Yes, But...

The Left's reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder is the measure of its responsibility for it

Can you believe it? Some jerk here on Substack had the unmitigated gall to denounce Erika Kirk’s homage to her late husband as “irresponsible.”

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Democrats, progressives, the Resistance, et al, are not guilty of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They do not, as the saying goes, have blood on their hands. That guilt is reserved for the person who squeezed the trigger, along with anyone who may have aided and abetted Kirk’s murder. But where guilt is absent, responsibility may remain, and I am of the opinion that Democrats, progressives, the Resistance, et al, bear significant responsibility for Kirk’s death and for the upsurge of political violence we’ve witnessed in recent years.

Not long ago Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate, delivered an intemperate tirade in which he called President Donald Trump “fascist to the core.” This is comical in a way: I’m confident that Walz, a prize buffoon if ever there was one, has no better understanding of fascism than I have of the Unified Field Theory. But he’s not the only Hitler shouter on the broad Left. During the campaign, when Harris was asked if Trump’s a fascist, she answered in the affirmative. At the time of the 2022 midterm elections, alleged historian Michael Beschloss fretted that a GOP victory might result in the destruction of “our democracy” and set the stage for a future in which “our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

The Resistance Left has become hopelessly addicted to fascist name calling. Federal law enforcement agencies are equated with the Gestapo. Federal law enforcement agents are called stormtroopers. The Trump Administration’s deployment of National Guard troops in crime-ridden Washington DC is likened to a coup. The completely legal enforcement of federal immigration law is denounced as “ethnic cleansing,” in the course of which people are being “disappeared” by fascist goons wearing masks. Repeatedly, violent mobs and individuals have attempted to obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Once such incident in Chicago recently ended with an ICE officer in critical condition after being run over by an illegal immigrant attempting to evade arrest. He was shot and killed by the officer he was trying to murder. “Community activists” and local officials reacted by denouncing ICE and wringing their hands over the death of the perp.

Not only the Hitler shouting but the general line of rhetoric emanating from the Left fosters a climate of unrest in which political violence seems, to some, a justifiable response to ills real and imagined. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rave and rant about “the oligarchy”; Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare is gunned down on a New York City street by Luigi Mangione, an advocate for that signature cause of progressivism, healthcare reform. That was a teachable moment indeed.

Plenty of people on the Left applauded Thompson’s killing. One expects such vileness from the denizens of the online leftie fever swamps, but it was much worse than that. From prominent Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and AOC, the response was in the nature of Yes, but… Yes, it was a regrettable incident—but let us not forget that the flaws of the American healthcare system are just so glaring! Proving what a truly loathsome human being she is, Senator Warren went right there:

The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system. Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change They lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone. (Emphasis added.)

But of course, Luigi Mangione, a child of privilege, had no personal beef with UnitedHealthcare. He had not been “pushed too far”—he simply embraced a leftist ideology that that romanticizes political violence.

How Elizabeth Warren can look in the mirror without retching is beyond me.

Then there’s the business of leftist anti-Zionism, the term of art among the comrades for their particular brand of antisemitism. Since 10/7/2023, American Jews have been subjected to systematic persecution and violence, supposedly for the sake of “free Palestine.” But of course, harassing or assaulting Jews on American college campuses does nothing to further the cause of Palestinian nationalism. Rather the reverse—it reveals the ugly face of Palestinian nationalism. Not that the anti-Zionists care about that. Their professed concern for the plight of the Palestinians is merely a smokescreen. Bashing the Jews is what gets them off.

It will be noticed that anti-Zionists and Hitler shouters are overlapping categories—which is to say, many of the people who denounces Trump and MAGA as Nazis are busily engaged in a soft pogrom very reminiscent of the early stage of the Final Solution. Long before the murder squads and the death camps commenced operations, the Nazi regime was promulgating laws and decrees designed to exclude Jews from German national life. The Reich Citizenship Law, introduced in September 1935, stripped German Jews of their citizenship and political rights. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, introduced at the same time, banned intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and people “of German or related blood.”

In line with these laws, Jews were purged from the educational system, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the armed forces. Jewish physicians were forbidden to treat “Ayran” patients. Jews holding foreign passports—mostly Polish—were forcibly deported, usually with their property confiscated. Other Jews took the hint and got out while the getting was good, again losing most of their property and wealth in the process. These were the initial measures of a long-range plan to make Germany Judenrein—free of Jews.

And this is also the objective of our homegrown anti-Zionists. To the extent possible, Jews are to be marginalized, excluded from key institutions, intimidated, harassed, treated as second-class citizens. Fortunately, American anti-Zionists don’t have the force of law on their side. But disgracefully, up to January 20, 2025, their pogrom went on with no pushback from the federal government of the United States.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk fits neatly into the mosaic of political violence sketched above. His assassination, or some similar crime, became inevitable at some point subsequent to the election of 2016. Kirk was not a presidential candidate, a member of Congress, a justice of the Supreme Court, or the popular governor of a battleground state. He was a political activist with a big megaphone and a message that enthralled some people and enraged others. He was killed to shut him up and intimidate others like him. It was bound to come to that, and now it has.

Assessing the responsibility for this state of affairs is a depressing chore. I have no doubt that most Democrats and progressives were genuinely shocked and horrified by Kirk’s murder, despite how sharply they may have disagreed with him. But if even five or ten percent of the broad Left is committed to violence as a tool of politics, that’s a large cohort that the majority seems reluctant to confront. And of the Democratic Party and its adjunct, the legacy media, it must be said that party leaders and journalists have an equivocal attitude towards the extremist to their left. To the horrible example set by Elizabeth Warren can be added the disgusting spectacle of MSNBC’s coverage of Kirk’s assassination, which resulted in the sacking of Mathew Dowd, who after opining that maybe the shot fired was “celebratory", offered these additional thoughts:

[Charlie Kirk’s] been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this—who’s constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in that you can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.

Allow me to convert this filthy stew of words into Standard English: Charlie Kirk got what was coming. That’s the measure of Matthew Dowd’s share of the responsibility for the death of Charlie Kirk. And there’s plenty more to go around.