By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
ABC’s Matt Gutman on ABC News Live, Tuesday afternoon, after Utah
law-enforcement officials formally announced the charges against the suspect in
Charlie Kirk’s murder:
It’s heartbreaking on so many
levels, Kyra. Obviously, Charlie Kirk was murdered brutally in front of a crowd
of thousands of people who watched him getting shot through the neck, and
essentially bleed out in front of them. And I think one of the things that the
attorney here made a very fine point about is that a lot of these charges,
seven charges, were aggravated because children were present. Children
witnessed this! Children were put in harm’s way. And that is something that is
aggravating here, and one of the reasons that this suspect, in addition to the
alleged murder being political in nature, is facing the death penalty. They’re
going for the death penalty.
And then on the other hand, there
is this duality of a very — a portrait of a very human person, a very human
experience from this entire family. As you mentioned, the mother, who
essentially discovered that it was her son who had done this, the kid who had
got a 34 out of 36 on the ACTs, who had a 4.0 [grade point average], who got a
full ride to college here. That that kid was the one who had allegedly
perpetrated this, she had seen those pictures and identified him, essentially.
And then those text messages. And I
don’t think I’ve ever experienced a press conference in which we’ve read text
messages that are A, so fulsome, so robust, so apparently, allegedly
self-incriminating and yet, on the other hand, so touching — right? — with the
suspect reaching out to his roommate, who was allegedly his boyfriend, who we
understand, you know, you know, identified as male at birth, now identifies as
female. And the terminology he used, he was trying to protect him. He kept
calling him ‘my love.’ ‘My reason for doing this is to protect you,’ you know,
but also asking him to delete the messages and not speak to law enforcement.
So, there’s this, this heartbreaking duality that we’re seeing very tragically
playing out.”
(This is the complete transcript; the post
on X by Curtis Houck skips over a few sentences, but I don’t think it
changes the thrust of Gutman’s remarks.)
This punk just pulled a Lee Harvey Oswald on a beloved
young father of two little kids with a huge crowd watching, and you’re telling
me about his ACT score and grade point average?
How do you come away from this situation and one of your
first thoughts is that this was some sort of “touching,” tragic, doomed
romance? What, were you watching Romeo and Juliet last night?
I’m about to go full Mugatu
from Zoolander over here. “Doesn’t anyone else notice this? I feel
like I’m taking crazy pills!”
After the furious reaction to his comments, Gutman
posted on X, “Yesterday I tried to underscore the jarring contrast between
this cold blooded assassination of Charlie Kirk — a man who dedicated his life
to public dialogue — and the personal, disturbing texts read aloud by the Utah
County Attorney at the press conference. I deeply regret that my words did not
make that clear. But let there be zero doubt here: I unequivocally condemn this
horrific crime and the pain it caused Charlie Kirk’s family, those who were
forced to witness it at UVU, and the millions of people he inspired.”
Six days ago, this newsletter contended that the American mainstream media exhibited a tacit
acceptance of left-wing violence.
What Matt Gutman chooses to say off the cuff does not
necessarily represent all of ABC News, nor all television journalists nor all
journalists. But with that caveat in mind . . .
Why are you like this, mainstream media?
Why is it that when confronted with a horrible situation
where someone who identified with the left did something terrible, and someone
on the right is an innocent victim, you feel an apparently uncontrollable urge
to romanticize the perpetrator?
Why, in recent days, have we witnessed this full court
press, from Laurence Tribe to Jemele Hill to Jimmy Kimmel to Reuters, contending that Charlie Kirk’s assassin had to be
a right-wing figure? Why is there this reflexive refusal to believe that
someone who identifies as being on the left side of the political spectrum
could do something terrible and violent?
CNN, how do you choose to feature Taylor Lorenz gushing about
Luigi Mangione, assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as a
“morally good man,” and “revolutionary, famous, handsome, young, smart” in a
prime-time special? That Emmy-nominated prime-time special?
We’re still waiting to see any Boston marathon bombing victims on the cover of Rolling
Stone, you know? But the lone surviving perpetrator has already been on
the cover.
CNN, why did you absurdly characterize the August 2020
riots in Kenosha, Wis., as “fiery, but mostly peaceful,” as national correspondent Omar
Jimenez said while standing in front of a building engulfed in flames?
Our Noah Rothman has a long memory (and, I hear, a lot
more to say on this subject). Over at Commentary in February, Noah recalled the
degree to which the mainstream media downplayed the crimes of those involved
the Occupy Wall Street movement:
Well after Occupy exposed its
penchant for violence to all who were willing to see it, the left-liberal
intelligentsia reserved most of its revulsion for the police who were ordered
by their superiors to contain displays of public disorder. The Atlantic’s
James Fallows mourned “what has happened before the world’s eyes at Davis,
Berkeley, and other recent Occupy sites,” by which he meant local law
enforcement’s efforts to roll up illegal encampments.
“The aggressive new police tactics
have focused attention on the ongoing protests against economic inequality that
began in New York City last month and have spread to several U.S. cities,” NPR
reported.
“Over the past few weeks,
increasingly irritated and trigger-happy local officials have received glimpses
of ‘people power,’” Fordham University associate professor Heather Gautney
wrote of the “collective will of the people” in the Washington Post.
Effective “historical movements, as well as today’s Occupy, engage non-violent
resistance because they know that violence is not a conduit of power.” Tell
that to the store owners whose windows were smashed by the dozens.
Various individuals who self-identify as “Antifa” have a
long history of vandalism, attempted arson, successful arson, building
incendiary devices and improvised explosive devices, harassment, stalking, shootings, looting, burglary, and one case of murder.
NPR’s
Mara Liasson, why did you assert that Antifa — a bunch of hooligans and
thugs who beat up people who disagree with them politically — are comparable to
the Allied Forces landing at Normandy? Why can you not discern that a bunch of
violent guys claiming to be “anti-fascist” does not actually make their actions
opposition to fascism? Why are we
still getting the same argument from Julia Ioffe of Puck?
(Hey, after the appalling Capitol Hill riot on January 6,
did you hear anybody in the mainstream media trot out the Martin
Luther King Jr. quote, “A riot is the language of the unheard”? Nah? Why is
it that when right-wingers riot, the mainstream media can see right and wrong
with 4K crystal clarity, but when left-wingers riot, everything suddenly
becomes murky and complicated?)
The media has two frames or narratives for stories
involving politically motivated violence.
If someone on the right does something harmful, it is not
only reported straight and without a need to cite past examples on the opposite
side of the spectrum, but there’s also often a contention or subtext that the
perpetrator’s actions are somehow reflective of the right as a whole. The crime
reveals that people on the right are hateful, unhinged, filled with rage,
itching to lash out. The likes of Cesar Sayoc send out ticking time bombs because
they’re part of a whole movement full of human beings who are ticking time
bombs themselves.
If someone on the left does something harmful, the
dominant narrative is often that “both sides do it.” Left-wing violence can be
acknowledged, provided that readers, listeners, and viewers understand that
this is just a lamentable fact of life, an inevitable side effect of people’s
political passions running amok. If someone on the left commits an act of
violence, you can be upset but you shouldn’t get mad at progressives, leftists,
or Democrats as a whole. As seen above, some media figures will find the perpetrators
“touching” or “morally good.”
Right-wing violence gets covered — justifiably — as
straight up evil and never justifiable. In those situations, the message from
the mainstream media is more starkly black and white than the faces of the Cheronians in the original version of Star Trek.
But when a left-wing perpetrator does it, like the assassins of Brian Thompson
or Charlie Kirk, suddenly there are more shades of gray than the book in the
drawer of your wife’s bedside table.
Why are you like this, mainstream media? What happened to
you? Who made you this way? Who hurt you?
Finally, in the aftermath of acts of political violence,
the default talking point is often something along the lines of, “We, as a
nation, must not be like this. We must have civil disagreement and healthy
debate.” That’s true enough, but it sounds awfully hollow and insufficient
right now. Civil disagreement and healthy debate is what Charlie Kirk was
doing! He did exactly what a whole bunch of good Democrats say they want
conservatives to do, and now his wife is a widow, and his kids don’t have a dad.
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