J.D. Vance Said Some Pretty Serious Things On Charlie Kirk’s Podcast Today

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At noon on Monday, in the show’s fourth memorial episode^[2] since Charlie Kirk was murdered, Vice President J.D. Vance went live from his White House office as the host of The Charlie Kirk Show. His guests included White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; and conservative media personality Tucker Carlson. Vance promised at the beginning of the show that he and his guests would honor Kirk and discuss what he meant to the administration and to the conservative movement more broadly.

And for most of the two hours that followed, the show did that. Vance and his powerful guests spoke of Kirk’s political acumen on the campaign trail and praised his commitment to unifying the MAGA movement. These officials (plus Carlson) described Kirk as an idealist, as a friend, as a kind and tolerant human.

But the tone shifted starkly at the show’s end, when Vance gave his closing monologue. In his final words, speaking with the weight of the vice presidential office, Vance insisted that the country must deal with what he described as a serious problem of organized, widespread, terrorist violence from the left.

“This is not a both-sides problem,” he said. “One side has a much bigger and [more] malignant problem, and that is the truth we must be told. That problem has terrible consequences.”

There could be “no unity” with Americans like this, he said. Ominously, after speaking of liberal journalists and Democratic donors, whom he blamed for Kirk’s death, he vowed that in the months to come “we will explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who will kill Americans because they don’t like what they say.” (We still don’t know what, exactly, motivated Kirk’s killer.)

It was a drastic shift in tone from the rest of the two-hour radio show, most of which revolved around Kirk’s commitment to being tolerant and generous, as these White House officials and one conservative media star saw it. If you were a part of the MAGA movement, having Kirk on your side was, apparently, empowering. “He made you believe more in yourself,” said Stephen Miller, the mastermind behind the Muslim ban, the child separation policy, and Trump’s mass deportations, while discussing writing executive orders. “He would give me the strength and focus to get it done.”

“When the president first asked [if I wanted to be HHS secretary], I was tentative,” Kennedy said, while recalling taking over the nation’s public health apparatus. “I didn’t know if I wanted to handle the Medicaid and Medicare portion. But he really persuaded me I should do it.” He added, in a line he also used at a vigil^[3] on Sunday night, of his first meeting with Kirk: “By the end of the interview, I’d felt like I’d met a spiritual soul mate.”

But there had been hints from Vance through the episode that he was leading to a darker place. Vance, toward the end of his opening segment, teased that he would discuss strategies for “dismantling” the “incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years.” (He ended the segment by declaring that “the greatest lesson any of us can take from Charlie is to have faith in the Lord and be bold in how we glorify Him.”) He then, when speaking with Miller, said, “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”

More dramatically, Vance and Miller both indicated, without providing evidence, that the left had fed into a domestic terror movement. Miller listed “organized doxxing campaigns,” organized riots, organized street violence, “organized campaigns of dehumanization and vilification,” and “actual organized cells that carry out this violence” as parts of the “vast domestic terror movement.” The good news, both White House officials argued, was that Kirk’s murder had energized people. “Focused anger, righteous anger directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history,” Miller said.

If anyone expected Vance to follow this assertion about mass left-wing terrorism with any kind of clarifying details, they would have been disappointed. Vance instead spoke in generalities, equating critical speech with violent speech.

He began his concluding monologue by describing an article^[4] from the progressive magazine The Nation. The article, which had critiqued Kirk’s political legacy, “lied about a dead man,” Vance said. (The “lie” was in describing Kirk as saying “Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.” In reality^[5], he had listed four prominent Black women, including Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who he said had benefited from affirmative action, because they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.”) “Well funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder,” he said. “This is soulless and evil.”

As Vance explained it, a violent political movement is “like a pyramid that stacks,” with a “foundation of donors and activists, journalists, now social media influencers, and of course politicians.” Not all these people would murder someone, he assured the audience. “But by celebrating that murder, apologizing for it, and emphasizing not Charlie’s innocence, but the fact that he said things they don’t like, many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen.”

It was a strange place for the episode to have gone, after two hours of praising Kirk for his practice of welcoming debate. (Never mind the wall sign, highlighted in the show’s opening graphics, that says “warning, does not play well with liberals.”) At one point, Carlson credited Kirk with teaching him how to disagree with people “without hating them, without bitterness.” (This particular claim related to disagreements within the conservative movement and not across the aisle.) Kennedy praised Kirk’s “total commitment to free speech.” Vance claimed that “90 percent” of Kirk’s college campus events were “Charlie being kind and compassionate.”

But Kirk himself hadn’t been opposed to tapping into political frustrations to accuse people on the left of being dangerous: His organization had, for example, launched an entire “watch list^[11]” targeting professors, that used as its justification the idea that conservative students needed protection. Vance did something similar in urging viewers to report anyone celebrating Kirk’s death to their employers. Where Vance went further, though, was in speaking from a place of great institutional power—one heartbeat away from the presidency—and in slotting critical political speech into the same category as actual domestic terrorism. He did not make it clear, in his comments, what he meant by indicating he would root out the violence. But by making critical speech inherently dangerous and by promising to “stop” the danger, he seemed to be laying the groundwork for some kind of political crackdown.

“St. Paul tells us in the book of Ephesians to put on the full armor of God; let us all put on that armor and commit ourselves to that cause for which Charlie committed his life,” Vance said, in his final note. “To rebuild a United States of America, and do it by telling the truth.”

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