Monday on CNN’s “The Arena,” host Kasie Hunt said Vice President JD Vance’s words made the path out of our so-called national divide “impossible.”
Hunt said, “Today the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk igniting right wing calls for a crackdown on the left and this afternoon, Vice President JD Vance the presumptive future leader of the Republican Party, took the mic.”
Vance said, “People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence. This is not a both sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth we must be told.”
He added, “We can thank God that most Democrats don’t share these attitudes. And I do while acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left.”
Hunt said, “Minority lunatic fringe, the vice president there, acknowledging that it’s not most people on the left who are shouting at children or celebrating an assassination. Still, Vance went on to argue that extremism on the left is, quote, growing and powerful and if you listen to what he says next, it really makes the path out of this wilderness seem all but impossible to find.”
Vance said, “There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.”
Hunt said, “So of course, there can be no unity with a celebration of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Of course, it does beg the question, though how can we get to a place where the voices that we’re hearing, the voices that we are listening to, the ones that define our nation, are not the ones that are most extreme of all. Because, as Vance himself said, this is a minority, a lunatic fringe, his words. How do we all get off our phones back to our real lives, where we can see each other for what we are? We are human beings. We are all human beings. We absolutely have to figure out how to tolerate people that we disagree with, people who see the world differently than we do.”
Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN
