Former President Barack Obama speaks during the Jefferson Educational Society's Global Summit XVII at Erie Insurance Arena in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Sept. 16.
A crowd of 8,000 attended former President Barack Obama's appearance at Erie Insurance Arena on Tuesday, Sept. 16, when he was joined on stage by veteran broadcast journalist Steve Scully in the first event of the Jefferson Educational Society's Global Summit XVII.

ERIE, PA ‒ Former President Barack Obama called the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and other recent acts of political violence "horrific" during a speech on Sept. 16, while criticizing President Donald Trump for using the tragedy to stifle debate critical to democracy.

In his first public comments outside of social media about Kirk's killing at Utah Valley University last week, Obama, the two-term president who remains one of the most influential forces within the Democratic Party, said Americans should condemn political violence when it occurs but also be free to debate the ideas espoused by the victims of such violence.

"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 best known for his tenure at C-SPAN. "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."

Obama told a crowd of 8,000 people at the Erie Insurance Arena that a central premise of democracy is being able to disagree, and at times engage in "really contentious debate without resorting to violence."

"And then when it happens to somebody, even if you think they're quote unquote 'on the other side of the argument,' that's a threat to all of us and we have to be clear and forthright and condemn it," Obama said.

'We have to extend grace'

In the days since Kirk's murder, Republicans have not only sharply criticized some on the left for seemingly celebrating the 31-year-old's assassination, but also those who have highlighted many of the controversial beliefs held by the Turning Point USA founder.

"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. 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."

A 'basic code'

"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 (Supreme Court) Justice (Ketanji Brown) 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."

Obama lauded Utah Gov. Spencer Cox's handling of Kirk's assassination, saying he disagrees with the Republican "on a whole bunch of stuff" but that Cox has shown that it is possible to abide by a "basic code of how we should engage with public debate." Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has shown a similar ability, Obama said, just hours after Shapiro, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, delivered his own speech in Pittsburgh about political violence. Five months ago, Shapiro and his family were the targets of an alleged assassination attempt when a part of the Governor's Residence was set on fire while they were asleep inside.

Obama, 64, drew sharp differences with Trump throughout the evening, without ever mentioning Trump by name.

"I've noticed that there's been some confusion around this lately coming from the White House and some of the other positions of authority," he said about the need to maintain political debate, "that suggest even before we had determined who the perpetrator of this evil act was, that somehow we're going to identify an enemy, we're going to suggest that somehow that enemy was at fault and we are then going to use that as a rationale for trying to silence discussion around who we are as a country and what direction we should go, and that's a mistake."

He recalled the 2015 killing of nine Black parishioners at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, at the hands of neo-Nazi and White supremacist Dylann Roof. Obama didn't respond to the massacre, he said, by assuming who might have influenced "this troubled young man" and then "go after my political opponent." His predecessor, President George W. Bush, "explicitly went out of his way to say, we are not at war against Islam and systematically and repeatedly talked about how we can't use this as a way to divide and target fellow Americans" after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he said, calling it one of the most commendable acts of Bush's presidency.

'Not in my White House'

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."

Obama spoke in Erie as part of the Jefferson Educational Society's Global Summit XVII, the regional think tank's annual speaker series. He addressed a range of issues during his 80-minute address, from serious topics including the influence of social media on society and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, which he warned will be economically disruptive and poses the risk of being "weaponized" by bad actors, to the lighthearted: his take on fellow Chicagoan and White Sox fan Pope Leo XVI, the infamous "tan suit" scandal and the work on his presidential library and the second installment of his memoir.

Though he spoke about the Trump White House at length, he made no mention of former President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, who became the party's nominee in 2024 after Biden was forced to bow out of the race over concerns about his age and health. He also made no mention of the state of the Democratic Party or efforts by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to launch a grand jury investigation into allegations that members of his administration "weaponized" the U.S. intelligence community over Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

Erie, a bellwether county of 268,000 residents, backed Obama's presidential runs in 2008 and 2012 before supporting Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Trump again in 2024, making it one of only 25 "boomerang" counties nationwide.

Matthew Rink is a USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania investigative journalist.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Obama condemns Charlie Kirk's killing, says tragedy being used to 'silence discussion'

Reporting by Matthew Rink, USA TODAY NETWORK / Erie Times-News

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