JD Vance urges people to report anyone celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death to their employer

JD Vance has urged members of the public to report anyone celebrating the Charlie Kirk to their employer while guest hosting The Charlie Kirk Show.

The vice-president made the call while guest-hosting the late right-wing pundit’s radio show on Monday (15 September) and blamed “left-wing extremism” for Kirk’s death.

Moments before being shot in the neck during an open-air debate at Utah Valley University on Wednesday (10 September), Kirk had responded to a question about his claim that “too many” mass shooters in the US were transgender. He died in hospital later that day.

Suspected shooter Tyler Robinson, 22, was arrested two days later following a huge manhunt and is due in court on Tuesday (16 September).

Talking about critics of Kirk, JD Vance told listeners of The Charlie Kirk Show: “Call them out and, hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence but we do believe in civility.

“We have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the [past] few years, and I believe is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin’s bullet.”

Bullet engravings don’t suggest political leaning, experts say

Claims that Robinson was left-wing and identified as LGBTQ+ proliferated after Utah governor Spencer Cox said the authorities had found bullet cartridges with engravings of internet memes and statements typically associated with anti-fascists.

However, experts have denied that the engravings necessarily indicate a specific ideology.

An associate professor from the Department of Communication and Center for Cognitive Science at Buffalo University, in New York state, told NBC: “What they do indicate is that the shooter wanted to get a message across and therefore be talked about online.”

Lindsay Hahn, who researches ideological extremism, went on to say: “It seems these messages, at the very minimum, were selected because he knew they were going to be talked about.”

Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of media studies at Queens College, in Flushing, New York, told Sky News that political messaging was often used online as “double-speak” intended for “someone like me to dive into what they would call meme culture, and declare them something so that they get more press”.

Cohen, who studies memes, went on to say: “It could just be another bait-and-switch for researchers who are falling into the same trap that they are designing for more viral exposure.”

The suspect’s political leanings are not definitively known and Snopes has claimed that he was not registered as a Republican or Democrat.

Elsewhere in his broadcast, Vance told White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that the administration was trying to stop “festering violence from the far-left spreading”.

According to a report four years ago, most murders carried out by domestic extremists in the US between 2020 and 2021 were committed by people holding right-wing views, particularly far-right white supremacists.

Of the 29 domestic extremist murders in 2021, just three were committed by those who were not right-leaning.

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