Former President Barack Obama has made his first public comment outside of social media, regarding the Charlie Kirk assassination, managing to both lament the murder as a “tragedy” and denounce political violence as unacceptable, before promptly branding President Trump and his administration as “extremists.”
We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 10, 2025
At a forum in Pennsylvania, Obama told a crowd of 8,000 people that when a political divide results in violence against those you disagree with, it is "a threat to all of us and we have to be clear and forthright and condemn it," according to GoErie.
“Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy.”
"I didn't know Charlie Kirk," Obama continued. "I was generally aware of some of his ideas. I think those ideas were wrong, but that doesn't negate the fact that what happened was a tragedy. I mourn for him and his family. He was a young man with two small children and a wife, who obviously had a huge number of friends and supporters who cared about him. So we have to extend grace to people during their period of mourning and shock."
However, he decided it was an opportune moment to take a couple of shots at President Trump, calling him an extremist and accusing him of putting the weight of the federal government behind extreme views.
"But I'll say this — those extreme views were not in my White House," Obama said. "I wasn't empowering them. I wasn't putting the weight of the United States government behind them. When we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we've got a problem. And so your original question was, 'are we at an inflection point?' We're at an inflection point in the sense that we always have to fight for our democracy and we have to fight for those values that have made this country the envy of the world."
Those extremist views Obama was referring to were arguments made by Charlie, disagreeing with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and arguing that Michelle Obama and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson have little to no brain processing power.
"We can also at the same time say that 'I disagree with the idea that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake,'" Obama said. "That's not me criticizing your beliefs. It's making an observation about who we are as a country. I can say that I disagree with the suggestion that my wife or Justice Jackson does not have adequate brain processing power. I can say that I disagree that Martin Luther King was awful. I can disagree with some of the broader suggestions that liberals and Democrats are promoting a conspiracy to displace whites and replace them by ushering in illegal immigrants. Those are all topics that we have to be able to discuss honestly and forthrightly."
The issue that former President Obama did not discuss is that the constant reference to conservative views as "extremist" breeds the sort of political violence resulting in Charlie Kirk's assassination. Democrats have long sat comfortably while their perception of the world is echoed uncritically by legacy media and academia, so any criticism of their foundation can be written off as misinformation, counterfactual, or racist. In that environment, branding your opponents as illegitimate is now a license that can end in bloodshed.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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