New York Post
MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd fired over Charlie Kirk comments after assassination
By Zoe Hussain and Victor Nava
Published Sep. 11, 2025, 12:51 a.m. ET
MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from the network after his comments about Charlie Kirk following Kirk’s shooting at Utah Valley University, Variety said, citing sources.
“You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place,” Dowd, who most recently ran as a Democrat for Texas lieutenant governor, said moments after the shooting on Wednesday.
“That’s the unfortunate environment we’re in.”
MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler quickly rushed to put out the fire after Dowd’s comments sparked backlash online.
“During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable,” Kutler said in a statement on X after the segment.
“We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise,” Kutler said.
The outlet ultimately axed Dowd for his “insensitive” words later Wednesday, sources told Variety.
Dowd also strangely suggested during the segment that a supporter could have killed Kirk by firing a gun in “celebration.”
“We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration,” Dowd told anchor Katy Tur.
“We have no idea,” he told the lefty network. “We don’t know any of the full details of this.”
Dowd joined MSNBC in 2022 after a long career at ABC News.
The political analyst later apologized for his comments.
“My thoughts & prayers are w/ the family and friends of Charlie Kirk,” Dowd said. “On an earlier appearance on MSNBC I was asked a question on the environment we are in. I apologize for my tone and words. Let me be clear, I in no way intended for my comments to blame Kirk for this horrendous attack.
“Let us all come together and condemn violence of any kind.”
National Review
The American Mainstream’s Tacit Acceptance of Left-Wing Violence
By Jim Geraghty
September 11, 2025 10:07 AM
On the menu today: You know exactly what this newsletter is about.
The Assassin’s Veto
The assassin killed a husband and father of a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son.
As outraging, saddening, and maddening as the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pa., was, at least we had some precedent and established mental frame of reference. Assassins murdered four American presidents: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963).
Americans witnessed assassination attempts against Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, and some nut shot at the White House while Bill Clinton was president. This is why presidents and a handful of other top officials get Secret Service protection and travel in as secure a bubble as possible. You never know when some lunatic who thinks his dog is talking to him will decide to try to harm the president.
Horrific as it is, we’re almost used to people trying to kill a president or other elected official — some loon trying to stab representative and gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, or shooting Representative Gabby Giffords, or nearly killing Steve Scalise on the baseball field and trying to murder other GOP representatives, or the nut who shot two state legislators in Minnesota and their spouses earlier this year and killed two of them. Or the guy who tried to burn down the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion.
Charlie Kirk . . . was just a young American, a married father of two small children, who went onto college campus and gave speeches and debated and stood up for his beliefs. He held no office. He had no government power. He controlled no policy. He was just some guy who wasn’t afraid to get up on a stage and say, “This is what I believe.”
And somebody out there decided to kill him over it.
I know the right side of the American political spectrum has its share of yahoos — the guy who mailed pipe bombs to Trump critics, the PizzaGate conspiracy theory believer who fired an AR-15 inside the D.C. restaurant Comet Ping Pong. Abortion clinic bombers. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh often gets inaccurately characterized as Christian extremist — he described himself as an agnostic — and while he was indisputably vehemently opposed to the federal government in a way that we usually define as “right wing,” he also believed the U.S. government had implanted a computer chip in his buttocks.
I would note that a couple of examples that get cited or remembered as “right-wing violence” really were nothing of the sort. The man who shot Gabby Giffords was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that grammar was a sinister form of mind control used by the government. The man who murdered the Minnesota House of Representatives speaker and her husband and shot a state senator and his wife earlier this year wrote in a letter addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel that Democratic Governor Tim Walz selected him to kill Democratic lawmakers, including Senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar.
Yesterday, I found myself thinking back to a (too) brief, small-scale controversy back in April, where CNN aired a prime-time special allegedly about “disinformation” and interviewed journalist Taylor Lorenz, in which she argued that Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back, is “a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.” She also swooned about the killer as “a man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart.”
(Today’s word of the day is “hybristophilia.”)
Does it increase the odds of another case of left-wing violence when Lorenz says the man who shot another man in the back is “a morally good man”?
Does it increase the odds of another case of left-wing violence when CNN’s interviewer Donie O’Sullivan just nods and smiles in seeming agreement, and doesn’t respond with, “What the hell are you talking about? This man’s a cold-blooded murderer, he’s not morally good!”
Does it increase the odds of another case of left-wing violence when the producers at CNN decide to air that segment, instead of saying, “Eh, that exchange makes both our interviewer and interview subject look like a pair of amoral idiots. Let’s keep that part of the conversation on the editing room floor?”
I ask because I genuinely don’t know the answer. Maybe it doesn’t make much of a difference at all. But it’s kind of hard to believe that any of that helps or discourages left-wing violence, no?
And as mentioned above, yes, the right side of the spectrum has its yahoos and nuts and violent types, but . . . do they get CNN talking heads on national television making an unrebutted argument for how “morally good” they are? How “handsome” and “smart” they are?
Could you imagine any scenario where any two figures who appear on CNN talked about how handsome, smart, and “morally good” a right-wing assassin was? You think any guests would gush about Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph?
Maybe you could envision more than 34,000 people contributing to a right-wing assassin’s legal defense fund, raising more than $1.2 million.
Could you envision a merchandise store about a right-wing assassin?
How about prayer candles?
Could you envision a fashion company “accidentally” using an image of a right-wing assassin to model a shirt?
Right around the same time as that CNN interview, the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research institute focusing on “cyber-enabled threats to democracy, markets, and vulnerable populations,” issued a new report that was downright chilling:
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The report, from Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), found that a growing number of people are willing to justify and even applaud killing in the name of politics and a warped sense of social justice. The chilling change appears to have accelerated in recent months.
“What was formerly taboo culturally has become acceptable,” Joel Finkelstein, the lead author of the report, told Fox News Digital. “We are seeing a clear shift – glorification, increased attempts and changing norms – all converging into what we define as ‘assassination culture.’”
The NCRI study traces the cultural shift back to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione in December 2024. What followed, researchers say, was a viral wave of memes that turned Mangione into a folk hero.
According to the study, these memes have sparked copycat behavior targeting other figures associated with wealth and conservative politics.
“It’s not just Luigi anymore,” Finkelstein said. “We’re seeing an expansion: Trump, Musk and others are now being openly discussed as legitimate targets, often cloaked in meme culture and gamified online dialogue.”
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Does this mean that every Democrat supports violence against Republicans? No, of course not. But it does suggest that there’s a not-so-small segment of the American political left that believes what they’re saying: that their political opponents are evil and must be destroyed, and violence is justified against them.
Senator Chris Murphy, Tuesday: “Republicans aren’t going to save us. The mainstream media isn’t going to save us. The Supreme Court isn’t going to save us. We will not stop Trump from destroying our democracy through de-escalatory politics. We need to fight fire with fire.”
Think about that. In this now commonplace Democratic party rhetoric, Trump isn’t just pushing through policies he wants, he isn’t just appointing cronies into his administration, he isn’t just maximizing his political leverage — he’s “destroying democracy.”
And if violence isn’t justified in the name of “saving democracy,” when would it be?
How many mentally unstable people out there are living out their own personal version of The Dead Zone, convinced that the president — or Elon Musk, or JD Vance, or whichever prominent right-of-center figure they’ve grown fixated on — is on a path to destroy the world? How many mentally unstable people are convinced that if they successfully assassinate one of those figures, they’ll be remembered as a hero?
We already know one person inclined to go on CNN and swoon over them.
For completely understandable reasons, a lot of organizations are canceling scheduled public appearances, speeches, and debates, reevaluating the security needs for events like that, justifiably afraid of copycats or other violence the perpetrators would insist was justified “retaliation.”
Like I said, it’s understandable. No one wants to host an event that will forever be remembered as the site of horrific, unjustifiable violence.
But this also means the assassin’s veto wins again.
ADDENDUM: It feels like small potatoes at a time like this, but over in that other Washington publication I write for, a look at the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s campaign memoir. You will probably be less than shocked at how she insists her defeat was everyone else’s fault.
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