Nearly 62 years later, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination is still shrouded in mystery.
The suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered, live on national television, without ever disclosing anything. A plausible theory is that a small man simply wanted to make a huge mark on history — and he certainly did.
We also may never really know why Charlie Kirk was murdered. The motive of the alleged killer, if he’s found guilty, could be as inexplicable as Oswald’s.
But Kirk’s killing has unleashed an unprecedented attack against free speech in America, as President Trump and his accomplices use Kirk’s death as a pretext for declaring war against everyone and everything on the political left.
It extends even to denouncing, suspending and terminating law-abiding citizens for exercising their constitutional right to question whether Kirk’s actions and words were good or bad for the nation.
They have as much right to do that as Kirk had to say the things he did.
Free-speech fight at FAU
A case in point is Dr. Karen Leader, a tenured associate professor of art at Florida Atlantic University, who was put on leave by FAU’s highly politicized administration.
Her offense? Sharing social media posts that criticized Kirk’s right-wing activism as racist, sexist and homophobic.
Leader also serves as faculty advisor to FAU College Democrats. She was exercising the same freedom of speech that Kirk did when he called George Floyd, the Black man murdered by police in Minneapolis, a “scumbag” while adding that he did not deserve to die.
Leader’s reposts were of a similar nature. She, too, did not even remotely suggest that Kirk’s murder was anything but a serious crime.
The Democratic victims
Many have observed that the right wing’s mourning and blame-casting contrasts sharply with its indifference to the recent murders of Melissa Hortman, the Democratic former speaker of the Minnesota House and her husband. A Democratic state senator and his wife were also attacked, but survived.
No national flags were lowered to half-staff for them. The suspect in those killings is from the far right.
When Paul Pelosi, the husband of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, Trump himself made a crude joke about it.
He also pardoned or commuted the sentences of some 1,500 people for the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2001. The mob injured 140 police officers.
In Kirk’s assassination, Trump and his followers appear to have found their Reichstag Fire moment. The term is a metaphor for using a crisis to crush all political opposition.
An arson fire in 1933 destroyed Germany’s national parliament building, which enabled the country’s new chancellor to wrest power from an aging president and suspend all civil and personal liberties. A wave of hysteria swept over the country, and mass arrests and suppression led to history’s deadliest war.
Claims of ‘domestic terror’
Kirk’s assassination has triggered equally ominous threats to civil liberties in America.
Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s fanatical policy adviser, Stephen Miller, have been especially overt, with Miller calling left-wing political groups a network of “domestic terror.”
On Kirk’s namesake podcast, Miller said: “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.”
What network? In 2020, a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified 335 killings linked to the far right over the previous 20 years. Only one death was attributed to the ephemeral left-wing “antifa,” and in that case, the person who died was the attacker.
Nothing on the left compares with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, to name just two of the right-wing paramilitaries involved in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection.
Trump’s indignation is selective.
A plea for peace and unity
Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox had coupled his announcement of the arrest of Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, with a plea for peace.
“To my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” he said. “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”
Minutes later, he received a phone call from Trump and a warning about the dangers of being president.
“You know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us,” Trump told the governor, as The Atlantic first reported.
Trump pointed out that he had been the target of two assassination attempts.
America is in a dangerous spiral. Kirk’s assassination was a moment for thoughtful leaders to decry violence in all its forms and modify their own rhetoric accordingly.
Trump and his acolytes are not only incapable of that sort of leadership — they avidly reject it.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
