The American Left Is In Thrall To Political Violence. It Has To Be Destroyed
John Daniel Davidson Visit on Twitter@johnddavidson
Left-wing political violence won’t end unless it’s actively stopped. We are not going to argue our way to peace.
In the immediate aftermath of the fourth assassination attempt on President Trump this past weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we heard the familiar chorus of voices in the corporate media and political establishment calling for calm, for unity, for lowering the temperature, toning down the rhetoric. We heard the same thing after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, and after Trump was shot in the face by a would-be assassin on the campaign trail in July 2024.
As always, the people saying this pretend it’s a “both sides” problem, that the political left and right are both at risk of becoming dangerously violent, and that for the sake of our democracy we all need to calm down.
What nonsense. There is only one side in America today that has a persistent and very real-world problem with political violence, and everyone knows it’s the left.
It’s the left that has produced four would-be assassins of President Trump. It’s the left that produced Charlie Kirk’s assassin and the sneering online hordes who celebrated his murder. It’s the left that produced Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood, and overnight became a folk hero to his fellow travelers.
The left riots and burns down cities in a way that makes Jan. 6 look tame, and the corporate press justifies it as a form of political speech. The left regularly threatens conservative speakers and events, forcing organizers to provide a level of security that liberal events never need. The left foments violence not just by spreading false propaganda about conservatives but by funding the supposed right-wing extremists they warn about, as the recent federal criminal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown.
Surveys consistently find a shocking tolerance for political violence among left-leaning Americans that simply is not present on the right. A YouGov poll last year found a whopping 42 percent of self-described liberals believe political violence is sometimes justifiable (only 9 percent of conservatives said the same). An April 2025 Rutgers University study on political violence found that 56 percent of self-identifying left-wing respondents justified murdering Trump, while 50 percent said the same of Elon Musk. If these numbers were reversed, and showed massive support for political violence on the right, it’s all the corporate press would talk about.
As it is, the press won’t even admit the left’s predilection for political violence, even though the reality of it is borne out nearly every week — and not just in the form of trans mass shooters targeting Christian schoolchildren and churches. When Jimmy Kimmel’s show was briefly suspended last year following Kimmel’s vile commentary on Kirk’s assassination (including his false assertion that Kirk’s assassin was MAGA), a man shot up an ABC affiliate station in Sacramento. To be clear, the alleged shooter (a former legislative director for the California Federation of Teachers) was outraged at ABC for suspending Kimmel, not at Kimmel for lying about Kirk’s assassin.