Minutes after the news broke that Charlie Kirk had been shot, we had a group leader call with a few hundred Indivisible leaders across the country. On that call and in a statement, we condemned this horrifying attack, expressed our deepest condolences to Kirk’s wife and two young children, and reasserted our commitment to peaceful, people-powered organizing.
This is more or less what we did after Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in June; and after the firebombing of Governor Shapiro’s residence in April; and after the shooting of Trump in July of last year; and after the attempted murder of Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022; and after the bloody insurrection at the Capitol in 2021; and after the kidnapping plot against Governor Whitmer in 2020.
This is not an academic thing for us. Like judges and other public figures, Indivisible broadly, and Leah and myself specifically, have been threatened by right-wingers all year. And we’ve heard similar stories from Indivisible leaders around the country.
So at Indivisible we’re very clear: political violence is a cancer on democracy. It doesn’t matter if you disagree politically — and we strongly disagreed with Charlie Kirk on basically everything. But we’re clear that political violence in any form is an attack on the basic conditions that allow everyone to organize and voice their views.
There’s a clear line: Do you condemn all political violence, no matter the perpetrator or the target? In the Indivisible movement, we are people who will condemn, with our whole hearts, such violence no matter the target or the perpetrator. We know the path forward is nonviolent, peaceful organizing.
Moments like this call for moral and strategic clarity across the political spectrum. And one of the challenges in organizing for democracy in the current moment is that the president of the United States is not interested in reducing right-wing political violence. That’s not an editorial statement by me — that’s a verifiable fact.
Trump shrugs at right-wing political violence. We know what Trump thinks about right-wing political violence because he tells us with his words and actions.
He jokes about the brutal assault of Paul Pelosi, or says that expressing concern for the murdered Minnesota politician would be a “waste of time.” Asked about right-wing political violence on Fox News, of all places, Trump said “I couldn’t care less” before concluding with an attack on Democrats, trans kids, and immigrants.
So what do we do about it? Shrugging at political violence is dangerous for democracy, but issuing statements and moving on is insufficient. In the face of this violence — and the right-wing escalation — we need to be intentional, principled, and courageous. We also need to understand the strategies for how large-scale, broad-based, peaceful, people-powered organizing best operates in this environment.
Training is important, but the point of training is action. That training needs to inform large-scale acts of opposition to violence-backed authoritarianism, so we need your help to make No Kings on October 18 the biggest peaceful protest of the year. Please spread the word, register your local protest as soon as you can, and start RSVPing for the local events to help build momentum.
I know the threats are real and the opposition is shameless and unrepentant. The way we triumph is by demonstrating courage with our actions. By standing up in defense of democracy and in opposition to violence, we spread the courage for more to do so.
