Former president Barack Obama made his first public comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and called it an “inflection point” for the nation. He said he did not know Kirk but he mourned his death as he held President Donald Trump responsible for the divisive atmosphere. “When I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents ‘vermin,’ enemies who need to be ‘targeted,’ that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and something that we’re going to have to grapple with, all of us,” Obama said, concluding that the nation is going through a “political crisis.”Trump and some of his allies, however, have a history of calling political opponents “enemies,” Obama said. There’s extremism on both sides, he said, referring to it as a broader problem that all Americans, regardless of political affiliation, must grapple with.“But I’ll say this — those extreme views were not in my White House,” he 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.““It is important for us at the outset to acknowledge that political violence is not new,” he told Steve Scully, the Erie native and veteran broadcast journalist. “It has happened at certain periods in our history, but it is something that it is anathema to what it means to be a democratic country. And regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy. What happened, as you mentioned, to the state legislators in Minnesota, that is horrific. It is a tragedy. And there are no ifs, ands or buts about it.”“Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy.”“Look, obviously I didn’t know Charlie Kirk,” Obama said. “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 and that I mourn for him and his family.”
