Politics

In 2021, an audience member asked Kirk at what point conservatives had the green light to use guns on their political opponents, and while Kirk took care to at first “denounce” the question, he went into a longer answer that suggested he didn’t really disagree that much with its premise. Kirk’s sole objection to the idea, he explained, was that it was strategically foolish because it would create a pretext for a Democratic crackdown on the Right. He went on to suggest that the line for when it would be okay to take up arms and hurt people would be “when we exhaust every single one of our state[’s] ability to push back against what’s happening” — in other words, if his movement didn’t succeed through the normal political process. Two years later, he reiterated this, warning listeners that “you have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president,” so they should “buy weapons” and carry them around all the time in public in case they have to fight back.