Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot to death yesterday during a speaking engagement at a university in Utah. A single shot to the neck by a sniper ended the life of the 31-year-old, whose two little children will now have to grow up without him.

President Trump considered Kirk to be the most influential public figure among young men in the country, a key constituency that helped him win the 2024 presidential election.

At the very moment of being assassinated, Kirk was discussing American gun ownership and specifically blaming trans people for “too many” mass shootings, though trans perpetrators have been responsible for only a handful of mass shootings in the last decade, while just in 2024, there were over 500 mass shootings in the United States. While it is certainly fair to say even one mass shooting is too many, it’s not fair to portray trans people as more murderously violent than other groups.

Public figures all along the ideological spectrum condemned Kirk’s murder, which is just the latest in a growing trail of political violence in the U.S., including attempts on the life of President Trump, the attempted assassination of ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, an arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home, and the murder of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman.

Ex-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, victim of a shot to the head that put an end to her career in 2011, urged people not to let the U.S. become a country that attempts to resolve political conflict, which is inherent to democracy, through violence.

Gifford’s naive message, though well-intentioned, comes far too late in the game. For not only is the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” in the words of Martin Luther King Junior, but it was actually founded on the mass extermination of dozens of native peoples and the attempted erasure of their cultural imprint, an effort that is not at all ancient history. As recently as 1970, the forced sterilization of Indian women was still practiced in the United States.

After having murdered and displaced the original inhabitants of the Eastern half of what is today known as the continental U.S., the Euro-American colonists invaded and plundered Mexico, permanently seizing half of its national territory. Upon discovering gold in conquered California, they put a bounty on every murdered Indian’s head, a clear invitation to the rapid eradication of Indian peoples that followed.

After having achieved what very well may be the most thorough mass extermination in history within its violently-established borders, Washington took its mass murder campaigns to the rest of the world, killing millions of Koreans and Vietnamese to prevent any possibility of these peoples becoming self-governing, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan Indians to hand over their land to the United Fruit Company, more than a million Iraqis and perhaps a quarter million Afghans in fulfillment of neo-con geopolitical designs, as well as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (with additional millions exiled) to preserve Jewish supremacy in Palestine.

Add to this bitter but very partial U.S. legacy the many other countries invaded by Washington over the years, plus the wide network of bloody dictators it has maintained in power for decades, in addition to two atomic bombings of Japanese civilians in three days, and one sees that the idea that we have only recently descended into political violence is sheer absurdity.

Unless Charlie Kirk’s death turns out not to have been politically motivated, it can only realistically be seen as a microscopic part of a vastly larger problem: the national commitment to murder as an expression of righteous violence, routinely practiced by all administrations and endlessly celebrated in U.S. movies, songs, news coverage, political speeches, and school textbooks.

The post Charlie Kirk and the Tsunami of U.S. Political Violence first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.