A House Democratic lawmaker blasted the right’s narrative that extremist violence comes largely — or exclusively — from the left, a claim contradicted by evidence, including a Justice Department study recently scrubbed from its website. The motive and political ideology of the shooter remain largely unknown.
President Donald Trump has been leading the charge on the right in suggesting that left-wing violence is prevalent.
“For years,” Trump said in an address from the Oval Office the night of Charlie Kirk’s killing, “those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans, like Charlie, to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
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White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on Monday declared there is “a vast domestic terror movement,” CNBC reported, noting that he was specifically “speaking of left-wing political organizations.”
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Miller also said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday declared, “Yes, who killed Charlie [Kirk]? Left-wing radicals. And they will be held accountable.”
U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz on Wednesday tore into House Republicans.
“I want to caution my colleagues on, you know, one-sided violence in this country,” the Florida Democrat began.
“We just heard that there were no riots on the right. We’re literally sitting in the building where there was a giant riot by supporters of the president, the right,” he said, referring to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which many have deemed an insurrection.
“We also heard that only leftists have said that Trump is a ‘Nazi.’ In 2016, the current Vice President of the United States said, ‘Trump is either a cynical a– or he’s America’s Hitler’.”
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Moskowitz lamented having to “say this garbage. But you want me to sit here and get painted with one brush—the whole left. No, no, there are extremes on the left, and there are extremes on the right. And we collectively should tackle that.”
“But to come here and just look at us and say, ‘we all support what’s going on in the extremes,’ is why we can’t solve anything in this building.”
On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Miller’s “suggestion that a secret network of violent left-wing extremists was behind the killing” of Charlie Kirk, “stands in contrast to the evidence that law enforcement officials presented on Tuesday in Utah, where Kirk was fatally shot. There was no indication presented Tuesday that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was a member of a group or that he fell under the sway of a particular leader. The investigation is ongoing.”
On Monday, as The New York Times reported, President Trump, “who has downplayed violence from right-wing or other supporters, said that he would like to designate a range of groups, including the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists, known as ‘antifa,’ as domestic terrorists and bring racketeering cases against people funding protests.”
The Times added that “other officials, from Vice President JD Vance on down, made it clear on Monday that they believed that political violence was a liberal problem and not a conservative one,” and announced “that they would be cracking down on what they called leftist nongovernmental organizations, and that they would use every available lever of the federal government to do so.”
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