3 hours ago
1
Barack Obama addressed the recent killing of Charlie Kirk and told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week that the country was “at an inflection point”, but that political violence “is not new” and “has happened at certain periods” in US history.
Obama added that despite history, political violence was “anathema to what it means to be a democratic country”.
The former president made the remarks at the Jefferson Educational Society, a non-profit in Erie, Pennsylvania. He explicitly denounced political violence, addressing the fatal attacks this year of Kirk and the Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hartman. He called both incidents “horrific” and “a tragedy”.
“There are no ifs, ands or buts about it, the central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resorting to violence,” he said.
Obama warned that the response to Kirk’s assassination last week, which has kicked off a debate about free speech and the incitement to violence, could serve to deepen political and cultural divisions.
“There’s been some confusion, I think, around this lately, and frankly, coming from the White House and some of the other positions of authority that suggest, even before we had determined who the perpetrator of this evil act was, that somehow we’re going to identify an enemy,” he said.
Politicians on the political right, including Donald Trump, have blamed the “radical left” for fostering a dangerous political environment. Many on the left maintain that the claims are a pretext for an authoritarian crackdown on free speech.
In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, political leaders including the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and former presidents Joe Biden and George Bush called for an end to political violence and a return to reasonable debate to lower the political temperature in the US.
Obama sought to hold a middle ground in his remarks, praising Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, who he said showed “that it is possible for us to disagree while abiding by a basic code of how we should engage in public debate”.
The desire to identify an enemy, Obama indicated, was misplaced. “We’re going to suggest that somehow that enemy was at fault, and we are then going to use that as a rationale for trying to silence discussion around who we are as a country and what direction we should go,” Obama continued. “And that’s a mistake as well.”
While he believed that Kirk’s ideas “were wrong”, Obama said that “doesn’t negate the fact that what happened was a tragedy and that I mourn for him and his family”. Denouncing political violence and mourning its victims “doesn’t mean we can’t have a debate about the ideas” that Kirk promoted, he added.
“Those are all topics that we have to be able to discuss honestly and forthrightly, while we still insist that in that process of debate, we respect other people’s right to say things that we profoundly disagree with,” Obama said. “That’s how we should approach this.”
