Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Should Herald The End Of The American Left
John Daniel Davidson Visit on Twitter @johnddavidson
Back in April, Charlie Kirk posted on X about how assassination culture is spreading on the left. He cited a recent survey that found 48 percent of liberals think it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk, and 55 percent think the same of President Trump.
“The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response,” Kirk said. “This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb.”
His words then now seem darkly prophetic in light of his assassination Wednesday at Utah Valley University. If the left was a ticking time bomb before Kirk’s murder, we can now say that the bomb has gone off. The assassin reportedly engraved transgender and antifascist slogans on the bullets in the rifle he used to kill Kirk, confirming what everyone already knew, that Kirk’s assassination was motivated by radical leftist ideology. This dark fruit came from the deliberate cultivation of violence by the institutional left as a political strategy.
That’s what Kirk was getting at in his X post. Those in positions of authority — in public schools and universities, in the media, in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood and Silicon Valley — have for many years encouraged and themselves engaged in violent political rhetoric, and at times openly endorsed political violence. Why? Because violence is at the center of the left’s political project.
As my colleague Mark Hemingway detailed earlier this week, former President Barack Obama’s disingenuous statement that “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk,” rings hollow precisely because Obama’s entire political career sprang from his close association with violent, unrepentant left-wing terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of The Weather Underground. Obama might pretend not to know what motivated Kirk’s assassin, but he certainly knew what motivated Ayers and Dohrn, and he not only didn’t have a problem with that, he also didn’t think his association with them disqualified him from mainstream Democratic politics. But now we’re supposed to take Obama’s denunciations of political violence seriously? I don’t think so.
There is no place in this country for Obama-style political leftism that pretends to abhor violence while tacitly and rhetorically embracing it. It’s not an overstatement to say that the politics of Ayers and Obama and the mainstream political left in America created the shooter who killed Kirk. Left-wing politics in this country has always been violent. As Hemingway noted, for an 18-month period in 1971-’72, left-wing terrorists set off nearly five bombs a day in American cities. That’s in addition to armed attacks like the 1981 Brink’s truck robbery The Weather Underground carried out with the Black Liberation Army, killing two cops and a security guard in the process.