”
Rhodes then called on Trump to “do what’s right, what’s necessary” and “invoke the Insurrection Act” in the wake of the shooting. “You should declare the left in this country is in obvious open rebellion against the law of the United States. They’re committing insurrection, they’re aiding and abetting an invasion, and they’re blocking the execution of federal law,” Rhodes said.
More mainstream right-wing commentators and lawmakers have also joined in the rush to blame the left and call for action.
Ed Martin, the US pardon attorney and former acting US attorney for DC, wrote on X: “For it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord,” citing Romans 12:19.
Elon Musk, the X owner and former figurehead of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), posted: “The Left is the party of murder.” He then quoted a post blaming “the left-wing mainstream media, as well as figures like Gavin Newsom” for radicalizing people against right-wing figures like Kirk. “Exactly,” Musk wrote.
Katie Miller, who worked closely with Musk at DOGE and is the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, wrote on X that even liberals condemning the violence “had blood on their hands.”
“You could be next,” influencer and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X. “The Left are terrorists.”
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who popularized the demonization of critical race theory, suggested in a post on X that the “radical left” was responsible for the shooting, and urged the US government “to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
Republican representative Derrick Van Orden from Wisconsin also blamed the shooting on “leftwing political violence” and warned on X that “whoever does not condemn this is part of the problem. The gloves are off.”
On the floor of the House, after Democrats and Republicans observed a “moment of prayer,” led by House speaker Mike Johnson, for Charlie Kirk and his family, representative Lauren Boebert called for a spoken prayer. Some Democrats said no, and referenced the school shooting in Colorado that also occurred Wednesday. Shouting broke out, and Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna yelled across the aisle, “Y’all caused this.” One Democrat, according to The New York Times, responded, “Pass some gun laws!”
On X, Luna continued to blame the left: “EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS. You were too busy doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence by supporting orgs that exploit minorities, protecting criminals, and stirring hate. YOU ARE THE HATE you claim to fight. Your words caused this. Your hate caused this.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also posted about Kirk’s death, calling on people to “rise up and end this.”
Blake Masters, a twice-failed US congressional candidate once backed by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel and endorsed by Trump, called for RICO investigations into nongovernmental organizations as a result of the shooting.
“Left-wing violence is out of control, and it’s not random,” Masters posted on X. “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments it, or it will destroy us.”
Masters was quoting a post from right-wing podcaster and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who blamed the shooting on the left. “Congressional hearings now,” Cernovich posted on X. “Every billionaire funding far left wing extremism. Soros, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman. Massive RICO investigations now.”
Chaya Raichik, who operates the anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok, simply wrote: “THIS IS WAR.”
On fringe platforms like Trump’s own Truth Social and The Donald, the rabidly pro-Trump message board that was responsible for some of the planning of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, numerous users echoed Jones’ comments about war.
“War is coming,” one user of The Donald wrote on a thread dedicated to Kirk’s shooting. “War is here,” another responded.
Another user of The Donald wrote in the same thread: “Civil War is coming … this will give the left the blowback they’ve been begging white people for so they can play the victim and justify white genocide.”
In other threads, users on the same platform linked Kirk’s shooting to other attacks on conservative figures. “These are looking like civil war times,” the user wrote. “They fired the first shot Ashli Babbitt, the second, Donald Trump, third Trump and fourth Charlie Kirk shot. Our side hasn’t fired a bullet.” Babbitt was shot by a police officer while inside the Capitol during the January 6 riots; the man who allegedly attempted to assassinate Trump in July of last year had no clear political motive.
Even some of Kirk’s detractors on the far right, who saw him as not extreme enough, framed his death as a potential recruiting tool.
“In life Charlie Kirk was our enemy because he did whatever he could to undermine White collectivism,” wrote Christopher Pohlhaus, the neo-Nazi leader of the white supremacist group Blood Tribe. “In death he is a martyr because he was killed in a political climate in which he was seen as one of us despite the fact that he was not.”
“We hope this is a lesson learned for the remaining moderates out there,” wrote the neo-Nazi group American Futurist on its Telegram page. “We hope any people who are not willing to commit realize the reality of our situation before they end up like Charlie. You will be an evil racist Nazi no matter who you are. You are their enemy.”
For extremist researchers who closely track these groups, the immediate and unified response to the death of Kirk is particularly worrying.
“Rufo calling for arrests of all those who are responsible for this chaos; Cernovich and Blake Masters calling for RICO-style crackdowns against Dem donors; a whole lot of everyday people declaring gloves off.” says Jeff Sharlet, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. “99.9 percent of those are just spouting off. But today, if anything, teaches us the damage that 0.1 percent can do.”
Update 9/10/25 9:05 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a statement made by Donald Trump.
