Back in April, Charlie Kirk posted on X about how assassination culture is spreading on the left. He cited a recent survey that found 48 percent of liberals think it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk, and 55 percent think the same of President Trump.
“The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response,” Kirk said. “This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.”
His words then now seem darkly prophetic in light of his assassination Wednesday at Utah Valley University. If the left was a ticking time bomb before Kirk’s murder, we can now say that the bomb has gone off. The assassin reportedly engraved transgender and antifascist slogans on the bullets in the rifle he used to kill Kirk, confirming what everyone already knew, that Kirk’s assassination was motivated by radical leftist ideology. This dark fruit came from the deliberate cultivation of violence by the institutional left as a political strategy.
That’s what Kirk was getting at in his X post. Those in positions of authority — in public schools and universities, in the media, in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood and Silicon Valley — have for many years encouraged and themselves engaged in violent political rhetoric, and at times openly endorsed political violence. Why? Because violence is at the center of the left’s political project.
As my colleague Mark Hemingway detailed earlier this week, former President Barack Obama’s disingenuous statement that “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk,” rings hollow precisely because Obama’s entire political career sprang from his close association with violent, unrepentant left-wing terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of The Weather Underground. Obama might pretend not to know what motivated Kirk’s assassin, but he certainly knew what motivated Ayers and Dohrn, and he not only didn’t have a problem with that, he also didn’t think his association with them disqualified him from mainstream Democratic politics. But now we’re supposed to take Obama’s denunciations of political violence seriously? I don’t think so.
There is no place in this country for Obama-style political leftism that pretends to abhor violence while tacitly and rhetorically embracing it. It’s not an overstatement to say that the politics of Ayers and Obama and the mainstream political left in America created the shooter who killed Kirk. Left-wing politics in this country has always been violent. As Hemingway noted, for an 18-month period in 1971-’72, left-wing terrorists set off nearly five bombs a day in American cities. That’s in addition to armed attacks like the 1981 Brink’s truck robbery The Weather Underground carried out with the Black Liberation Army, killing two cops and a security guard in the process.
Eventually, this rash of left-wing terrorism came to an end — not because the leftist radicals were beaten, or because they mellowed out, but because they won. They infiltrated and took over our institutions, the universities and the media and corporate America, and eventually put one of their disciples, Obama, in the White House.
The violence and intolerance of the left, in other words, isn’t confined to a radical fringe. It’s foundational to the left’s entire revolutionary political project going back more than a half-century in this country. As Kirk himself saw, assassination is now considered a justified response by half of all self-identified liberals. It’s a mainstream view on the left. That’s why you see so many liberals outright celebrating Kirk’s assassination on social media. That’s why you see left-wing media figures like Matthew Dowd on MSNBC essentially justifying or excusing Kirk’s murder on the grounds that he spread “hate speech.” These are the same people who cheered when Trump supporters or vaccine skeptics died of Covid, or celebrated when Hamas slaughtered Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Some of these leftists are members of the U.S. House of Representatives, who loudly protested a moment of prayer on Kirk’s behalf as he was dying.
They do this not because of substantive disagreements over Covid or Palestine or anything Kirk believed. Those disagreements are pretexts for the sadism and violence inherent in the left-wing political project. As one anonymous X user put it, “The sadism is there a priori, looking for a home. All of those things are little holding compartments for it.”
The sadism itself arises from an approach to politics that is apocalyptic and millenarian. For the left, politics is a religion — not like Christianity but more like Islam. If you submit, you’ll be permitted to live. If you don’t, you must be destroyed.
A famous quote from the late Charles Krauthammer helps illustrate the problem this represents for our country. He said, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” If you think someone is stupid, or just wrong, you do what Kirk did and try to persuade them to change their mind. But if you think someone is evil, then there’s a lot you will justify in an effort to stop them, including violence. And, because they are evil, you can revel in the violence the way many on the left are now doing over Kirk’s assassination.
So what are we on the right supposed to do about this? Calling for revenge assassinations or street violence is both morally wrong and politically foolish. Tit-for-tat violence and escalation will just feed the chaos in civil society and hence serve the interests of the left, for whom chaos is an essential ingredient in their social and political revolution.
And yet something must be done. The feckless GOP congressional leaders who are now shrugging their shoulders and acting helpless in the wake of Kirk’s assassination are, in their cowardice, playing a dangerous game. The only thing that will prevent escalation and vigilantism at this point is a vigorous response from legitimate, duly-constituted authorities. Absent that, some on the right will likely conclude that their government can’t or won’t protect them, and they will respond accordingly. Once that happens, it will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to contain the escalation.
So how should the right respond? On the formal institutional level, The Trump administration should dismantle the entire ecosystem of left-wing political activism in America. Antifa and BLM groups need to have their assets seized and donor lists scrutinized. The left-wing billionaires who fund these organizations need to be criminally investigated and charged if possible. Groups tied to transgenderism, Palestine/Hamas, socialism and other radical leftist causes should be targeted using every tool available to the Justice Department and federal law enforcement agencies. The law should be applied maximally to these groups and the individuals who lead them and fund them.
If the Democratic Party and Democrat leaders are implicated, so be it. It might be that the DNC and the Democratic Party itself need to be destroyed, root and branch. In the near term, Democrat politicians like Rep. Ilhan Omar, who mocked Kirk after he was killed, should be expelled from Congress by the Republican majority.
Walter Kirn said this week on X, “This thing has a roots system, don’t be fooled. And gardeners in the media and other realms who water and tend to it.” The garden has to be destroyed, and the gardeners have to be held accountable.
This is not an extreme position, given where we are now. This entire left activist ecosystem spent a decade demonizing Kirk, smearing him as a Nazi and a racist and a fascist. They created twisted moral justifications for violence against him and every other conservative who believes what he believed. And now that their rhetoric has come to its full fruition, we find ourselves in a new place in America, where a new response is required from the right.
In a moving piece about Kirk’s assassination for The American Mind this week, my friend Joshua Treviño wrote that, “We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good.”
That’s absolutely right. Part of what it means to be in the realm of fundamental politics is that the ordinary rules of partisan politics no longer apply. It’s not necessary for the president or Republican leaders to issue statements about “turning down the temperature” or “coming together in this difficult time,” as Democrat Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did this week. Schumer in 2020 openly threatened Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, warning they would “reap the whirlwind” if they overturned Roe v. Wade. Less than two years later, when Roe was overturned, an assassin tried to kill Kavanaugh in his home.
So it no longer matters what people like Schumer say. You cannot “turn down the temperature” with such people, still less make common cause with them. Their cause is revolutionary and inherently violent, and if we don’t stamp it out completely it will consume and eventually destroy this country. We can be a constitutional republic of free citizens or we can be ruled by a leftist revolutionary regime. We cannot be both, which means we can no longer tolerate the violent leftist radicals among us. As Lincoln famously said of slavery in 1858, our country will cease to be divided: “It will become all one thing or all the other.”