The killing of right wing activist and influencer Charlie Kirk has prompted disturbing and questionably legal calls for a crackdown on the left from President Trump and his allies. In an appearance on the cable network Newsmax on Tuesday evening, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) took things further — way further.
After latching on to the fact the man being charged with the shooting allegedly had a transgender romantic partner, Jackson called gender non-conforming people a “virus” as he argued they need to be placed in institutions and barred from the internet.
“We have to do something about this,” Jackson said after railing against doctors who aid with “gender transition. “We have to treat these people. We have to get them off the streets and we have to get them off the internet. We can’t let them communicate with each other. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that’s spreading across this country that’s going to do great damage to normal, hard working, law abiding people.”
Jackson’s comments came during an episode of the show “Finnerty” where Kirk’s killing was characterized as “trans violence.” The idea that trans people are linked to mass shootings has been a recent fixation on the right after a couple of cases with perpetrators that were reportedly transgender. Those incidents accounted for a very small number of the overall phenomenon. In a 2023 fact check, Reuters highlighted an analysis that found trans suspects were involved in 0.11% of mass shootings recorded over the past decade, a figure far lower than the proportion of trans people in the total U.S. population. Efforts to tie transgender people to violence have coincided with a wave of anti-trans policy and rhetoric from Trump and other Republicans.
Right-wing attacks on the transgender community have been fueled by false claims that trans people are mentally ill. Kirk was a prominent proponent of this rhetoric, which is rejected by medical institutions including the American Psychiatric Association.
Kirk was killed on Sept. 10 on the campus of Utah Valley University while engaging in one of his signature events where he debated college students about their views. Moments before the fatal shot rang out, Kirk was involved in an exchange where a questioner asked him if he was aware of the actual number of transgender “mass shooters.” In some of his final words, Kirk said there had been “too many” without indicating he was aware of the specifics.
Tyler Robinson was charged on Tuesday for killing Kirk. According to charging documents filed by prosecutors, Robinson’s mother has said he was involved in a romantic relationship with a person who was undergoing a gender transition. In alleged text message exchanges with that person included in the documents, Robinson said he killed Kirk because, “I had enough of his hatred.”
On Newsmax, host Rob Finnerty asked Jackson, who was first elected to Congress in 2020 after serving as White House physician to President Barack Obama and Trump, to offer “perspective on this from a medical point of view.”
“This kid, the assassin, he went from what seemed like a fairly normal 20-year-old to a totally radicalized 22-year-old left wing assassin with a trans boyfriend,” Finnerty said. “How does something like that happen?”
Jackson, who did not respond to TPM’s request for comment, went on to make baseless claims that transgender people are prone to violence.
“They already have an underlying psychiatric issue where you know they don’t know what their gender is and they’re — they’re transitioning and, let’s just be honest, most of them are men that are transgendering to women right? And so, they have an underlying level of aggressiveness,” Jackson said.
Jackson also suggested that transgender people have been “seized upon” by the left as part of some vague, violent conspiracy.
“This is not a problem that exists on the right. It’s not. This is a group of domestic terrorists that have been bred, they have been bred by the left, by the progressives.”
Analyses — at least one of which, issued by the Justice Department, was recently actively suppressed by the Trump administration — show right-wing extremists are responsible for the majority of U.S. domestic terrorism. There is no data indicating transgender people have an increased propensity for violence. According to GLAAD, “despite being less than 2% of the U.S. adult population, transgender people are four times as likely to be victims of crime.”
After Jackson made the wild claim the left has “bred” and “facilitated” transgender violence, Finnerty played clips of Democrats calling Trump a “fascist.” The host said he was eager to make “the connection between how this young man became radicalized with a trans boyfriend” and “rhetoric like this.” Jackson responded by suggesting Democrats’ criticism of Trump was directly to blame for Kirk’s death.
“Every single one of those people, Rob, are directly responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk,” Jackson said of the politicians highlighted by Finnerty. “They have created this narrative. They have planted this seed in the heads of these people and, as elected officials in high ranking positions, they have legitimized their anger, their concerns, and their actions. They are responsible for what happened and you know we have to stop this.”
Jackson also claimed Congress has to do “everything we can” to crack down on what he referred to as leftist “domestic terrorists.”
“They’ve propped up antifa and antifa has embraced these transgenders and it’s just become one big mess,” he said.
Jackson’s remarks are particularly disturbing since unconventional and questionably legal detention has been a feature of this second Trump administration. In addition to the controversial new migrant detention infrastructure, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has previously suggested people with mental health issues should be taken to “wellness farms.” Kirk’s death is also provoking a widespread suppression of political speech and critics of the late influencer.
The inflammatory segment concluded with Finnerty playing a trip of Trump speaking to reporters in 2019 and suggesting mass shootings could be addressed by opening more “mental institutions.” The host asked Jackson if House Republicans might do “something to bring back mental institutions … so this doesn’t happen again.”
That suggestion is what prompted Jackson to describe transgender people as a “cancer” and to call for them to be taken “off the streets” and “off the internet.” The Newsmax host seemed to appreciate the congressman’s call to round up and censor members of the LGBTQ community.
“It’s getting worse, and worse, and worse,” Finnerty said. “Congressman, good to see you again.”
