We Americans, it seems, continue to live in two separate countries. Consider two items in the news this week and the inconsistent responses they evoked.  

One was the conviction in Florida of Ryan Routh, the second man who attempted to assassinate then-candidate Donald Trump in mid-September 2024. The news appeared on page A24 of the print edition of the New York Times.

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Very different treatment was accorded to the return of Jimmy Kimmel, the third-highest-rated of the three broadcast network late-night show hosts, from the suspension imposed on him last week.

That action was prompted by Kimmel’s statement that “the MAGA gang … was desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” 

Presumably, Kimmel thought he was speaking truth to power, but actually, he was speaking falsehood to people who were eager to believe it. This, of course, doesn’t excuse Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr from issuing thuggish threats that may have persuaded ABC to yank Kimmel from the air — a sharp and shameful contrast from Carr’s justified protests at Biden administration speech suppression. The government shouldn’t be repressing speech protected by the First Amendment.

Still, it’s off-putting that Kimmel is hailed as a martyr for free expression when he was relaying what Biden Democrats were quick to label and often mislabel “misinformation.” Kimmel’s monologue was one example, perhaps an unwitting one, of what my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney has described as “many prominent public figures peddling a conspiracy theory that Kirk’s assassin was a Republican, right-winger, or MAGA type.” 

That theory was pretty well scotched by the release by law enforcement of emails sent by the accused killer and his trans boyfriend. But Democratic voters are apparently reluctant to draw the obvious conclusion. It hurts people to think that someone with views resembling their own has committed a horrific murder, particularly when you preen yourself on your enlightenment and moral superiority.

But faced with an ogre like President Donald Trump, some people don’t mind. YouGov polling conducted after Kirk’s murder showed that 10% of liberals and 24% of “very liberal” people considered it acceptable to be happy about a public figure’s death, compared to 4% of conservatives and 3% who are “very conservative.” Similarly, conservatives are significantly more likely than liberals to say that political violence is never justified. 

The difference should not be overstated. One of the strongest and most heartfelt denunciations of political violence after Kirk’s assassination came from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).  

Political assassinations should not be treated as statistically meaningful events and are often the acts of delusional people. Examples include the shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 and the murder of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman last June. 

But violence from the apparently lucid recently seems to come disproportionately from the Left, dating back at least to the Sanders volunteer who shot four people and grievously wounded then-Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) at the House Republican baseball team practice in 2017. Sanders, as I noted at the time, quickly denounced that attack unambiguously. 

Sanders is a more prominent voice these days, but one fears that he speaks to many deaf ears. Young liberals in particular, as reflected in polls and seen on so many elite campuses, seem eager to celebrate or engage in political violence. 

This may reflect a desperation as history suddenly seems not to be moving in their direction. Progressive Democrats, Ross Douthat writes in his New York Times column, have seen “a belief in a nearly inevitable leftward arc of history, a guaranteed multiracial Democratic majority, giving way to repeated shocks of the populist era. A period of extraordinary cultural influence, of revolutionary zeal joined to institutional power, that peaked in 2020 and 2021 and has been dissolving ever since.”

The liberal influencers who fled Twitter after Elon Musk acquired it and ended the suppression of non-leftist views for the new, all-liberal Bluesky have been isolating themselves from the rest of America. “The progressive epistemic bubble is getting really bad,” writes analyst Nate Silver, a self-described liberal Democrat. “That suggests the bubble is expanding, slowly devouring the reality-based community, and that formerly rational commentators have trouble escaping it once they’re past the event horizon.”

An uncomfortably large percentage of people in that bubble are not averse to killing. Whoever leaked the draft of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade had to know that it put the lives of several justices at risk, and indeed, it was just revealed that the man who tried to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh contemplated killing three justices.

This past week, a former teachers union staffer fired gunshots at a Sacramento ABC affiliate, apparently protesting the Kimmel suspension, and left a note saying FBI officials were next. 

In contrast, Charlie Kirk “was one of the most effective institution-builders and coalition-crafters in the United States,” China scholar Tanner Greer writes. “He figured out how to make conservative populism work.” He taught other things as well.

“We do not respond to hate with hate,” his widow Erika Kirk said at his memorial service, as she forgave the man who killed her husband. 

CHARLIE KIRK’S FREE SPEECH, ANTI-VIOLENCE LEGACY

That surely surprised — astonished — the other half of America that doesn’t share her views. As Barton Swaim wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week, “Whereas conservatives are obliged to know what their correlatives on the left say and write — so pervasive are their ideas and assumptions in our cultural institutions — liberals and progressives feel no corresponding need to know the opinions of people on the right.” 

The half of America that takes its educational credentials as an imprimatur of moral superiority sees no need to understand the other half and resists acknowledging the violence wreaked by those on its side.