JD Vance makes radical calls to avenge Charlie Kirk and take back the country from ‘people who took his life’
At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, JD Vance dramatically blurred grief into grievance. In trying to get cheers from the crowd, he turned the death of Charlie Kirk into a rallying cry against “people” who don’t exist.
On Sunday, Dec. 21, Vice President JD Vance took the stage at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix and delivered a half-hour speech. What should’ve sounded like a memorial turned into a mobilization by the end. At the beginning, Erika Kirk floated Vance as a 2028 presidential prospect. By the end, Vance was no longer talking about politics as persuasion. He was talking about politics as retribution.
“I know many of you miss our dear friend Charlie Kirk,” Vance said, before asking supporters to “take the country back from the people who took his life”:
If you miss Charlie Kirk, do you promise to fight what he died for? Do you promise to take the country back from the people who took his life? Do you promise to help defeat the radicals who cheered his death?
According to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Charlie Kirk was killed by a single individual. Authorities have repeatedly said there is no evidence of a coordinated group, wider network, or ideological cell responsible. There’s no “people,” collective enemy, or movement to “avenge” against. And Vance probably knows this. Or at least he should.
Yet, Vance chose a language that implies a broader conspiracy, inviting supporters to project guilt outward. He tried to mobilize the crowd toward an undefined “them,” without clarifying who he was even referring to. But it’s the oldest political alchemy. You take a personal tragedy, dissolve the facts, and reforge it into grievance fuel. And the result is never accountability or healing; it’s always escalation.
When a VP tells a crowd to “take the country back” from those who “took his life,” it’s incitement-by-implication. And so, the backlash came fast. Users on X asked the obvious questions: Does Vance have secret intelligence the DoJ and FBI don’t? Or is he deliberately blurring a lone-actor crime into a collective threat to keep the crowd angry and mobilized?
Others pointed out the contradiction at the heart of the speech. If the killer acted alone and belonged to the same MAGA ecosystem that Vance was addressing, who exactly does he want the country “taken back” from? There is a clear line difference between mourning and mobilizing or condemning violence and conscripting it rhetorically. But Vance deliberately crossed that line.
In the heat of a national trauma, leaders can choose to lower the temperature by sticking to verified facts. Yet, Vance couldn’t resist the urge to radicalize it for his own benefit.
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