Charlie Kirk and the Left’s ‘Assassination Culture’

In an eerie foreshadowing of his own demise, Charlie Kirk minced no words in his assessment of the American left. Two months before he was murdered in cold blood, Kirk wrote on X, “Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump. The political left is normalizing violence — and even political assassination — as a legitimate means of achieving its goals."

The radical progressive movement that has done everything in its power to take down Donald Trump, literally and figuratively, has now seen its chickens come home to roost. After two would-be assassins failed to kill Trump in hopes of changing the course of history, Charlie Kirk now becomes a trophy for those whose hatred of all things Trump and MAGA knows no bounds. While leftists such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Gavin Newsom publicly decried the assassination, one suspects that their dismay is a product not of genuine sorrow but of the damage this will undoubtedly do to their already collapsing public image. Radical leftists cannot win the war of ideas, so they resort to violence and murder. Ryan Routh and Thomas Crooks failed to close the deal, but now a likely hate-filled enemy of the president has succeeded in silencing the nation’s foremost advocate for free speech and civil discourse.

Blaming Trump

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said the quiet part out loud in blaming President Trump for the assassination of the young man whom many have said was largely responsible for Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024. Pritzker is not some obscure local official, but the wealthy chief executive of a large state whose presidential aspirations have become obvious in recent months. After writing that political violence has “got to stop,” Pritzker quickly pivoted:  "I think the president's rhetoric often foments it. We've seen the January 6th rioters who clearly have tripped a new era of political violence and the president, what did he do? He pardoned them. I mean what kind of signal does that send to people who want to perpetrate political violence? Not a good one."

Pritzker should at least be credited with brutal honesty in expressing what so many on the left are actually feeling in the aftermath of this horrific event. Equating a spontaneous riot with the premeditated assassination of a world-famous activist who literally built an empire with Turning Point USA is both inexplicable and repulsive. Blue Sky, a refuge for leftists who abandoned Twitter after Elon Musk transformed it into X, became a cesspool of hate following the assassination, with many on the platform openly cheering the death of Mr. Kirk. Dozens of vile messages of celebration were typified by a user named alexod9132, who posted, “Charlie Kirk is Dead. YAY!!!! One less misogynist piece of s--t on the planet. Do Trump next!!!! NOT SORRY!!!!!” Joon Ant weighed in with: “Trump next please. Let’s make sure we succeed this time.” Then there was Dan, who wrote, “Omg do trump next” accompanied by three smiley-face emojis.

What exactly should we expect when Trump’s enemies have labeled him as the worst person in the world, a Hitler wannabe who poses an existential threat to the planet? It is entirely predictable that such rhetoric elicits this kind of response from down-and-out losers who have come to hate the country in which they live and have nothing better to do than spew bile with their keyboards.

It is, then, ironic that Ezra Klein of The New York Times, of all places, provided perhaps the most apt description of Kirk’s legacy with the headline, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Indeed, he was defined by running towards the fire, not away from it. To his dying day, he took on all comers, never dodged a debate, and welcomed all to “prove me wrong” with civil discourse. He did not engage in pejoratives and refused to demonize those who disagreed with him, an opposite strategy from the left, where a failure to fall in line with progressive orthodoxy marks you as a target for retribution.

Charlie Kirk Had to Be Stopped

Put simply, Charlie Kirk had become too dangerous to the left. His success in drawing a shocking number of young voters to Trump’s side had become a mortal threat to their ideology and power. They knew that, with Trump leaving the stage in a few years, Kirk’s message would only have been amplified in the decades ahead, especially after his spectacular success in winning over young voters that the left had long taken for granted. He had to be stopped.

This turn of events is in many ways a mirror image of the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr., a legendary agent of change whose preaching about non-violent resistance to racial discrimination was so effective and so threatening to his enemies that he had to be silenced. And like MLK, Charlie Kirk has now become a martyr whose towering legacy will undoubtedly grow even greater in death than it was in life.

So where do we go from here? Will the shock of this ultimate expression of political violence finally put an end to the death cult growing out of the left, or will it lead to even more upheaval? To what degree will we witness retribution from enraged supporters of Trump and Kirk? To the question of whether we as a people choose to tamp down or double down on extreme violence, those who see the figurative glass as half-full are undoubtedly outnumbered by those who view it as half-empty – or worse.

We’ll return to Charlie Kirk’s message on X to give him the last word from the great beyond about the left’s assassination culture: “This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end … [turning] the left into a ticking time bomb.” One that just exploded for all the world to see.