Within the last two weeks, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and the targeted shooting of a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement office have confirmed a grim reality. The so-called “fringe” left is not fringe at all, but a fully entrenched, violent, mainstream force.

More concerning, the once near-universal belief that violence is never an acceptable response to speech is quickly eroding, particularly among younger generations.

The reaction to Kirk’s murder made this abundantly clear.

Across social media and in sympathetic corners of the corporate press, voices rushed not to condemn the violence but to rationalize it. Some, like popular streamer Destiny, even celebrated it, suggesting that conservatives bring such attacks upon themselves, adding that they need “to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events.”

Former MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd (he was fired for his comments) captured this mindset when he said immediately after Kirk’s shooting: “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have, saying these awful words, and then not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”

In other words, the violence itself is treated as inevitable and, by extension, justified.

Justifying Violence

This chilling shift reflects a deeper trend. Survey data and campus studies show that a rising share of Americans, especially younger generations, now see violence as an acceptable tool of politics. What was once unthinkable is being normalized. In a national survey, respondents were asked whether using violence to stop a speech containing the ideas they found most offensive was “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” or “always” acceptable.

Though 80 percent said violence was never acceptable, this still signals that 20 percent would find violence to silence speech acceptable. But it gets worse as we look at the statistics by generation.

While 93 percent of Baby Boomers and 85 percent of Generation X rejected political violence, only 71 percent of Millennials and just 58 percent of Generation Z did. Put another way, among Gen Z, the generation now entering civic life, roughly 42 percent say political violence to silence speech can be justified.

This data aligns with findings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, which reported that more than one-third of students now consider “using violence to stop a campus speech” acceptable.

Tragically, it was Kirk himself who warned that assassination culture was spreading on the left. In an April 7 social media post, he cited a study by the Network Contagion Research Institute showing that 31 percent of respondents said murdering Elon Musk would be at least somewhat justified, while 38 percent said the same about President Trump.

Among those who considered themselves on the political left, the numbers spiked to 50 percent for Musk and 56 percent for Trump. When it came to destroying property, nearly 40 percent said it would be at least somewhat acceptable to attack a Tesla dealership in protest.

Inflammatory Rhetoric

The acceptance of political violence is a direct consequence of the inflammatory rhetoric employed by academia, mainstream Democrats, and their media allies, which has served to dehumanize Trump and his supporters by branding them as fascists, Nazis, and existential threats to democracy.

This deliberate framing has not only led to multiple assassination attempts against Trump, but also attacks on Christians, like that of the mass shooting of the Annunciation Catholic School by a deranged trans-identifying individual.)

Moreover, framing politics as an existential struggle against “Nazis” has fueled the rise of the violent left-wing “anti-fascist” movement, not only in America but around the world. When political opponents are dehumanized and branded as “Nazis,” physical attacks against them, even murder, become not only permissible, but a moral obligation.

Extremely Flawed Statistics

Naturally, some prominent left-leaning figures, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have attempted to characterize the right as the primary instigators of political violence. They assert that right-wing extremists are responsible for a substantial majority, specifically 80 percent of “incidents” and 75 percent of “killings” from 2013 to 2022, with left-wing extremists being associated with a significantly smaller share of such violence.

However, the analysis that goes into determining these statistics is quite subjective. What counts as “extremist violence” or “political violence” is, at the end of the day, a judgment call by the researcher.

Furthermore, statistics, on political violence are often sourced from overtly biased left-leaning organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (as were Omar’s).

In the ADL’s recent study on “murder and extremism,” many of the attacks that are framed as “right-wing” political violence are not, and clear cases of left-wing politically motivated violence are simply omitted.

One clear example of a false attribution to so-called “right-wing” violence occurred in Washington, where a man killed another man with a baseball bat after a prior altercation. Despite the absence of any political motive, the case was categorized as a ‘”right-wing gang-related crime” solely because the perpetrator was linked to a white supremacist group.

A striking example of a lie by omission is Darrell Brooks, a BLM supporter who had posted anti-white rhetoric online. Brooks drove his car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring dozens. The ADL did not even mention this attack in its reporting.

A Less Biased Study

All that being said, a new study from the “centrist” Center for Strategic and International Studies counters the left-wing narrative on political violence that is attempting to take hold. In it, researchers found that left-wing terrorism has increased since Donald Trump entered the political arena in 2016, and that in 2025, left-wing attacks outnumbered those from the right.

This reality has been clearly obvious to anyone who has been paying attention, and the left’s reaction to Kirk’s assassination further exposes the dangerous political culture in which leftist violence is excused, rationalized, celebrated, and normalized.

For well over a decade, Democrats and their allies have framed conservatives as existential threats, dehumanizing millions of Americans and portraying opposition as evil.

Given that the Democratic Party controls the institutions that produce, amplify, and enforce anti-conservative rhetoric, it should come as no surprise that an increasingly large segment of the population begins to see violence against conservatives as justified.

The issue at hand is not that political violence is a right-wing or even a “both sides” problem; rather, it is whether Democrats and their media allies will finally acknowledge their responsibility for the monster they have unleashed upon America.