The Real Charlie Kirk
The Intercept Briefing
The Intercept
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After the fatal shooting of right-wing personality Charlie Kirk on Wednesday afternoon, the rhetoric on the right quickly escalated. Influential voices on social media declared war on the left, despite the absence of any knowledge about the suspect or their motive at the time.
President Donald Trump made a formal address where he pledged to go after the “radical left.”
“We are seeing language weaponized so swiftly,” says Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard.
“I think the Trump administration has a clear track record at this point of taking these little chips that they can leverage to induce state repression and encroach on civil liberties,” says Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lennard and Breland about the implications of Kirk’s killing and how we think about political violence in the U.S.
“We already know that whoever it does turn out to be, we are living in a moment with an authoritarian government that will weaponize this moment either way,” says Lennard. “This is about finding any opportunity to further escalate the white nationalist project.”
“I worry that his assassination is a progression toward something darker in which a wider group of people are considered to be targets for political violence,” says Breland. “And I don't think that the rhetoric that's coming out right now is doing anything to stop it or off-ramp us on this dark path.”
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Transcript
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| 0:25.2 | Let's go. |
| 0:26.4 | Find out more at sse.com slash change. |
| 0:34.5 | Welcome to the Interset Briefing. I'm Akala Lacey. |
| 0:41.0 | On Wednesday afternoon, right-wing personality Charlie Kirk was killed at an event at Utah Valley University. |
| 0:48.4 | As news broke, many quickly deemed the shooting a political assassination. |
| 0:53.3 | As of this recording, Thursday afternoon, the suspect and motive were still unknown. |
| 0:58.4 | Despite that, Kirk's killing set off dueling debates around political violence in the United |
| 1:03.2 | States. |
| 1:04.3 | Who wages it and how we define it. |
| 1:07.6 | It also fueled a battle to define Kirk's legacy. |
| 1:13.3 | Kirk, who many have described as a conservative activist, often took far more extreme positions. He had a long record of comments |
| 1:19.1 | denigrating black people, women, gay, and trans people, and immigrants. Kirk's group Turning Points |
| 1:24.4 | USA pushed a Christian nationalist vision of America that, as we've |
| 1:28.9 | discussed on this show, fuels a major part of the MAGA base. |
| 1:32.9 | The Southern Poverty Law Center Road of the Group, TPUSA, exploits complicated feelings of |
| 1:38.6 | insecurity and anxiety to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated male supremacist Christian social order. |
| 1:53.6 | While Kirk started out in the more moderate wing in the Conservative Party, his politics grew more extreme as his reach exploded, particularly |
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