Sometimes one sentence can be immensely clarifying.
Several years ago, when I worked at National Review, I was speaking to my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty on a podcast about a familiar and depressing topic: partisan blindness. Why, when we can we see the evil in the opposition so clearly, are we blind to our own faults?
When my opponents do something wrong, that’s emblematic, Michael said, but when my allies do something wrong, that’s exceptional.
Here’s what he meant. If, say, you’re a highly partisan Republican, you will often look at corruption and acts of violence by your partisan opponents and say, “That’s just what the left does” or “That’s what leftism leads to.” Corruption and violence reveals the left’s true nature.
If a right-leaning extremist commits an act of violence — or if a Republican is brazenly corrupt — then the response is different. “Every orchard has a few bad apples” or “How dare you compare me to that terrible person?” or “Normal Republicans are nothing like that.”
As a result, no matter the facts of the moment, you end up mad at the opposition. If a left-leaning assassin kills a Republican, then you’re angry because the left is violent. If a right-leaning assassin kills a Democrat, then you’re angry because the left blames the right for what is obviously an evil individual act.
Online algorithms magnify the problem. They recognize that you are hungry for content that amplifies every bad act by your political enemies and that you hate to read or see any form of attack on your friends, so you live in a carefully curated false reality.
As a result, no matter the direction of the tragedy, the end result is the same — the right grows angrier at the left, and the left grows angrier at the right.
You see this exact phenomenon unfolding in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Take, for example, this statement from Matt Walsh, a popular podcaster at The Daily Wire, one of the largest media outlets on the right: “Charlie tried to have conversations with you on the left, and you killed him for it.”
Walsh went on: “You’re killing us in our churches, you tried to kill our president, you killed one of our greatest advocates in Charlie Kirk. You have been openly cheering for and celebrating and encouraging and committing political violence for years.”
“It’s too late to turn the temperature down,” he added. “This is not a time to hold hands. It’s a time for justice. This is a time for good to fight back against evil. It is time for the righteous to prevail.”
Blake Masters, a former Republican candidate for Senate and an ally of JD Vance and Peter Thiel, posted on X, “There is no ‘both sides’ here. The political aggression and taste for violence against innocent people are all coming from the left.”
John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist, a right-wing outlet online, wrote, “The left is a violent revolutionary movement that wants all those who oppose it dead. It’s incompatible with American constitutionalism. Charlie Kirk’s assassination should confirm what we already should have known: We cannot share a country with the left.”
This line of thinking leads in one direction — rationalizing extreme measures in response. In an interview on “Fox and Friends” Friday morning, President Trump responded to a question about radicalism on both the left and right by saying: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime.” Trump continued, “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.’”
But wait. Can’t someone on the left mount a similar indictment of the right? In the last decade, we’ve watched as right-wing extremists commit mass murder in synagogues and shopping centers. We’ve seen a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband assassinated in their own home.
We’ve seen hard-right militants plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Conspiracy theories have led to armed attacks on government buildings and even a pizza place.
In fact, a person on the left might argue, the data is clear — over the last decade, right-wing extremists have killed far more people than left-wing extremists.
We’ve watched threats escalate against public officials at all levels, and we’ve watched as MAGA has inflicted a reign of terror against local election officials and school board members who dare to defy its will.
And we’ve watched a right-wing mob occupy the Capitol, brutally beat police officers, and attempt to overturn the result of a presidential election because they didn’t like the outcome.
If anyone pretends that the right doesn’t celebrate political violence against the left, let’s remember that none other than the sitting president of the United States would sometimes begin his political rallies with a performance of the national anthem by the “J6 Prison Choir,” a group of people imprisoned because they stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf.
On Friday, Megan McArdle, a columnist at The Washington Post, wrote on X, “One thing that’s clear from the online debate over whether the left or the right is more violent is that many people have an encyclopedic command of the attacks perpetrated by the other side, and have memory-holed attacks by their co-ideologists.”
She’s right, and this isn’t a harmless error. If we’re convinced that political violence comes from only one side of the divide, then the temptation toward punitive authoritarianism is overwhelming. “They” are evil and violent, and “they” must be crushed.
If, however, we accurately understand that America has an immense problem with violent extremism on both sides of the ideological aisle — even if, at any given moment, one side is worse than the other — then the answer lies in reconciliation, not domination. In fact, it’s the will to dominate that magnifies the crisis and radicalizes our opponents.
Confirmation bias is entirely human. We screen out negative information about our side because we so desperately want to see ourselves as good people, fighting hard in a righteous struggle. It’s not just that we believe our ideas are better, but that we are better — we possess higher character and better values than the people on the other side.
The truth, however, tends to complicate simple narratives, and in the United States the truth is grim. Violent acts aren’t uniting our nation in introspection, grief and grace — they’re separating us into warring factions.
It was a shattering thing for me to realize that the Republican Party had no moral firewalls against nominating a man like Donald Trump. I’d spent years laboring under the false belief that character mattered to Republicans, and — specifically — that it mattered more to Republicans than Democrats.
The destruction of that illusion was a painful thing, but I’m grateful to know the truth. To get past this dreadful moment, more and more Americans are going to have to face a painful fact. Evil isn’t confined to one side of the American divide. There are monsters in your midst, too.
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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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