Liberals in the media and the Democratic Party, if they want to regain the trust of the non-Left public, ought to use the week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a case study into their various pathologies.
They believe the other side is evil, they rely on “disinformation experts” (the term makes one’s eyes roll), and they are unwilling to believe anyone right of center. These foibles led to many prominent public figures peddling a conspiracy theory that Kirk’s assassin was a Republican, right-winger, or MAGA type.
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These weren’t random anonymous liberals on Twitter and your #resistance-cringe aunt who fell for it. Well, your aunt did fall for it, but not only her.
Jerry Dunleavy of Just the News collected the hall of shame of prominent Democrats and liberal commentators peddling these ideas.
Jimmy Kimmel most famously implied that the killer was a MAGA type. Democratic Congressman Dave Min, D-CA, said “the Charlie Kirk assassin has been identified as MAGA.”
Keith Olbermann called the killer “ultra-right, gun-nut Republican-raised” troll. Prominent liberal commentators Jemele Hill, Julia Ioffe, David Shuster,
“A white Christian, Conservative, Republican male with a gun… again,” said liberal actor Billy Baldwin.
A left-wing influencer with 200,000 Twitter followers claimed “Charlie Kirk was killed by A White American CIS Male Christian Conservative Republican.”
The full list of prominent libs to fall for this myth would take up too many words. What’s interesting is how this happened.
Jemele Hill arguably was the Typhoid Mary of this conspiracy theory, and the details of her posts are telling: “the LA Times spoke with an expert (imagine that!) about the markings on the killer’s bullet casings and turns out … Charlie Kirk likely was the victim of a white supremacist gang hit. Well, well, well.”
This is the Left’s self-image: They are the ones who “trust the science” and “rely on the experts.” Hill’s smug “imagine that!” is almost a parody of this mindset.
If you are not stuck in this intellectual cloister, you might ask, did they talk to a bullet-casing-marking expert? An expert on white-supremacist etchings? Someone who studied the casings?
No.
The L.A. Times spoke to an assistant professor of journalism at Boston University who also presents herself as a “disinformation” expert. When Facebook took down its fact-checking program, this assistant professor, Joan Donovan, called it “the making of a mafia state.”
Back in 2020, Donovan was called in as a disinformation expert to say that the New York Post’s reports from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “really hard to believe.” She praised Facebook and Twitter for “throttling and outright suppressing false stories that directly link to the election.”
So this is the expert the L.A. Times called on to tell them who the real killer was.
But peddling this story, that the shooter was right-wing, required rejecting the findings of Utah law enforcement, as relayed by Gov. Spencer Cox.
THE SHODDY EFFORT TO PIN POLITICAL VIOLENCE ON THE RIGHT
Cox is no MAGA-head. Nobody laid out a case that he is not credible. But he’s a conservative Republican, and so media outlets felt comfortable dismissing his findings, and leaning instead on their “experts” in Boston.
If liberals and Democrats wanted to take a lesson from this episode, they would (1) be a lot more humble, (2) rely less on experts who use the word “disinformation,” and (3) consider, just once in a while, maybe the other side isn’t as evil as they assume.