Maine-based historian Heather Cox Richardson claimed during a Friday podcast that liberals didn’t celebrate the assassination of Turning Point USA founder and CEO Charlie Kirk.
Authorities arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson early Friday morning, accusing him of killing Kirk during a TPUSA “Prove Me Wrong” event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, during which Kirk engaged in civil debate with students. Richardson claimed that the “radical right” had created a narrative that Kirk was a “target of the left.”
“As soon as the shooting happened, there is this outpouring insisting that he [Kirk] was a target of the left, insisting that people who were not MAGA were celebrating his death. I didn’t see that absolutely anywhere and I was online significantly that day,” Richardson claimed during her podcast “Politics Talk.” “There was an outpouring from liberals and most of the left — maybe there were some people who thought that he was, you know, live by the sword, die by the sword, because he was quoted — there is a video of him talking about how if we have to have deaths to support the Second Amendment, that’s fair because we need that to support our greater rights, and, you know, people posted that.”
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“But the, the radical right created this atmosphere that somehow people who weren’t MAGA were cheering on political violence and in order to back away from that, some of the people in that space started to defend him as being an exemplar of democratic values, which, again, I feel like — if you have one thing that you should take with you after your life on earth, it’s how you presented yourself,” Richardson continued. “You had all those years to do it. Why would somebody suddenly change who you were?{
Grabien News founder Tom Elliot posted a supercut of liberals and left-wingers celebrating Kirk’s assassination on X Sunday, in response to a Daily Caller News Foundation reporter’s post showing the video of Richardson making the claim. The video included online posts wishing for the deaths of President Donald Trump and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro.
ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith expressed his disgust with online celebrations of Kirk’s murder during Thursday’s episode of his SiriusXM show, a day before Richardson’s podcast aired.
“I don’t care what his political beliefs were! I don’t care what he felt! I care about the fact that a man was gunned down in front of two of his children who are 5 years of age or less,” a visibly angry Smith said. “That he’s dead at the age of 31. That his wife is a widow. That his children are fatherless because his ideas and his beliefs differed from somebody else, apparently.”
“And then I’m going online and I’m seeing people celebrating it!” he continued, his voice raising. “Shame! Shame on you!”
Multiple people have been fired for online comments either celebrating Kirk’s assassination or attacking him. Democratic elected officials have either criticized those mourning Kirk’s death or have attempted to equivocate, often citing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol building.
TPUSA events in high schools and colleges across the country have faced violent efforts to disrupt them. Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, a vocal critic of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, was assaulted during an April 6, 2023, event at San Francisco State University hosted by TPUSA, where she spoke about the issue.
Richardson is known to be a Trump detractor and has spoken out against the president’s administration deporting gang members who had entered the U.S. illegally, suggesting that the policy amounted to a “really slippery slope” in March. She had implied the previous month that Trump’s renaming of the body of water south of the continental U.S. to the “Gulf of America” was an act of authoritarianism.
The historian had said in a July video posted to YouTube that far-left Democratic New York City nominee Zohran Mamdani is “not a socialist.”
