Telling us that it doesn’t matter when one side commits violence warps public policy, news coverage, and more.

A fter Tuesday’s press conference by Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray laying out extensive excerpts from text messages that Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer sent to his transgender romantic partner, as well as other evidence collected in the investigation regarding his reasoning for deciding that “I had enough of his hatred,” progressive commentators are in a bind. Their collective push to deny that the killer acted out of left-leaning political motives has collapsed. Sure, they can still get gullible people who don’t read widely to buy that the assassin might have been a white-supremacist “groyper,” or just to focus on the fact that his family members were conservative, religious Republicans (as if young leftists aren’t often people angrily alienated from their families). But anybody who deals even glancingly in facts and evidence, and who ventures outside of the left-wing bubble, is going to know that it’s dishonest agitprop.

That effort was always a high-risk play. Sure, before we knew the details, it was possible that Kirk’s killer could have come from the far right, but it was never the likeliest outcome, and the people pushing the narrative had to bet heavily on him never being caught (this is the strategy that has allowed some of them to continue, three years later, to claim that the Supreme Court Dobbs leak must have been the work of a conservative). They were also betting on the Katrina media strategy: If you can swarm enough voices saying the same thing, you can create the appearance of a set of facts before the evidence is available, and that’s all people will remember. They may not be wrong that this will work with some audiences. There are still liberals who paint John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the result of a “climate of hate” in Dallas in November 1963, even 62 years after we learned that he was killed by a guy who literally defected to the Soviet Union.

So, instead we get the sort of message offered by Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, the chief deputy whip of the Democrats’ Senate caucus: “What f***ing difference does it make if this murderer was left or right. Pull yourself together, read a book, get some exercise, have a whiskey or walk the dog or make some pasta or go fishing or just do anything other than let this algo pickle your brain and ruin your soul.” If you’ve followed cable news and social media, you’ve heard an increasing chorus of such sentiments, which call to mind the king of Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who!”

Now, as a general matter, I’ve long argued that we should blame political violence on the violent, not on people who happen to share their political views, even if those people use very heated rhetoric. Speech isn’t violence, and unless you directly advocate for its use, it also isn’t to blame for violence. Similarly, when it comes to the “manifestos” of deranged school shooters and assassins, I’ve argued that we should not name them or publish their views at all. These are unwell people who do this sort of thing for glory, so we should deny them that platform.

I still believe those things. But there are a couple of sound reasons why they are not a good argument for squelching or dismissing all discussion of the motives of Kirk’s assassin.

One, of course, is just accuracy: History should reflect the difference between deliberate, calculated political assassinations and the works of madmen. As Charlie Cooke noted the other day on The Editors podcast, our history books would do a disservice if they treated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by a white racist as if it were as motiveless a crime as the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan by a guy who was apolitical and too unbalanced to be given a prison sentence. Other than the act itself, we have thus far seen no reason to believe that Kirk’s assassin was suffering from grave mental illness; to the contrary, he pursued a calculated (if amateur) plan to carry out the killing, escape, and hide the evidence; he concealed what he was doing from people close to him; and his own text messages show that he thought he would get away with the crime.

We’ve seen a number of political assassinations, attempts, or assaults in recent years by people who were clearly much more mentally deranged than they were coherently political. These include the assassin of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, the gunman who shot Representative Gabby Giffords and killed federal chief district judge John Roll, and the vagrant who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul. There are other cases, including the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, where the line between politics and madness has been hard to draw from fragmentary sources.

Of course, Democrats and their media sympathizers have applied wild double standards: In 2022, I noted their criticisms of Republicans merely for continuing to run ads against Pelosi, and contrasted this with Pelosi’s own furious response when left-wing motives were blamed in connection with the left-wing shooter who tried to assassinate multiple Republicans at the congressional baseball practice, including Steve Scalise. Then, Pelosi sounded like Schatz now: “I think that the comments made by my Republican colleagues are outrageous, beneath the dignity of the job that they hold, beneath the dignity of the respect that we would like Congress to command. How dare they say such thing? How dare they?”

That double standard is not an isolated incident. (Nor is the urge to change the subject to gun control when a leftist commits murder with a gun, but that’s another story).

There is, however, a more serious reason than mere truthfulness to care that Charlie Kirk was killed by someone who opposed his political views from his left. That reason is that the left has a set of ideas and assumptions about political violence that are embedded in public policy decisions, news coverage, and campus administration. If those ideas and assumptions are false, then that matters quite a lot. And they are, in fact, false.

The assumption — sometimes stated, sometimes implied — is that people on the right are more prone to politically tinged violence than are people on the left, and that the ideas, rhetoric, and organizations on the right are more prone to trigger violence than are those on the left. This concept is embedded, for example, in the term “stochastic terrorism,” which equates heated speech on the right — but only on the right — with incitement to violence even if the speaker does not in any way advocate violence. These ideas are just too dangerous, you see, because those people are so suggestible and combustible.

These assumptions get embedded in efforts to apply greater suppression and control to right-leaning speech, whether labeled as “misinformation” or “hate speech.” They get embedded in law enforcement priorities such as having the FBI produce reports warning that we should track traditional Catholics or school-board protesters rather than left-leaning causes and groups. They get embedded in decisions to bring criminal charges (including some of the charges against Donald Trump in the January 6 cases) that assume that the First Amendment test for incitement doesn’t need to be met in order to connect inflammatory speech to subsequent rioting. They are implicit in decisions not to charge left-wing rioters as harshly as the January 6 crowd, or to treat forcible incursions by left-wingers to stop legislatures from meeting as harmless, even admirable, while stripping a Republican legislator of voting power over a Facebook post on the theory that it could prove dangerous. Over and over, Democrats premise policy on the assumption that one side’s speech and ideas pose a greater risk of causing violence than the other’s.

The desperate desire to protect these assumptions from being challenged is plainly a driver of the intensity with which the left has circled the wagons to deny the motivation for the killing of Kirk, the best-known American political figure in decades to be assassinated. That’s not to say that Kirk, a private citizen, was more politically important than Hortman, or Roll, or Harvey Milk, or a number of other judges and public officials killed over the past half-century. But he may well be the most famous political figure in the country to be assassinated since Robert F. Kennedy, in addition to being one of the youngest victims of political assassination in our history. It leaves a big hole to fill. So, it’s entirely natural that his death should provoke some serious thought about what drove it.

And the left’s assumptions are nonsense. From Kirk to the congressional baseball shooting to the still-being-celebrated killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO to the murder of Israeli Embassy employees in D.C. to the planned assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the George Floyd riots and on and on and on and on, going back to the 1970s-era florid campaigns of bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, and the biggest crime in the history of my hometown, the roster of sensational violent crimes committed in the name of left-leaning ideas, causes, and grievances is extensive. The notion fostered by liberals and progressives that somehow our people are not violent like their people in this way is arrant nonsense that ought to be banished from how we make government policy, from how news is reported, and from how our educational institutions are run. No amount of telling us to avert our eyes should be expected to work this time.