No Peace Or Unity With A Violent, Unrepentant Left

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s assassination by a radical Antifa terrorist, a refrain has arisen in the corporate press and the political establishment that we must come together, lower the temperature, tone down the rhetoric, and condemn political violence on both sides. In order to have peace, they say, we have to have unity.

But there can be no peace or unity without first telling the truth, and the truth is that both-sidesism, the polite fiction that the American left and right have a problem with political violence, is a damnable lie — and everyone peddling it is a moral coward.

Case in point is David French, the man willing to say anything for a paycheck and a column at The New York Times. Over the weekend, French published a piece, “There Are Monsters in Your Midst, Too,” arguing that America has a problem with political violence on both the right and the left. To call out the left for Kirk’s assassination, or argue that the left is inherently more violent than the right, says French, is nothing more than confirmation bias. In his usual scolding schoolmarm style, French argues that “partisan blindness” makes it easy to see the evil of the opposition while explaining away or justifying the evil on our side.

Now normally I don’t pay much attention to French, who has built a lucrative media career by punching down at people who are weaker than him — Christians, the working class, conservative families who don’t think Drag Queen Story Hour at their local library is a “blessing of liberty.” The kind of people despised by his leftist paymasters at the Times. I’ve argued in the past that French is by definition unmanly because of this penchant for punching down. He viciously and predictably attacks the very people he should be using his position of influence to defend, even if it costs him to do so.

And this time is no different: French’s response to Kirk’s wanton murder by a left-wing terrorist radicalized by Antifa and transgender ideology is to lecture conservatives about their blindness to right-wing political violence. Great timing there, buddy.

But since French quotes me as an example of confirmation bias on the right, and because his argument epitomizes the kind of brain-dead, morally vacant rationalization of left-wing violence we’ve seen across the corporate press since Kirk’s assassination, I’ll respond.

First off, despite the dominant narrative in the corporate press and liberal academia, there is no reasonable case to be made that “both sides” of the political divide have a problem with political violence, or that in the aggregate political violence on the right is worse than political violence on the left. If all you consume is MSNBC slop and New York Times opinion columns, this might surprise you, since their constant refrain is that the right has had a near-monopoly on violence since the 1980s.

That’s not to say that there is no political violence on the right, or no sympathy for political violence among conservatives. But the outlandish claim that the right is responsible for most of the political violence in our country can only be made by torturing crime statistics and carefully manipulating definitions of what counts as right-wing, while rewriting or whitewashing the American left’s long history of political terrorism.

By contrast, a brief survey of the most high-profile instances of political violence in recent years reveals what most Americans instinctively know, corporate media propaganda notwithstanding: the left, not the right, has the near-monopoly on political violence. The difference is that when a leftist carries out an attack, the media ignore or downplay the obvious ideological motivations behind it — just as they have tried to do this past week with Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer.

Consider this partial list: The 2017 mass shooting of Republican lawmakers during a congressional baseball practice was carried out by a left-wing Bernie Sanders supporter. In the 2020 BLM riots, at least a half-dozen people were killed and thousands more injured amid widespread violence and destruction. In June 2022, an armed would-be assassin was arrested outside the home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In March 2023, a trans-identifying woman, Audrey Hale, killed six people (three of them small children) at Covenant Christian School in Nashville. Last year, Luigi Mangione allegedly assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, and two assassination attempts were made on President Trump. Last month, another trans-identifying terrorist, Robin Westman, attacked Annunciation Catholic School in Minnesota, killing two children and injuring 21 others. And then came the assassination of Kirk. All of these attacks were carried out by unambiguously left-wing terrorists.

In making his argument that conservatives are blind to political violence on their own side, French cites a handful of what he clearly thinks are representative cases, including the “Minnesota lawmaker and her husband assassinated in their own home,” and the “plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan,” Gretchen Whitmer.

The problem is, these examples are incorrect. The alleged assassin in Minnesota, Vance Luther Boelter, was a political appointee of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat. Moreover, Boelter’s motives were unclear — among his list of assassination targets were abortion providers, suggesting he had conservative views, and yet handwritten flyers with the anti-Trump slogan “No Kings” were found in his vehicle, suggesting liberal views. And of course the Whitmer plot was never successfully prosecuted because the whole thing turned out to be an outrageous FBI entrapment scheme.

Suffice to say, if you’re going to argue that the right has a problem with political violence just like the left does, you shouldn’t have to rely on such shaky non-examples. That French does is telling. It reveals not just an inexcusable laziness but a callous disregard for the truth. (He did the same thing in his ridiculous column about Cracker Barrel.)

But set the examples aside, along with the fraught historical debate about which side has carried out more political violence. The gleeful reaction to Kirk’s murder on the left has been nothing less than demonic. The prevalence of self-avowed liberals and leftists who have taken to social media in recent days to celebrate Kirk’s assassination — using their real names, seemingly unconcerned about the consequences — reveals a moral degeneracy on the American left that has no counterpart on the right.

Simply put, the mask has been ripped off. One side of the political divide in America — and one side only — has shown that it is comfortable with political violence, that it believes it is justified to kill people for holding moderately conservative views, and that it is not interested in peaceful coexistence with the right.

This mindset is mainstream on the left. Popular left-wing influencers like Destiny and Hasan Piker routinely call for violence against conservatives, and are still doing so even after Kirk was murdered in front of his family (Destiny said Monday on Piers Morgan, “If you wanted Charlie Kirk to be alive, Donald Trump shouldn’t have been president for the second term.”) On cable news networks, journalists are openly making excuses for Kirk’s murder. This week Peter Baker of The New York Times casually talked about how Kirk “said a lot of things that riled people up” and was “a symbol of the toxic culture we’re in,” while his bloated colleagues nodded along in agreement. Media outlets like NBC News described people who are publicly celebrating Kirk’s assassination as simply “sharing opinions,” implying it’s okay to celebrate assassination, that it’s just another opinion and you shouldn’t punish people for their opinions. There are thousands of examples of this kind of thing just from the last 48 hours. The purpose of it is to justify Kirk’s murder.

So no, there is no honest comparison to be made here between right and left. Lesser instances of political violence on the right, like Jan. 6 (which didn’t hold a candle to the violence of the BLM riots that year), are generally condemned by both sides, while left-wing violence is endlessly contextualized, justified, and excused.

Peace and unity, then, will have to wait until the left comes to terms with its open embrace of political violence. At this point, both-sidesism is nothing more than a cowardly pretext for excusing left-wing terrorism, and calls for unity are nothing more than demands to surrender.

As Vice President J.D. Vance said in a powerful address on Monday while hosting The Charlie Kirk Show, “There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk says in order to excuse his murder. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.”

Vance closed by saying he’s desperate for the country to be “united in condemnation of the actions and the ideas that killed my friend.” But we can only have unity, he said, “with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable, and when we work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.”

Those institutions are all on the left. They are well-funded, they are part of the liberal mainstream, and they are unrepentant. Until they are destroyed utterly, those are the only monsters in our midst worth talking about.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.