By Dan McLaughlin
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
After Tuesday’s press conference by Utah County Attorney Jeffrey
Gray laying out extensive excerpts from text messages that Charlie Kirk’s
alleged killer sent to his transgender romantic partner, as well as other
evidence collected in the investigation regarding his reasoning for deciding
that “I had enough of his hatred,” progressive commentators are in a bind.
Their collective push to deny that the killer acted out of
left-leaning political motives has collapsed. Sure, they can still get gullible
people who don’t read widely to buy that the assassin might have been a
white-supremacist “groyper,” or just to focus on the fact that his family
members were conservative, religious Republicans (as if young leftists aren’t
often people angrily alienated from their families). But anybody who deals even
glancingly in facts and evidence, and who ventures outside of the left-wing
bubble, is going to know that it’s dishonest agitprop.
That effort was always a high-risk play. Sure, before we
knew the details, it was possible that Kirk’s killer could have come
from the far right, but it was never the likeliest outcome, and the people
pushing the narrative had to bet heavily on him never being caught (this is the
strategy that has allowed some of them to continue, three years later,
to claim that the Supreme Court Dobbs leak must have been the work of a
conservative). They were also betting on the Katrina media strategy: If you can swarm enough voices
saying the same thing, you can create the appearance of a set of facts before
the evidence is available, and that’s all people will remember. They may not be
wrong that this will work with some audiences. There are still liberals
who paint John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the result of a “climate of hate”
in Dallas in November 1963, even 62 years after we learned that he was killed
by a guy who literally defected to the Soviet Union.
So, instead we get the sort of message offered
by Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, the chief deputy whip of the Democrats’ Senate
caucus: “What f***ing difference does it make if this murderer was left or
right. Pull yourself together, read a book, get some exercise, have a whiskey
or walk the dog or make some pasta or go fishing or just do anything other than
let this algo pickle your brain and ruin your soul.” If you’ve followed cable
news and social media, you’ve heard an increasing chorus of such sentiments,
which call to mind the king of Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy
Grail: “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who!”
Now, as a general matter, I’ve long argued that we should blame political violence on the
violent, not on people who happen to share their political views, even if those
people use very heated rhetoric. Speech isn’t violence, and unless you directly
advocate for its use, it also isn’t to blame for violence. Similarly, when it
comes to the “manifestos” of deranged school shooters and assassins, I’ve
argued that we should not name them or publish their views at all.
These are unwell people who do this sort of thing for glory, so we should deny
them that platform.
I still believe those things. But there are a couple of
sound reasons why they are not a good argument for squelching or dismissing all
discussion of the motives of Kirk’s assassin.
One, of course, is just accuracy: History should reflect
the difference between deliberate, calculated political assassinations and the
works of madmen. As Charlie Cooke noted the other day on The Editors podcast, our history books would do a
disservice if they treated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by a
white racist as if it were as motiveless a crime as the attempted assassination
of Ronald Reagan by a guy who was apolitical and too unbalanced to be given a
prison sentence. Other than the act itself, we have thus far seen no reason to
believe that Kirk’s assassin was suffering from grave mental illness; to the
contrary, he pursued a calculated (if amateur) plan to carry out the killing,
escape, and hide the evidence; he concealed what he was doing from people close
to him; and his own text messages show that he thought he would get away with
the crime.
We’ve seen a number of political assassinations,
attempts, or assaults in recent years by people who were clearly much more
mentally deranged than they were coherently political. These include the
assassin of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, the gunman who shot
Representative Gabby Giffords and killed federal chief district judge John
Roll, and the vagrant who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul. There are
other cases, including the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in
Pennsylvania, where the line between politics and madness has been hard to draw
from fragmentary sources.
Of course, Democrats and their media sympathizers have
applied wild double standards: In 2022, I noted their criticisms of Republicans merely for continuing
to run ads against Pelosi, and contrasted this with Pelosi’s own furious
response when left-wing motives were blamed in connection with the left-wing
shooter who tried to assassinate multiple Republicans at the congressional
baseball practice, including Steve Scalise. Then, Pelosi sounded like Schatz
now: “I think that the comments made by my Republican colleagues are
outrageous, beneath the dignity of the job that they hold, beneath the dignity
of the respect that we would like Congress to command. How dare they say such
thing? How dare they?”
That double standard is not an isolated incident. (Nor is the urge to change the subject
to gun control when a leftist commits murder with a gun, but that’s another
story).
There is, however, a more serious reason than mere
truthfulness to care that Charlie Kirk was killed by someone who opposed his
political views from his left. That reason is that the left has a set of ideas
and assumptions about political violence that are embedded in public policy
decisions, news coverage, and campus administration. If those ideas and
assumptions are false, then that matters quite a lot. And they are, in fact,
false.
The assumption — sometimes stated, sometimes implied — is that people on the right are
more prone to politically tinged violence than are people on the left, and that
the ideas, rhetoric, and organizations on the right are more prone to trigger
violence than are those on the left. This concept is embedded, for example, in the term “stochastic terrorism,” which equates heated
speech on the right — but only on the right — with incitement to
violence even if the speaker does not in any way advocate violence. These ideas
are just too dangerous, you see, because those people are so suggestible
and combustible.
These assumptions get embedded in efforts to apply
greater suppression and control to right-leaning speech, whether labeled as
“misinformation” or “hate speech.” They get embedded in law enforcement
priorities such as having the FBI produce reports warning that we should track
traditional Catholics or school-board protesters rather than left-leaning
causes and groups. They get embedded in decisions to bring criminal charges
(including some of the charges against Donald Trump in the January 6 cases)
that assume that the First Amendment test for incitement doesn’t
need to be met in order to connect inflammatory speech to subsequent
rioting. They are implicit in decisions not to charge left-wing rioters as
harshly as the January 6 crowd, or to treat forcible incursions by left-wingers to stop legislatures
from meeting as harmless, even admirable, while stripping a Republican legislator of voting power over a
Facebook post on the theory that it could prove dangerous. Over and over,
Democrats premise policy on the assumption that one side’s speech and ideas
pose a greater risk of causing violence than the other’s.
The desperate desire to protect these assumptions from
being challenged is plainly a driver of the intensity with which the left has
circled the wagons to deny the motivation for the killing of Kirk, the
best-known American political figure in decades to be assassinated. That’s not
to say that Kirk, a private citizen, was more politically important than
Hortman, or Roll, or Harvey Milk, or a number of other judges and public
officials killed over the past half-century. But he may well be the most famous
political figure in the country to be assassinated since Robert F. Kennedy, in
addition to being one of the youngest victims of political assassination in our
history. It leaves a big hole to fill. So, it’s entirely natural that his
death should provoke some serious thought about what drove it.
And the left’s assumptions are nonsense. From Kirk to the
congressional baseball shooting to the still-being-celebrated killing of the
UnitedHealthcare CEO to the murder of Israeli Embassy employees in D.C. to the planned assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the
George Floyd riots and on and on and on and on, going back to the 1970s-era florid campaigns of
bombings, hijackings, and kidnappings, and the biggest crime in the history of my hometown, the roster
of sensational violent crimes committed in the name of left-leaning ideas,
causes, and grievances is extensive. The notion fostered by liberals and
progressives that somehow our people are not violent like their people
in this way is arrant nonsense that ought to be banished from how we make
government policy, from how news is reported, and from how our educational
institutions are run. No amount of telling us to avert our eyes should be
expected to work this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment