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Lawmakers are divided on whether to tone down heated rhetoric after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, reigniting debate over the role fiery language plays in America’s surge of political violence.
Political violence has been a steady constant in recent years, including a pair of assassination attempts against President Donald Trump in 2024 and the slaying of a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota earlier this year.
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Kirk’s death has again reignited the discussion on what role political rhetoric, be it inside the walls of Congress or around the country, has to play in the specter of political violence in the U.S.
“This is on all of us, right?” Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., told Fox News Digital. “I mean, you know, everyone’s been ramping up the rhetoric, right?
“If the left is going to blame the right, and the right is going to blame the left, and we’re going to continue to say it’s your fault, and we’re not collectively going to try to bring it down together, then this cycle is just going to continue to go on,” he continued.
And Republican leaders are hoping to turn the temperature down in Congress in the wake of Kirk’s death.
“I’m trying to turn the temperature down around here,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said. “I always do that. I’ve been very consistent.”
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Fox News Digital that he believed reining in hostile or divisive rhetoric is “always a conversation with people in leadership.”
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“And it should be in both parties to make sure that you don’t incite this kind of an activity,” he said. “And you just don’t know somebody, and based on their mental health, what kind of activity they may — what role that may play in this. We still don’t know what’s happened here.”
Some lawmakers fear that the escalation in political violence is seeing America return to the violent and chaotic time of the 1960s, which saw the assassinations of civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers, as well as former President John F. Kennedy and his brother and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, among others.
“The message was love and not violence,” Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., said of the turmoil in the 1960s. “So, you know, returning to a message like that could be good, but it didn’t change the outcome of the assassinations during that era. So I don’t know that there’s an easy answer.”
Still, emotions were running high on the Hill in the days following the shooting at Utah Valley University, which resulted in a two-day manhunt and the eventual arrest of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.
When asked how much of a role rhetoric had to play in Kirk’s slaying, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said, “A lot.”
“You say you’re a Nazi and a fascist and a threat to democracy, how does that help? If you disagree on issues, that’s one thing, but [you’re] not saying that,” Norman said. “The left is a poster child.”
Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital that he had known Kirk for a decade and noted that the late founder of Turning Point USA “stood for the open exchange of ideas.”
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“I think what we have to learn from that is that we need to go back to the principles that built this country, which is that it is actually a positive and healthy thing to debate ideas,” Moreno said. “We don’t have to be mad at each other because we have a different point of view, let alone escalate the violence.”
But Moreno noted that for the last decade, Trump and Republicans like himself have been compared to Adolf Hitler, Nazi sympathizers and fascists, “which the Democrats do every single day.”
“What’s the problem,” Moreno said. “Like, you signed up for politics, you got to be able to have a thick skin. It’s not about that. It’s about that you send a message to crazy people, that says, ‘You’re actually doing a good deed if you kill somebody who would otherwise be a Nazi and a fascist who will end our democracy.'”
Trump put the blame, in part, on Democrats in an address to the nation on Wednesday night, where he charged that “those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.”
He reupped that sentiment during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning when he was asked about radical elements on the conservative side of the aisle.
“I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem.”
When asked for his response to Trump’s address, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “This is a time that all Americans should come together and feel and mourn what happened.”
“Violence affects so many different people, so many different political persuasions,” he said. “It is an infliction on America, and coming together is what we ought to be doing, not pointing fingers to blame.”
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