Vice President JD Vance has been unsparing in his criticism of the Left in the wake of the murder of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk.

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“This is not a both-sides problem. My friend is dead because of left-wing political radicalization, and if you want to cut that s*** out, then be honest about it and look yourself in the mirror,” he said in an interview with Fox News, not long after sounding a similar theme as a guest host of the Charlie Kirk Show.

“The idea that left-wing violence and right-wing violence in 2025 in America are equal, it’s preposterous,” Vance added.

Progressive Democrats say Vance and President Donald Trump are holding up a funhouse mirror that presents a distorted picture of political violence in America. “The American people weren’t born yesterday. They’ve seen Trump whip up political violence & divide us,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) wrote in a social media post. “He incited a mob to storm the Capitol and beat cops — then he pardoned violent criminals. Now he’s trying to exploit a tragedy in order to silence his political opponents.”  

This last point has been a common theme following Kirk’s assassination. “JD Vance vows retribution on liberal institutions after Charlie Kirk killing,” read a headline in the Washington Post. “White House plans broad crackdown on liberal groups,” said a similar headline in the New York Times. A Guardian columnist warned that the Kirk assassination could become Trump’s Reichstag fire, a pretext for wielding autocratic power against his domestic political opposition. 

At a minimum, many on the Left contend, we are witnessing the dawn of a right-wing cancel culture. “One thing I do want to say, and I want to make this point: For an administration that railed against cancel culture, they’re certainly canceling a lot of people,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) told host Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, later adding, “What about all of these people, Vance and others, who [were] complaining about cancel culture, now telling people to call up kids’ employers and get them fired and defending the firing of Jimmy Kimmel because he made an erroneous statement, what happened to free speech? Like, this administration has just forgotten about it.”

The Kimmel point is instructive. While the circumstances of the liberal late-night host’s suspension were muddled by threatening statements the Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission chairman made about broadcast licenses, what triggered the local affiliates’ revolt against him were his comments about Kirk’s murder, specifically winking at the conspiracy theory that the alleged shooter was motivated by intra-MAGA feuding rather than a popular progressive cause.

“The MAGA gang 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,” Kimmel said. The comedian’s defenders argue that this was at worst a botched joke that his detractors have pulled out of context in service of a wider purge of outspoken liberals from late-night television that began with the cancellation of Stephen Colbert. But popular social media influencers have cast doubt on the alleged Kirk shooter being motivated by transgender issues, preferring instead the theory that he was some kind of white nationalist groyper. They aren’t joking.

That may be where the focus needs to be shifted. It is true that when Kirk was shot, the overwhelming majority of elected Democrats said responsible things. Many of them saw fit to qualify their condemnations of political violence with disavowals of Kirk’s views, sometimes to the point of taking the air out of their outrage at the assassination. But socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), for example, issued a video statement that was quite strong, arguing that what happened to Kirk was incompatible with a free and democratic society. 

Liberal New York Times columnist Ezra Klein penned a lengthy defense of Kirk’s practice of politics, arguing that while their views differed starkly, they were both engaged in a shared enterprise of nonviolent persuasion and debate. Klein held firm in this take after he received criticism from his left, particularly from the trendy progressive author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

At the same time, TikTok, Reddit, Bluesky, and X were teeming with posts, often from fairly generic progressives who were professionals if not political practitioners, celebrating Kirk’s murder with a specificity and glee that was shocking. These were not people whipped up by the madness of crowds. The videos were often filmed by people who were alone in their homes, offices, or cars. They received a substantial number of views, implying an audience for this type of content. 

It is always difficult to extrapolate how representative social media activity is of broader national or political trends. Trump won in 2024 in part because he was nimble in response to what was popular with possible supporters online, thanks to the help of younger allies like Kirk. Former President Barack Obama enjoyed similar success as a pioneer in this technological space during his two elections. Former President Joe Biden’s team, by contrast, believes it prevailed in 2020 largely because it ignored left-wing online chatter.  

“The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional left that has taken over places like the New York Times,” a Democratic strategist famously told Politico at the time. “The Biden campaign’s unspoken primary slogan could have been, ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” the authors of that piece wrote. Biden basically continued in that vein through the general election, but unfortunately, this approach did not hold after he took office.

Surely, some of the most horrifying Kirk content is temper tantrums by powerless rank-and-file progressive Democrats, more than serious calls to violence. Vance said in his remarks about left-wing political violence that he was sure over 99% of the people engaged in or adjacent to these activities would never commit a murder but that “many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen.”

What is true of left-wing Kirk assassination porn can also be said of claims that Trump somehow stole the 2024 election or faked the Butler attempt on his life. This flotsam floats around left-wing social media, but virtually no mainstream Democrats do anything to amplify or even acknowledge it. But the garbage does run downstream of consensus liberal positions that Trump is a uniquely malevolent threat to the American political system, with little introspection when events like Butler or the Kirk killing transpire.

Most Democratic leaders promoted some version of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative following the 2016 presidential election. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advanced a fairly comprehensive theory of how Trump, others on the Right, and the Russians conspired to defeat her, beyond anything any subsequent Trump-Russia investigation was ever able to establish. Few elected Democrats went so far as to claim Russia altered vote tallies to elect Trump, but pollsters regularly found high percentages of rank-and-file Democrats believed exactly that.

Biden campaigned on the idea that Trump was specifically an existential threat to democracy. Both he and his vice president, and eventual replacement at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, used the word “fascist” to describe Trump or his supporters. But they also both condemned the assassination attempts against Trump and treated him like a normal politician during debates, the postelection White House transition process, and his inauguration, which Biden and Kamala Harris attended. This seeming cognitive dissonance is too much for some on social media, however.

Democrats are highly attuned to the radicalizing effects of anything Trump says or does but routinely turn a blind eye to the radicalization of a nontrivial slice of their own base. Polls routinely show higher percentages of very liberal respondents having some degree of sympathy or tolerance for political violence than their conservative counterparts. 

When UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated, a YouGov poll found that 41% of those aged between 18 and 29 found his murder “completely” or “somewhat” acceptable. The alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, was hailed in some quarters as a vigilante hero and even a sex symbol. Donations flowed into his GoFundMe. The left-wing social media influencer Taylor Lorenz professed to feel “joy,” or at least a lack of “empathy,” for Thompson’s murder. Why? The former New York Times and Washington Post reporter responded that Thompson had himself “murdered” some “tens of thousands of Americans.”

Lorenz is referring here to denied insurance claims and broader problems in the U.S. healthcare system, though it is unclear how she arrived at those particular numbers. Hasan Piker, whom the New York Times dusted off to wax eloquently about Kirk’s assassination on its opinion pages, has similarly described acts of capitalism as capital crimes. “Kill them! Kill those motherf***ers! Murder those motherf***ers in the streets! Let the streets soak in their red capitalist bloods!” he said of California landlords.

In Kirk’s case, it was his speech that was considered violent by some on the radical Left. If you subscribe to that view, it becomes easy to justify literal violence against a speaker as a form of self-defense.

It’s absolutely the case that the targets of political violence are not one-sided. The former Minnesota state House speaker who was assassinated in June was a Democrat, as is Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), whose home was attacked by an arsonist while his family was sleeping. 

“We are at an inflection point in America,” Shapiro wrote on social media after Kirk was assassinated and Trump announced he would move against radical leftists in response. “Violence transcends party lines — and the way to address it and have true peaceful debate is for leaders to speak and act with moral clarity. That needs to start with the President.”

But there wasn’t the same online celebration of the violence against Shapiro or the murder of Melissa Hortman as was seen in connection with Kirk and Thompson. Conservatives roundly condemned the attack on the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion. The alleged anti-Shapiro arsonist, who struck on Passover, was at least partly motivated by his rejection of Israel’s war in Gaza — a view that is still much more widely held on the Left than on the Right.

The studies that purport to show right-wing violence to be more common than the left-wing variety normally aren’t limited to political violence at all. Murders committed by white nationalist prison gangs are a serious social problem, but they are not really political assassinations. While hyper-online progressives may see little difference between genuine white racists and the typical Trump supporter, there was no conservative equivalent to Taylor Lorenz defending white supremacist Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof. (And that is without denying that conservative social media influencer culture has its own problems with conspiracy theories, grifting, and flirtations with racism.)

POLITICAL VIOLENCE ON THE RISE IN THE US: A TIMELINE OF KEY INCIDENTS

No political faction has a monopoly on evil or deranged people. Normal political actors cannot be held responsible for everything a crazed extremist might do in their name or in response to their words. But they do have a responsibility to recognize it and police their own ranks.

Trump is not by his nature a unifying figure. He is also responding to the hurt and fear felt by his own supporters, whose emotional needs after the Kirk murder are different than those of his opponents. But it is going to fall on Democratic leaders to lower the temperature on their own side because they, not Trump, have the credibility to speak to these people. The question is whether they even know it is currently running hot.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.