By Becket Adams
Sunday, September 21, 2025
In the days following the assassination of conservative
activist Charlie Kirk, members of the Democratic Party and the press have
complained that the right is not doing more to promote unity.
Unity would be nice, sure. You first.
“At moments like this, when tensions are high, then part
of the job of the president is to pull people together,” former President Barack Obama told an audience last week.
“Whether we’re Democrats, Republicans, independents, we
have to recognize that on both sides, undoubtedly, there are people who are
extremists and who say things that are contrary to what I believe are America’s
core values,” he said. “But I will say that those extreme views were not in my
White House. I wasn’t embracing them. I wasn’t empowering them. I wasn’t
putting the weight of the United States government behind extremist views. And
that . . . when we have the weight of the United States government behind
extremist views, we’ve got a problem.”
Obama then said, “My view was that part of the role of
the presidency is to constantly remind us of the ties that bind us together.”
That he may sincerely believe those words would be
laughable were it not the modus operandi of the Democratic Party and its media
allies to invent alternate realities in which their people are forever the
heroic and faultless champions of lofty ideals.
The Obama White House, alas, did not represent bipartisan
comity. His administration was hardly respectful toward all viewpoints or
mindful of constitutional rights. The Obama White House used the Espionage Act
against U.S. reporters who refused to give up their sources, it secretly
obtained phone records from the Associated Press, it oversaw a weaponized IRS
that targeted conservative groups, and it turned the entire intelligence
apparatus against the 2016 GOP presidential nominee.
We’re talking here about President “I want you to argue with them and get in their face” Obama,
who, at a memorial service in 2016 for five murdered police officers, chose to scold law enforcement, saying, “With an open heart, police
departments will acknowledge that, just like the rest of us, they are not
perfect; that insisting we do better to root out racial bias is not an attack
on cops, but an effort to live up to our highest ideals.” (Give the man credit:
At least he managed something less glib than “acted
stupidly.”)
How does one achieve unity with a man who lives in a
fantasy land, where his opponents are the only ones responsible for political
division? This goes well beyond just one man’s delusions and high self-regard;
it’s a party-wide problem.
An especially loathsome example involves the tragic
killing of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband,
State Senator John Hoffman. Many on the left insist they were the victims of
right-wing political extremism — except that the man who allegedly murdered the
couple appears to be an insane person, not an ideologically motivated assassin.
Yet the myth persists anyway in Democratic and media
circles that Vance Boelter was a right-wing hit man, and that the Minnesota
murders are a comparable rejoinder to the right’s anger over the targeted
slaying of the Turning Point USA founder.
In response to Senator Ted Cruz saying Boelter “was not a
right-wing assassin” but was instead a “deranged lunatic,” Vox co-founder
Matthew Yglesias asserted, “Very prominent conservative people — sitting United
States Senators, not anons on social media — keep lying about the assassination
of a Democratic Party elected official, the murder of her husband, and the
shooting of another elected official.”
He added, “I get that [Charlie Kirk] was dramatically
more famous than any state legislator (and the majority of members of congress)
in America, but assassinating politicians is actually a very big deal and the
inability of leading voices on the right to get basic facts straight is
troubling.”
It’s the absolute certainty with which they assert
versions of reality that don’t exist, from “men can get pregnant” (they can’t)
to “crime in the nation’s capital was under control before Trump stepped in”
(it wasn’t) to “there wasn’t a crisis at the border during the Biden
presidency” (there was), that is so disturbing.
Voting records indicate that Boelter once supported
Republicans, including President Trump, but by 2019, he was officially listed
as having no party affiliation. When he was apprehended, the alleged gunman had
a hit list featuring Democratic lawmakers. He was also found with anti-Trump
rally paraphernalia. More importantly, Boelter wrote letters claiming that
Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had ordered him to assassinate state and
federal lawmakers, and that he had been secretly “trained by U.S. Military
people off the books starting in college.”
In other words, the right is as responsible for the
Minnesota murders as Jimmy Carter is for Son of Sam, which is to say not at
all.
Yet, here we are, being lectured about the dangers of
right-wing extremism and rhetoric. This isn’t even the worst of it. The worst
is that Democrats are clearly using those murders to avoid engaging in
uncomfortable conversations about Kirk’s assassination. Even Obama used
Minnesota to draw fire away from last week’s assassination.
“Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum,
what happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy,” Obama said. “What
happened . . . to the state legislators in Minnesota, that is horrific.”
Curiously, Obama hadn’t said anything publicly about the
Minnesota slayings until it became necessary to “both sides” the targeted
killing of Kirk. Not even on Twitter/X, where he has memorialized the passings
of Robert Redford and Chicago Cubs star Ryne Sandberg, had Obama mentioned what
happened in Minnesota. It was only last week, after Kirk was murdered, that the
former president felt compelled to acknowledge Hortman and Hoffman.
Even in the Kirk case, some on the left have deluded
themselves into believing that the assassin, who appears to have been left-wing
and was living with his gender-transitioning boyfriend at the time of the
killing, is actually a right-wing MAGA type and that the
assassination was a “white
supremacist gang hit.”
How is unity possible? How does one unite with a group
whose media patrons will, despite readily available evidence, contradict and
deny the facts staring them right in the face, as NBC News’ ironically
titled “disinformation” reporter Brandy Zadrozny did last week when she
claimed that the idea that left-wingers are celebrating Kirk’s murder is “the
total opposite of what’s actually happening”?
How does one unite with a group whose base includes
people who celebrate murder and whose ideological allies will simply write it
off as people having bad opinions, as The Atlantic’s Jonathan
Chait did last week?
“In the absence of evidence of any serious strain of
liberal support for the Charlie Kirk murder,” said Chait, “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.”
No one had to “hunt.” The celebratory notices and dances
performed by people using their real names and faces, many of whom are everyday
professionals (such as teachers, veterinarians, and nurses), have practically
flooded social media.
Unity? With this?
Not everyone on the left has been so vile; a number of
voices were properly appalled by the killing and have sought to turn the
temperature down. But the left has a wing of fanatical foot soldiers who
evidently enjoy it when people on the right are killed, and no one in
leadership or positions of influence appears willing to acknowledge it, let
alone rein it in. Ask anyone on the left, from the most vanilla lawmaker to a
Pol Pot–lite podcaster, about left-wing violence, and you’ll get one of five
responses (or some combination):
1. What
violence?
2. The
violence is actually right-wing.
3. White
supremacy is worse.
4. It
wasn’t violence; it was justice.
5. Now
is the time for unity.
How does one seek unity with a group that cannot
acknowledge the faults and dangers on its own side?
Unity would be nice, sure. You first.
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