Former President Barack Obama called Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s recent assassination “horrific and a tragedy” on Tuesday.
Kirk died at 31 on Sept. 10 after he was shot while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University. On Tuesday, authorities announced formal charges against Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating Kirk, and prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty.
Obama said during a Tuesday speech at the Jefferson Educational Society in Erie, Pa. that while political violence in the U.S. is “not new,” it is “anathema to what it means to be a democratic country.”
“Well, we are certainly at an inflection point, not just around political violence, but there are a host of larger trends that we have to be concerned about. I think it is important for us, at the outset, to acknowledge that political violence is not new,” Obama said. “It has happened at certain periods in our history, but it is something that it is anathema to what it means to be a democratic country.”
“And regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy,” Obama continued.
“What happened, as you mentioned, to the state legislators in Minnesota, that is horrific,” Obama said, in reference to former Democratic Minnesota State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband being assassinated in June. “It is a tragedy.”
The former president went on to say that Americans must “be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates” without resorting to acts of violence.
“And there are no ifs, ands or buts about it, the central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without [resorting] to violence,” Obama said. “And when it happens to some but even if you think they’re, quote, unquote, on the other side of the argument, that’s a threat to all of us. And we have to be clear and forthright in condemning them.”
Additionally, Obama criticized the Trump White House and others for suggesting “even before we had determined who the perpetrator of this evil act was, that somehow we’re going to identify an enemy.”
“Now, that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a debate about the ideas that people who were victims of political violence were promoting,” Obama said. “And so, I’ve noticed that there’s been some confusion, I think, around this lately, and frankly, coming from the White House and some of the other positions of authority that suggest, even before we had determined who the perpetrator of this evil act was, that somehow we’re going to identify an enemy. We’re going to suggest that somehow that enemy was at fault, and we are then going to use that as a rationale for trying to silence discussion around who we are as a country and what direction we should go. And that’s a mistake as well.”
Last week, Obama discouraged Americans from jumping to conclusions about what “motivated” Kirk’s assassin in a Sept. 10 statement posted to X, adding that “this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”
A court document released Tuesday showed that Robinson told his transgender boyfriend he had been engraving bullets that authorities later discovered with left-wing messaging, including “Hey fascist! Catch!” Robinson’s mother had told police that “over the last year or so,” Robinson had “become more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” according to the court document.
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