The Domestic Terrorism Label Applied to Charlie Kirk's Assassination and Its Aftermath

Showing 17 Domestic Terrorism videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

Domestic terrorism became the specific legal and political framework both Kirk himself and, after his death, his allies used to characterize left-wing political violence, predating the assassination that would eventually be described the same way. Kirk had argued as early as 2020 that Antifa should be formally designated a domestic terrorist organization, a position he repeated consistently enough that President Trump's administration ultimately made that designation official following Kirk's own death, with a former acting Homeland Security Secretary testifying before Congress that left-wing political violence had reached a thirty-year high. Commentator Matt Walsh went further than the administration's own framing, arguing directly that Kirk's assassination specifically constituted an act of LGBT terrorism given the shooter's relationship with a transgender partner and the ammunition's Antifa-associated engravings, a characterization Walsh said was corroborated by sources familiar with the FBI's investigation. Kirk had applied similar domestic-terrorism framing to academic figures years earlier, visiting Marquette University to expose that Bill Ayers, a former Weather Underground member convicted of domestic terrorism activity in the 1960s and 70s, had authored textbooks still used in student coursework there. The congressional hearing on Antifa's designation exposed the same partisan divide that ran through most of the domestic-terrorism debate, with witnesses split between attributing the violence primarily to left-wing extremism and arguing right-wing extremism posed the greater ongoing threat.