While many Democrats are calling for “turning down the temperature” following the assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, some of the party’s more progressive members are going on the offensive. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution Friday to honor Kirk and his legacy, but 58 Democrats voted against the measure. Among those voting not to commemorate Kirk was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who accused the slain Kirk of being a white supremacist and racist. The congresswoman claimed that the House resolution “brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of bigotry today.”

“We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted black Americans the right to vote was a mistake; who, after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi, claimed that ‘some amazing patriot’ should bail out his brutal assailant; and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges, it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it,’” Ocasio-Cortez claimed. “His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant, uneducated, and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans, far from the ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ asserted by the majority in this resolution.”

Former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia lambasted Ocasio-Cortez for her attack on Kirk in the wake of his assassination. “I was stunned,” Manchin said of the congresswoman’s comments. “This is not the place and the time for that at all. If the Democrats — if AOC and the far-Left, the extreme Left, I want to say — believe that’s where the party, the Democratic Party, is today, then that’ll tell you why you lost people like me and an awful lot [more],” he said. “Now, let me tell you what you’ve lost. … The Democratic Party has lost more than 160,000 Democrats that have basically left the party since the November election. So if that’s the way the Democrat Party is going, it’s getting worse, not better.”

But Ocasio-Cortez is not the only Democrat to have smeared Kirk after his murder. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) refused to support the House resolution for fear of implicitly condoning Kirk’s “vile dissenting views,” adding in a social media post, “Charlie Kirk was advocating for a Christian nationalist government and to roll back the rights of women and [b]lack people…” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) also rejected the resolution, writing in a statement, “The fact is Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was divisive, disparaging, and too often rooted in grievance. The beliefs he evangelized normalized fringe views on race, sex, and immigration.” Thompson claimed that Kirk “demeaned women, immigrants, and [b]lack Americans…”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) suggested in an interview just hours after his death that Kirk may have been responsible for his own death due to his support for Second Amendment rights and opposition to gun control restrictions, comparing the TPUSA founder to “Dr. Frankenstein” whose “monster shot him through the neck.” In another interview, on Friday, Omar refused to retract her comments, instead further attacking Kirk and his legacy. “What I find jarring is that there [are] so many people willing to excuse the most reprehensible things that he said, that they agree with that, that they are willing to have monuments for him, that they want to create a day to honor him,” the Somali-born congresswoman said. “I am not going to sit here and be judged for not wanting to honor any legacy this man has left behind. That should be in the dustbin of history, and we should hopefully move on and forget the hate that he spewed every single day.”

Experts like FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter say that the Democratic Party is not doing itself any favors by engaging in divisive rhetoric about Kirk.

“It’s fair to wonder if Democratic politicians believe these awful things they’re saying, or if they just feel compelled to say them because they’re scared of their base — since so many of them cheered in delight at the assassination of Kirk. It’s probably some combination of both,” he told The Washington Stand. “Democratic politicians have to condemn political violence — even if they privately think there was nothing wrong with it — because voters who do not share that depraved view will dump them in favor of someone who does, and the Democratic base has been screaming at them to be more confrontational with their Republican counterparts since Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. So, Democrats, like AOC, seem to be settling on a strategy of trying to thread the needle between condemning political violence and continuing the campaign to smear Charlie Kirk’s legacy with lies.”

“Certainly, having someone in their caucus as unashamedly hateful as Ilhan Omar makes the rest of the Democrats in Congress seem moderate by comparison,” he continued. “With the midterms coming up, the Democrats were already gasping for air as the only clear advantage they hold is the history of the president’s party losing seats during a midterm election. Their donors are not showing up, voters are not resonating with their extreme platform, their party leadership is at each other’s throats, they are without any significant leadership, their base is fervently on the 20% side of every 80%-20% issue imaginable, and they are hemorrhaging voters. They are truly a party in shambles.”

“While many on the Right are not focused on the political ramifications of Kirk’s assassination at the moment, and rightly so, many on the Left seem unable to truly grasp the scale of what is headed their way: a tidal wave of freshly minted-conservative Gen Z voters who will vote in large numbers,” Carpenter concluded. “And not just vote, but will sign up to knock on doors and register voters. I have no doubt the young people who were moved by Charlie Kirk’s work will pick up where he left off, and they will make their voices heard in the midterms.”