Spin Doctor
“Me calling you, you know, ‘wannabe Hitler,’ all those things are like, not necessarily saying, ‘Go out and hurt somebody.’” —Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX)
Friendly Fire
“You just don’t ever, ever compare anyone to Hitler and those kinds of extreme things. [Trump] is not an autocrat. This is a product of a democratic election. … A lot of Americans happen to disagree with you, that does not mean that they are fascists, or now they want to shred the Constitution.” —Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)
Justifying Murder
“If you wanted Charlie Kirk to be alive, Donald Trump shouldn’t have been President for this second term.” —popular streamer Destiny
World’s Smallest Violin
“The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.” —Sen. Chris Murphy
Re: The Left
“Kathy Hochul is the worst governor in America, and it was only a matter of time before she bent the knee for this raging antisemite communist.” —Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) on Hochul’s endorsement of far-left NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani
“I’m asking the Democratic Party: you better start looking at how you lost people like me.” —Former Senator Joe Manchin
“The attacks on [Kirk] have been shocking, scurrilous. … It is irrational, it is viscous … Americans have long thought that ordinary decency requires that you don’t speak ill of the dead. … This has been so poisonous that it reflects very badly on the American Left … and on the political party that represents the Left.” —Brit Hume
“I think the really dangerous thing here is that I don’t know how much this really is the far left anymore. I think it is a much larger portion of the base of the political left … who believe all the things that have been said about the Nazis on the other side, the fascists on the other side, and that’s a very dangerous thing.” —Ben Domenech
Re: Social Media
“[Social media is] not a cancer in all respects. In some respects, it’s great — but there are segments, there are deep dark holes, that are cancerous, absolutely. Beyond cancer, they’re death.” —President Donald Trump
Facepalm
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.” —Attorney General Pam Bondi
First Amendment Refresher
“Hate speech is not prosecutable in America (which is good).” —Megyn Kelly
“[The First Amendment] absolutely protects hate speech. It protects vile speech. It protects horrible speech. What does that mean? It means you cannot be prosecuted for speech, even if it is evil and bigoted and wrong.” —Senator Ted Cruz
The Long and Short of It
“There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents’ politics. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder. There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.” —JD Vance
For the Record
“Charlie Kirk may be the first supposed fascist whose offense was refusing to use the correct pronouns and insisting that gender is innate and can’t be changed on a whim.” —Rich Lowry
Truth vs. Lies
Debate is not a choice when your principles fail to withstand intellectual scrutiny, which is why Charlie Kirk would sit openly on college and university campuses and challenge young people to ‘prove me wrong.’“ —Allen West
The Lowdown
“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” —Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
