NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk signals a troubling new chapter in America’s political violence, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said.
Kirk, 31, died after he was shot in the neck during his “American Comeback Tour” at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. The assassination comes a year after two attempts to take the president’s life.
“We like to say that something happened gradually and then suddenly,” Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. “It’s from Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’: A character, asked how he went bankrupt, says, ‘Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.’ That’s how political violence in America has been growing in this century. I would say the 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and now the assassination of Kirk, are the ‘suddenly’ moments. The reality continues while the dark tempo is picking up.”
CHARLIE KIRK WARNED ‘ASSASSINATION CULTURE IS SPREADING ON THE LEFT’ IN EERIE ONLINE POST MONTHS BEFORE MURDER
Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a senior opinion writer for The Boston Globe, and Peggy Noonan, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, appear on “Meet the Press” in Washington D.C., Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024. (William B. Plowman/NBC via Getty Images)
“We know this can’t continue and we don’t know how to stop it,” Noonan wrote. “That is our predicament.”
Noonan, now a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, previously served as former Presdient Ronald Reagan’s head speechwriter from 1984 to 1986.
Kirk’s assassination is one of multiple examples of political violence – or attempted political violence.
For example, 20-year-old gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on Trump from a rooftop during a campaign rally in July 2024, and one of the eight bullets shot grazed Trump’s ear. The gunman also shot and killed Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old firefighter, father and husband attending the rally, and injured two…
