In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder at a Utah college campus, National Review senior writer Noah Rothman said Thursday on The Editors that the left is going to have to acknowledge its complicity in the cycle of political violence.

“A lot of very responsible figures in national politics” seem to “sacrifice and abandon all prudence in events like these,” he said. As we saw “in the reaction to Luigi Mangione’s murder [of Brian Thompson] . . . you had Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all appending a very pregnant ‘but’ onto their condemnations of his actions: ‘Yeah, it was bad. Murder’s bad. But you have to understand that everybody’s so angry. You have to understand that the health-care system is broken, the justice system is broken, the campaign finance system is broken, everything’s broken. What else do you expect people to do?’”

Rothman said that this type of rhetoric isn’t new, but added: “The people who say stuff like that inspire the next killer. And then you create the conditions for a cycle of retributive violence, because everybody who engages in political violence looks at the last act of political violence committed by their adversaries and says, ‘retribution, vendetta.’”

This is “a cycle,” said Rothman, but it’s a cycle that “won’t be arrested until we acknowledge our complicity in this.

“And when it comes to the left, their complicity is deep and profound, and they need to stare long and hard into a mirror.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.