Charlie Kirk murder suspect radicalized online and ‘not cooperating,’ Utah Gov says

Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah told ABC’s Martha Raddatz on This Week that “we need to have a little grace for those who are angry” and grieving Charlie Kirk’s death.

He added: “As they move past that anger, and they definitely need to move past it, we need to think about productive dialogue.”

The senator also said of political violence: “I think you need to take the word ‘radical’ and remove right or left. And radical, if coming from any direction, is not good. It’s not healthy, and it should be called out.”

Arizona politician Kari Lake, who currently serves as adviser to the United States Agency for Global Media, is the latest Republican politician to broadly blame the political left for the spike in political violence in recent years, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

“I’m not going to say our side is perfect, but damn it this is coming from the other side,” Lake told the crowd on Sunday at a vigil for the late conservative activist, who was shot and killed earlier this week.

Lake went on to allege that shooting suggest Tyler Robinson had been “brainwashed” during his brief time at a Utah college.

“We sent our kids off to college and they brainwashed them,” Lake continued. “I am making a plea to mothers out there, do not send your children into these indoctrination camps.”

As The Independent has reported, political violence has in fact surged in recent years across the spectrum, though data suggests right-wing political causes are in fact responsible for the most deaths.

Donald Trump has shared a video calling for the president to reinstate a Cold War-era media “accountability” law in response to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, with a petition calling for its revival gathering more than 5,000 signatures within 13 hours.

Following the 31-year-old Kirk’s killing at Utah Valley University and the arrest of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, TikTok user Ellie May called for the president to reintroduce the Smith‑Mundt Act, a U.S. law once intended to prevent domestic dissemination of U.S.-backed foreign media, and to give it a new name: the “Charlie Kirk Act.”

May’s video went viral and was shared on the president’s Truth Social account.

Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. offered deep praise for the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a vigil on Sunday at the Kennedy Center.

Kennedy said Kirk was the “primary architect” of his surprise decision to endorse President Trump during the 2024 election and called the Turning Point USA one of his “spiritual brothers.”

Kennedy, whose father Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and uncle President John F. Kennedy were both assassinated, also recounted a conversation in which Kirk once asked him if he feared for his life being a public figure.

In response, Kennedy said he told Kirk “there’s a lot worse things than dying.”

“Chief among those is losing our constitutional rights and having our children raised in slavery,” Kennedy said. “I said to him at that time, ‘Sometimes our only consolation is that we can die with our boots on. We can die fighting for these things.’”

“Charlie gave his life so that the rest of us would not have to suffer those fates worse than death,” Kennedy added.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told ABC News that the suspect in the shooting of Charlie Kirk is not cooperating with the authorities.

Speaking to Martha Raddatz on This Week, the governor added, “But all the people around him are cooperating. And I think that’s very important.”

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk is akin to the 9/11 terror attacks, according to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

“They were both carried out by those who hold onto ideologies that cannot stand up to scrutiny and challenge so they feel that their only recourse is to commit an act of violence to silence those who oppose them and to intimidate and terrorize them into silence,” Gabbard said on Sunday during a vigil for Kirk at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “This is the definition of terrorism.”

Authorities are in fact still working to decipher the motive behind the shooting of Kirk, though they have described shooting suspect Tyler Robinson as a “leftist” who opposed Kirk’s views.

But as some of his own colleagues insist that calls for political violence are solely perpetrated by Democrats — ignoring those very calls from some of the president’s loudest supporters — a Utah Republican senator is calling on the targets of a recurring GOP blame game to take things in stride.

Sen. John Curtis told ABC’s This Week Sunday that Democrats would see their efforts to mend fences go a long way by ignoring the clumsy recriminations of Kirk’s allies, who have accused the left of espousing the same violent rhetoric that the likes of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones continue to amplify on their respective media channels.

“We need to have a little grace for those who are angry, we know anger is a part of grieving,” Curtis told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. “As they move past that anger, and they definitely need to move past it, we need to think about productive dialogue.”

John Bowden has the full story.

Another student has been left unable to sleep or shake what she saw and heard and called her dad to come take her home.

Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg notes that the only consistent pattern between recent shooters is not that they are on the left or the right of the political spectrum, but that they are “young men, who seem to spend more and more of their time in dark and twisted corners of the internet.”

He told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that social media is part of the problem “in a big way,” saying it’s bigger than political polarization.

Buttigieg continued: “Look, every time there’s one of these killings, in a summer that began with the assassination in June of a Democratic lawmaker by somebody with a kill list of Democrats, and is ending this September with the assassination of a conservative figure. And you go back through so many other cases, political and not of violence, there is not a consistent pattern of left versus right among the shooters. But there is a pattern where we see so many of these people are men, usually young men, who seem to spend more and more of their time in dark and twisted corners of the internet.

He pointed to a broader “societal sickness,” observing: “When we all should have still been praying for the victim and his family, we’re busy online praying for some shred of evidence that the shooter would turn out to be from the other political team. That is not healthy, and that is not a way forward. But that is exactly what the algorithm pushes us to do.”

Buttigieg concluded by saying that people offline are very different from people online: “That’s why we do need to just put down the phone, put down the computer, step out and talk to each other in environments where our humanity comes through.”

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, President Donald Trump has repeatedly singled out Democratic officials and the political left for the recent tide of political violence — despite data showing right-wing violence has killed more people than those associated with any other political cause in the U.S. since 9/11.

“The problem is on the left. It’s not on the right, like some people like to say,” Trump told reporters Sunday night.

“When you look at the agitators — you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place — that’s the left, not the right,” he said.

While Trump immediately blamed the “radical left” after Kirk’s killing, the president did not recognize or acknowledge recent threats, violent attacks and murders of Democratic officials.

He told reporters Sunday that “a lot of the people” on the political left are under a “major investigation,” but the president did not elaborate.

“They’re already under major investigation, a lot of the people that you would traditionally say are on the left,” he said.

He has previously promised to investigate billionaire philanthropist George Soros. On Saturday, he called for Soros to be “put in jail.”