From the moment an assassin shot Charlie Kirk, my social-media feed began filling up with people decrying the attack. The sentiment of horror—both at the murder itself and at what it portended for American political culture—was overwhelming and cross-ideological.
From the pro–Donald Trump conservatives in my timeline, however, I detected another sort of response. Although most expressed genuine grief at the tragedy befalling a figure many of them admired or knew, some others seemed preoccupied with proving that “the left” was celebrating the attack.
The challenge, for this cohort, is that Democratic Party leaders were united in condemnation of the attack on Kirk and political violence generally. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a gleeful pugilist who has made a brand out of aping the president’s disordered egomaniacal communication style, wrote, “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.” Zohran Mamdani, a New York City mayoral candidate so left-wing that many Democratic leaders refuse to endorse him, wrote, “I’m horrified by the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah. Political violence has no place in our country.”
And so, in the absence of evidence of any serious strain of liberal support for the Charlie Kirk murder, some influential voices on the right willed one into existence. They hunted the internet for expressions of support for Kirk’s murder, or even insufficient remorse, a search that yielded almost exclusively random private citizens.
Andy Ngo, a right-wing journalist with 1.7 million followers on X, produced offensive posts from such figures as the owner of an animal hospital in Oklahoma, a wealth manager in Pennsylvania, and grade-school teachers in Oregon and Idaho. The conservative Washington Free Beacon published one story about a post by a University of Michigan professor, and another about posts by a former Columbia-encampment organizer who notoriously endorsed the murder of Zionists and has long since been expelled from the school. An entire website, titled Charlie’s Murderers, was established to collect alleged pro-murder sentiment; as Wired reported, some of the posts it displayed had in fact been written before Kirk’s killing.
Some conservatives treated the anonymity of these scattered pro-violence posters as evidence of the breadth of their views. “The number of people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death who work as teachers, nurses, psychologists, social workers, and other ‘helping professions’ is immensely disturbing,” the right-wing activist Chris Rufo posted on X. “We have a serious problem in this country.”
No question, some social-media posts about Kirk are genuinely grotesque. That anyone would celebrate Kirk’s death is sad. But in a nation of more than 300 million people, there is no offensive opinion you can’t find if you go looking for it. If support for Kirk’s assassination were a significant current of thought on the American left, right-wing journalists would call out the prominent people expressing glee. Because that’s not happening, they have to publish articles about random individuals.
Indeed, the fact that attention is being focused on such examples—and not on actual Democratic Party officeholders or major voices on the left—shows that the party has a healthy culture of marginalizing illiberal and violent sentiments. Thus the outpouring of condemnations, and thus too the bitterness that divides radical-left activists from the Democratic Party. This divide reflects a major structural difference between the two parties: The far left reviles the Democrats and their leaders, whereas right-wing activists worship Donald Trump.
Yet the Republican Party’s fanatical devotion to Trump requires an insistence that it is responding to a greater and more insidious form of fanaticism on the left. Positing a totalitarian and violent left-wing threat is necessary to justify Trump’s own behavior.
Many mainstream Republicans and legacy conservative outlets have behaved more responsibly, acknowledging that violent tendencies exist on the right and left alike. “The time for unity, the time for peace, it is now,” said Alabama Senator Katie Britt. “At some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox pleaded this morning.
But a far more intemperate mood is equally if not more prevalent. “The left wants us dead,” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted to his 3.8 million followers. “Face the facts, and act accordingly.” On the House floor, Representative Bob Onder, of Missouri, declared, “There is no longer any middle ground. Some on the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people, but their ideology is pure evil.” In a New York Post op-ed, the writer Batya Ungar-Sargon accused Democrats, whose political leaders unequivocally denounced Kirk’s assassination, of nonetheless “doubling down on the rhetoric that led to it.” Her evidence? They had condemned violence without admitting that “the vast majority of the political violence in this country is coming from their side.” (All of these comments, it should be said, came before any information whatsoever was known about the suspect.)
Yesterday, I wrote an article about Trump’s disturbing response to Kirk’s killing. I noted that, rather than calling for unity and calm, the president delivered an address in which he defined political violence as an exclusively left-wing problem, attributed it to the entire political opposition, and threatened the use of state power to suppress it. Even though the first sentence of my article described the murder as a “horrifying, cold-blooded assassination,” right-wing accounts began circulating screenshots of the headline as if it showed that I was celebrating Kirk’s death or calling for more violence. “This is absolutely vile. People like @jonathanchait are contributing to the vitriol and political violence that are ravaging our country,” Senator Marsha Blackburn posted.
These sorts of reactions might be forgivable if they were merely overheated expressions of an impulse to delegitimize political violence. But the purpose of this rhetoric is not to vilify political violence. It is to equate political violence with everyone perceived as being to the left of the Republican Party, so as to simultaneously delegitimize opposition to Trump while excusing even the most illiberal and violent forms of right-wing activity.
That was the unmistakable message of Trump’s Oval Office remarks Wednesday evening. But, in case anyone missed it, he made the point even clearer during a Fox & Friends appearance this morning. After one of the hosts posited, “We have radicals on the right as well,” and suggested that this was part of the challenge facing the country, Trump disputed the premise. “The radicals on the right are often radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said. “They don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.’ The radicals on the left are the problem.”
First by omission, and now by commission, Trump is coming within a whisker of doing the exact thing that some of his allies are accusing “the left” of doing: justifying violence against his enemies. Much of the right is focusing on pro-violence statements by pet-hospital owners in Oklahoma while ignoring them by the world’s most powerful person. That is not blindness. It is a choice.
The post Leading Democrats Are Condemning Charlie Kirk’s Murder appeared first on The Atlantic.
