Yesterday, I was writing a piece on the tragic killing of Iryna Zarutska down in Charlotte that has captured national attention. Before I could finish, news came down the beloved conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been shot at a university in Utah. I’ve been covering politics for a long time, and I can’t say I’ve ever had a story about politically charged violence pre-empted by even more political violence. Nor do I ever want this to happen again.

But I was doing my best to Kubler-Ross my way through this — I’ve met Kirk and generally thought highly of him — but I didn’t really snap until I saw Obama put out a statement:

We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.

“We don’t yet know what motivated…” Yeah, I’m sorry, but we certainly know what the results of left-wing rhetoric are. And Barack Obama is living proof of that.

Plug into the matrix with me for a moment. As I was writing the aforementioned aborted story about the problems of law and order in America, I was reminded that, as part of a national political project to elect progressive district attorneys led by billionaire and Democrat megadonor George Soros, in 2020 San Francisco elected Chesa Boudin as its district attorney. Boudin was such a soft-on-crime disaster as D.A. — indeed, his entire campaign for the office was dedicated to issues such as bail “reform” and reducing incarceration — he was recalled by voters before he could finish his term.

But it’s remarkable he was ever elected in the first place, when you consider Boudin’s history. Boudin is the son of Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. They both ended up in jail after participating in a 1981 Brinks truck robbery with the Black Liberation Army that resulted in the deaths of two cops and a security guard (Chesa was just 14 months old at the time of the robbery). Aside from the Brinks robbery, the Weather Underground was best known as one of many left-wing groups that committed a series of terrorist attacks throughout the 70s. “During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day,” observes Bryan Burrough, author of the indispensable book on post-sixties left-wing violence, Days of Rage. Blessedly, almost all of those bombings did not result in death, but far too many did.

Normally, I don’t bother foisting the sins of the parents on the child. Except in this case, years before he ever contemplated running for public office, back when Chesa Boudin was merely red-diaper royalty fresh off of being a Rhodes Scholar, he wrote an insufferably indulgent memoir that I was, thankfully, paid to read. But despite being totally unimpressed with his writing, I’m sure he earned that Rhodes Scholarship, because when has academia ever rewarded violent left-wing radicals for no defensible reason? Oh right, they’re still doing it even now.

Anyway, if you read Boudin’s book you’ll find that he accepts the notion that his parents were “political prisoners” and he is of the opinion “certainly violence is illegitimate when it targets civilians or intends to cause generalized or widespread fear, but my parents never did either of those.” As far as Boudin was concerned, it’s OK to kill cops because they’re not civilians, they’re part of the racist, capitalist system or something. (Where the poor security guard who Boudin’s parents had a hand in murdering sits in the hierarchy of oppression is beyond me.)

If you’re wondering how Boudin came to think like this, well, his parents aren’t entirely to blame. Kathy Boudin wasn’t paroled until her son was out of college, and his dad wasn’t let out of jail until then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave him clemency in 2021. Because his parents were in jail, Chesa Boudin was adopted and raised by his parents’ friends and fellow Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Now Dohrn was famous for being especially radical; aside from her violent and traitorous deeds, she’s perhaps best known for a speech she gave at a radical event known as the Flint War Council, where she defended the Manson Family. “Dig it!” she famously said. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” Burrough goes on to note that most of the crowd “responded by raising their hands in four-finger salutes, signifying the fork shoved into the pregnant Sharon Tate’s belly.”

Now there’s much that could be said about Ayers’ own violent and traitorous deeds with the Weather Underground, but at this point he’s best known for launching the political career of … Barack Obama. In fact, Chesa Boudin would have been 14 or 15 when his adoptive parents held an event at their house to help launch his political career. The two men had a close working relationship and shared much the same worldview, despite the fact the Obama campaign lied about the nature of their relationship. In fact, books have been written about how Obama lied and obscured his past radicalism, and the media were enthusiastically complicit in helping him.

Which all brings me back to Obama’s disingenuous statement that “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk.” At this point what does it matter? Obama did not think consorting with violent, unrepentant terrorists was disqualifying. Obama certainly knew what “motivated” Ayers and Dohrn, and it did not trouble him. Nor is Ayers the only left-wing terrorist Obama has excused. But now, when the cold-blooded assassination of a leader on the right threatens to be an impediment to implementing the progressive political program that Obama and Ayers largely share, Obama is confused about what may have motivated this and wants you to know that violence is bad.

Anyway, I am DONE. If you have ever excused or condoned violence or knowingly consorted with those who have, and I don’t care one whit if you’re someone as lofty as Barack Obama, you need to be driven from polite society. I will happily engage in the ritual malediction of saying that call to ostracize obviously extends to forces on the political right. Except I do so knowing that no matter how much corrupt Democrat leaders cook the stats to pretend right-wing violence is a serious threat, nothing the right has ever done comes close to setting off five bombs a day for 18 months straight, proceeding to terrorize the country for more than a decade, and then electing new generations of politicians that knowingly excused this insane level of violence.

After January 6, Democrats and their allies did everything from raiding the former president’s home on dubious pretexts to algorithmically shutting off the ad revenue of any right-of-center publications they perceived as enabling Trump to kicking thousands of ordinary citizens off of social media. They corrupted the judicial system to the max to deal with rioters at the Capitol — many J6 defendants were given harsher sentences for nonviolent crimes than the prosecution asked for. And this came after Democrats not only refused to prosecute violent rioters following the mass destruction in the summer of 2020, they gave out $80 million settlements to rioters who encountered police as a way of rewarding the left-wing agitators they viewed as useful in undermining Trump’s reelection chances. It’s hard to escape the fact that encouraging violence, unequal justice, and repression is just another tool in the left’s political toolbox.

Well, it has led to this. A good man, a father, a patriot has been killed. He did what you’re supposed to do in America if you want to create political change — go out and earnestly debate people, don’t hide your beliefs, be as honest and public about your attempts to persuade people as you can. That is the essence of democracy, is it not? And Kirk, who did not hold office and had no power beyond what’s given to him as a citizen, was so good at exercising his democratic rights that they had to stop him not with a ballot, but a bullet.

It’s hard to imagine where the future of political debate goes from here. The constant and disingenuous refrains about “incipient fascism” from the left are hard to swallow as legitimate complaints. Instead, they sound a lot like justifications for the force they planned on using against their perceived enemies all along. Nor can the denunciations of violence from the left’s elder statesmen such as Obama be regarded as sincere.

Before Kirk, Democrats in power enabled assassination attempts on Supreme Court justices by deliberately refusing to enforce the law to protect their homes. It was unsurprising that enabling the same evil forces resulted in two attempts at assassinating Donald Trump. (They succeeded in killing an American hero, Corey Comperatore.) And at no point has there been a responsible reconsideration of tactics and rhetoric among the media or Democrat officeholders; the left wants to regain power and will use the nearest weapon at hand — literally.

I do not want to live in a society where half the country simply uses whatever power is available to them to go after the other half. I do not believe the average Democrat voter believes that successfully engaging in good-faith debates on college campuses warrants death. But, and I am hardly alone here, I am increasingly concerned that there are forces on the left that cannot be debated, they must be made to feel pain until they stop. I pray that this can be done within the bounds of the law and the Constitution, not that the left has much cared about those restraints.

If that seems like a bleak future for American politics, well, that’s because watching one of America’s most promising young leaders die in front of our eyes is pretty damn bleak. We survived a civil war, and I pray for everyone involved in American politics that understanding and forgiveness will once again be this country’s guiding lights. But I am also reminded that there are times when vengeance is necessary and just, and millions of Americans will not stand for Kirk’s death to be in vain.