"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

The quote that is the title of this post is attributed to King Henry II of England just prior to the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. The story goes that Henry uttered these words or something similar, but with no express order or request that his lackeys do anything about Becket; nevertheless, it prompted four knights to travel to Canterbury where they killed Becket. As Wikipedia notes:

The phrase is commonly used in modern-day contexts to express that a ruler's wish may be interpreted as a command by their subordinates. It is also commonly understood as shorthand for any rhetorical device allowing leaders to covertly order or exhort violence among their followers, while still being able to claim plausible deniability for political, legal, or other reasons.    

This, of course, is what prominent leftists do today when the label Trump as another "Hitler" or warn that conservatives are "Nazis" and a threat to "our democracy". The common refrain among leftists that "speech is violence" is another covert way to encourage using violence against their political opponents, for how else do you defend yourself against violence?

    And its not just leftist politicians and celebrities.  The Daily Signal notes in its article, "The Disturbing Ties Between the SPLC and Antifa," that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) does the same thing. That article relates:

The organization that put Charlie Kirk’s organization on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan ahead of his assassination last week also has a long history of carrying water for the violent Antifa movement that President Donald Trump has targeted for investigation. 

The author goes on to explain:

    The Southern Poverty Law Center, a public interest law firm that gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan chapters into bankruptcy and presents itself as America’s premiere “hate” watchdog, has steadfastly refused to put any Antifa organization on its “hate map.” Meanwhile, the SPLC puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on the map, calling them part of the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”

    A terrorist used the map to target the conservative Christian Family Research Council in 2012, and the man who opened fire at a Congressional Baseball Game practice in 2017 had “liked” the SPLC on Facebook. The SPLC condemned these attacks. 

    This summer, the SPLC added Kirk’s Turning Point USA to the “hate map.” It remains unclear whether this may have inspired Robinson, and the SPLC condemned the assassination, but it has not removed Turning Point from the map.

    The SPLC has refused to add Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or vandals targeting churches and pro-life pregnancy centers to the “hate map.” 

As an example, in May 2025, the SPLC published an article on Kirk and his organization entitled "Turning Point USA: A case study of the hard right in 2024," which accused "the political right"--including Kirk and Turning Point USA--of having "increasingly shifted toward an authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions." It then turns specifically on Kirk and Turning Point USA and accuses them of promoting "Christian nationalism," using the word "female" "as a means of reducing women to their reproductive abilities alone" (because, apparently, the leftist term "birthing person" is better), and concludes: "Turning Point USA’s effort to sow fear and division to enforce social hierarchies rooted in supremacism is emblematic of the hard right’s broader political project to destroy our foundational democratic principles and institutions." 

    But it won't just be prominent politicians and pundits that will be targeted by the left. Casey Chalk, writing at The Federalist, warns that Kirk was killed for holding views that are common among conservatives:

    The fact that Kirk’s actual political beliefs are (and have been) dominant on the right for decades should clarify how we interpret the left’s virulent vitriol for him. Large numbers of conservatives affirm traditional gender roles, oppose affirmative action, and say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. For arguing such things, Kirk was widely hated and ultimately murdered. A surprising number of our fellow citizens not only didn’t mourn him but celebrated his death, as Peachy Keenan’s recent Federalist article terrifyingly highlighted.

    What does that say about how these people view their conservative fellow citizens? If your coworker, neighbor, or fellow parent on your kid’s sports team knew you held most of the same positions as Charlie Kirk, what would they think of you? What would they say about you, either to your face or behind your back? Would they call you a bigot, a white supremacist, a misogynist, a fascist? Would they think your continued existence is a threat to democracy?  

    And leftist groups are merely doubling down since Kirk's death. The Minnesota Star Tribune published an op-ed by Nekima Levy Armstrong, an activist in that area, entitled "The blunt truth about Charlie Kirk’s legacy," in which Armstrong wrote about Kirk:

    But to honor the truth, we cannot allow grief to blur memory into mythmaking. And right now, America is watching an aggressive effort to canonize Kirk — a man whose life’s work left scars on millions of people like me. To tell the truth about him is not to celebrate his death. It is to insist that facts matter more than falsehoods, even in mourning.

    Kirk built his career on attacking the dignity of others. He dismissed prominent Black women as affirmative-action “picks” who, in his words, “don’t have the brain processing power to be taken seriously,” despite never completing a college degree himself.

    He smeared George Floyd — whose murder sparked the largest racial justice protests in half a century — as a “scumbag,” pushing conspiracy theories about Floyd’s life rather than grappling with the reality of police violence. He called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “a bad man,” attempting to strip away the moral authority of one of America’s greatest leaders.

    He was openly hostile to empathy itself, saying he did not believe in it. That posture was not abstract — it became a license for cruelty, for mocking the marginalized, for celebrating inequality. His rhetoric toward LGBTQ communities was no less venomous. For young queer kids scrolling social media, the message was clear: You are not safe, not worthy, not human enough to be treated with compassion.

    These words were not harmless. They were a politics of dehumanization, amplified daily through platforms that rewarded outrage. They emboldened bullies, disinformed voters and undermined the fragile work of racial reconciliation in America. His legacy is not just of “provocative” speech but of real harm.

And the "speech is violence" mantra makes its appearance.  The World Socialist Web Site, in a piece from its editorial board entitled "Charlie Kirk: The Horst Wessel of the MAGA movement," begins:

    In the 36 hours following the assassination of Charlie Kirk—the fascist political operative whose activities were lavishly funded by billionaire oligarchs and for which he was paid millions of dollars—he has been posthumously elevated to the status of a national hero. Once again emulating the propaganda tactics of Hitler and Goebbels, the Trump administration is portraying Kirk as a political martyr, an American version of the German Nazi Horst Wessel. After the latter’s violent death in February 1930, the Nazis eulogized Wessel as an exemplar of Germany’s patriotic youth. A hymn to honor Wessel’s memory, the notorious “Horst Wessel Song,” became the anthem of the Nazi Party.

    In a similar process of political canonization, Charlie Kirk is being transformed into the Horst Wessel of the fascistic MAGA movement. 

They couldn't even go two sentences without comparing conservatives to Hitler and Nazis. Werner Lange writing at Common Dreams discusses "The Murder and Myth of Charlie Kirk," stating:

    For years, fascist forces in America have been loosely bifurcated along spiritual and secular lines, one turning a hijacked faith into a holy war against “godless Liberals” and the other using metastasized political power to cripple democracy, curtail free speech, and crush the “lunatic Left.” The murder of Charlie Kirk changed all that, and brought the two trajectories together, dramatically and dangerously.

    A broad united front for fascism now confronts us. To propel its potency, the real Charlie Kirk had to be replaced by a mythologized one, something masters of deceit promptly manufactured.

 He, too, goes on to compare Charlie Kirk to Horst Wessel, once again repeating the comparison of conservatives to Nazis. 

    I don't see Kirk's assassination being like that of Horst Wessel, but more like that of Emmett Till. Till's murder showed the public the ugly side to racism in Mississippi in the early 1950s; and Kirk's murder very publicly showed the ugly side of leftism and its violence. 

    In any event, leftist violence has been ratcheting up over the past several years. At this point, the political violence and terrorism that we saw in the 1960s and '70s may be a "best case" scenario.

Related:

• "Jasmine Crockett Rejects Violence Claims After Charlie Kirk Death"--Newsweek. Essentially it is Crockett claiming that her hateful speech comparing conservatives to Nazis is not a call for violence.
• "The Left Calls Kirk Memorial a ‘Festival of Hate,’ and Attendees ‘Fascists’"--Legal Insurrection. 
• "Bogus ADL Report Either Mislabels Leftist Violence As ‘Right-Wing’ Or Omits It Entirely" by John Lott at The Federalist.  
• "The Atlantic admits left-wing violence is on the rise"--The Post Millennial. 
•  "How College Courses Rationalize Political Violence"--The Daily Signal.