White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller vowed Monday to use the killing of Charlie Kirk to target a “vast domestic terror movement” of left-wing political organizations that he said without evidence had led to the conservative activist’s assassination last week.
“The thing about anger is that unfocused anger, or blind rage, is not a productive emotion, but focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history,” Miller told Vice President JD Vance, as Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast.
Kirk was assassinated at a Turning Point USA event in Utah last Wednesday. Law enforcement has so far arrested a single suspect in the attack: 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who is expected to be charged in Utah on Tuesday. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said Robinson had been influenced by "leftist ideology,” citing statements from family members and messages sent to friends. There is no evidence at the moment to suggest anyone else was involved in the shooting.
The thing about anger is that unfocused anger, or blind rage, is not a productive emotion, but focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history."
stephen miller
On the podcast, however, Miller spoke about the need to "uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks,” which he described more specifically as “the organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence."
"It is a vast domestic terror movement," he told Vance.
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again,” Miller continued. “For the American people, it will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Miller, also Trump’s Homeland Security adviser and the reported architect of some of the administration’s most contested immigration policies, including family separation, mass deportation and indefinite detention, has often amplified isolated acts of violence to support sweeping — and critics say cruel — policy shifts. Miller has also repeatedly claimed without evidence that the Democratic Party has been “completely radicalized.”
President Donald Trump has similarly vowed to investigate left-wing organizations in the wake of Kirk’s death. “The radicals on the right often times are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” Trump said last week. “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
“They’re already under major investigation,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “A lot of the people that you would traditionally say are on the left [are] already under investigation.”
