What If We Acted Like Political Violence Was a Problem?
De-escalation is that much harder, yet even more necessary, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's brutal assassination.
What would you do if you believed that the United States has a growing and volatile problem with political violence?
That question, as we relearned to our horror with Wednesday's assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, is no longer rhetorical or academic. There have been too many snipers at rallies, too many home invasions of public officials, too many ambushes at government institutions, and too many intentional escalations at public demonstrations, to wave this trend off as statistical noise, coming as it has against a backdrop of plummeting societal trust and sustained Manichean hyperbole about the existential threat of the political Other.
So, what would you do about it? How would you act? As in most things, there is no one, true answer to the prompt; it depends on your vantage point, predilections, and station in life.
President Donald Trump, I think, was on the right track Wednesday night, if foreshadowingly tilting toward primary causality, when he posited, "It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year."
Some on the political left have spent the better part of a decade demonizing Trump and his fellow travelers (Kirk was a supporter and friend) as possibly fascist authoritarians who either seek or turn a willfully blind eye to the deaths of their political opponents and other citizens. The cover of The New Republic on newsstands the day Trump was nicked by an assassin's bullet was an image of him with a Hitler mustache over the words "American fascism." Joe Biden during the COVID-19 pandemic accused "Republican governors in states like Texas and Florida" of "playing politics with the lives of their citizens, especially children." Trans activist Samuel Theodore Cain, a.k.a. Roxie Wolfe, was arrested four months ago and charged with threatening the life of a public official after posting on X, "I'm going to assassinate Representative Nancy Mace with a gun and I'm being 100% dead ass," in the wake of Mace's repeated criticisms of "the radical trans movement."
As the great, pseudonymous American car-identifier Dave "Iowahawk" Burge posted on X Wednesday, "Stop normalizing violence. The first step is to stop framing anybody who disagrees with you an existential threat."
Alas, Trump and his supporters, both long before and immediately after Kirk's murder, could not resist some existential threat-inflation and demonization of their own.
"For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals," the president said. "This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country."
To the contrary: The responsibility for Kirk's killing, as in basically all acts of political violence, does not flow "directly" from political rhetoric, no matter how vile, but rather from the finger of the sniper; motives and mental state to hopefully be determined later. And all of Trump's cited examples of violence were left-wingers targeting either conservatives or businessmen or law enforcement; nothing about the assassination this June of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D–Brooklyn Park), no word about the 2022 skull-fracturing home-invasion hammer-attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul (which Trump has serially joked about); and certainly full radio silence on the multiple assaults on law enforcement committed by Trump's own supporters on January 6, 2021.
A person truly committed to blunting the rise of political violence in a two-party country would look to physical and rhetorical examples emanating from both major blocs, beginning with the twin riotousness of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 and the ransacking of the Capitol on January 6. Trump's blanket pardon of even violent J-6 convicts precluded that conversation on the right; meanwhile, there's little evidence of the cultural left being willing to grapple with the madness of 2020, while murderous psychos like Luigi Mangione and Hamas get way too much love.
Perhaps understandably, if not quite justifiably, people on the right grieving over Kirk used that moment to go more blanket, more shrill, and even more threateningly violent toward them. "The Left is the party of murder," Elon Musk wrote. Fox host Jesse Watters on Wednesday asserted that, "They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?" Self-described "Libertarian, GMU Econ, Writer and Think Tanker" Simon Laird declared, "I'm done with de-escalation. I'm done with compromise," adding: "Killing a few dozen Federal judges and New York Times journalists would have an effect. I'm not calling for violence at this time, but I'm done with the idea that violence is not an option on the negotiation table."
The most important thing about Charlie Kirk's assassination is not the threat of further bloody escalation, but the sickening death of a young father who had fashioned a remarkably successful career around the belief that vigorous political discourse was the necessary preventer of political violence. That, and not various whataboutisms and what-ifs, should be heartbroken reaction enough, and for most normal people, I'm sure that's true.
But for those who are tempted to throw more hands, for those playing the "yeah, but" game about Kirk's allegedly beyond-the-pale beliefs, for those LARPing about some imagined future where the Virtuous side of this struggle manages, through force, to defeat the Bad—ask yourself honestly: Is this how the political violence ends?
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Please join Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie while they discuss Charlie Kirk's murder and rising violence in U.S. politics today at 2:30pm ET on September 11, 2025.
