The Only Way To End Leftist Violence Is To Defeat Leftism Itself

The brutal murder of Charlie Kirk has evoked an array of passionate and argued responses, many of which are misguided or patently false: We need to cool the rhetoric. Trump in power breeds unrest. Both sides of the political aisle engage equally in political violence. Kirk’s right-wing incendiary language had deadly consequences. The shooter was merely a paramour overwhelmed by protective passion.

These are all distractions (at the very least) from the truth about Charlie Kirk’s death: Charlie Kirk died because he went into spaces that were bastions of leftist thought and confronted an inherently violent ideology with biblical truth — and it is now the moral duty of those who remain to utterly discredit and defeat that ideology and the political movement it drives.

Why Charlie Died

Before Kirk was pronounced dead, the media had already launched a narrative implying that he was a political hack who foreseeably brought the shooting upon himself, with MSNBC smearing Kirk’s rhetoric as “hateful,” “divisive,” and “polarizing.” After his death, The New York Times portrayed him as a “provocateur” who “tweeted relentlessly with a brash right-wing spin, including inflammatory comments about Jewish, gay and Black people.” He used an “approach” that “even some conservatives” found “distasteful,” the Times added. Christianity Today labeled him an “Activist Who Championed ‘MAGA Doctrine.’” (Contrast this presentation with CT’s treatment of George Floyd, whom the publication portrayed as a “person of peace” with a “gospel legacy.”) Axios peddled claims that Kirk was “anti-Muslim, sexist and transphobic.”

Not content with mischaracterizing Kirk’s rhetoric, the Times erroneously attributed an antisemitic statement to Kirk, and now former WaPo columnist Karen Attiah posted a made-up quotation of Kirk on Bluesky to make Kirk appear racist.

Fabrications aside, the media’s insinuation that Kirk’s political persona goaded his opponents into killing him directly contradicts their follow-up narrative that Kirk’s alleged assassin was not motivated by leftist ideology. That is to say, the idea that Kirk’s right-wing rhetoric would naturally provoke a violent reaction from those on the left, not the right, thus demanding a left-wing assassin. Nevertheless, legacy outlets have worked hard to portray the alleged murderer as right-wing, non-ideological, or having no discernible motivation (which would absolve Kirk of guilt so despicably attributed to him). To give a few examples, this looks like Jimmy Kimmel (whose show ABC has now suspended indefinitely) indicating the alleged shooter was “MAGA,” Montel Williams calling Tyler Robertson a “love-torn child” who “tried to defend his significant other, not … some ideology,” and NYT asserting that “Some Messages on the Bullets Apparently Meant Nothing.”

Except the bullets did mean something. “Hey Facist! Catch!” coheres quite well with the left’s obsession for calling Trump Hitler and his supporters fascists and Nazis, and further reporting undermines the NYT assertion that the trans-related furry-culture engraving was simply a random joke. Robinson was reportedly in a romantic relationship with a man who claimed to be a woman and was transitioning, and his alleged online history indicates he was actively living a sexually deviant lifestyle. According to prosecutors, the alleged shooter’s mother “explained that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left — becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” According to a message Robinson reportedly sent to his roommate and paramour, he had “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

These are all indisputable hallmarks of the modern left, as is the dangerous and illogical orthodoxy that disagreement with the left’s sacred values is an existential threat to those who hold them. Based on the available evidence, the conclusion that the alleged shooter had imbibed this perverted orthodoxy is unavoidable, as is the accompanying reality that Charlie Kirk died for contradicting the tenets of leftism.

Inherently Violent

Though the assassination of one of conservatism’s foremost proponents was shocking, the left’s penchant for violence is not. From trans-identifying shooters murdering school children, to the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, to the brutal killings of Israeli Embassy staff members, the examples are not lacking. But the problem goes far beyond these stark tragedies. Leftists raving over alleged murderer Luigi Mangione and rioting for Hamas send a strong signal that they see political violence not only as a legitimate tool, but a primary one. To give a another prominent example, during the Black Lives Matter riots, Democrats in office, academia, and media permitted, encouraged, or engaged in violent protest and communist struggle sessions to cram down their racial justice on purportedly racist Americans — at the cost of 25 or more dead and $2 billion in damage.

Further, two cornerstones of Democrat policy and leftist ideology are violent to their cores: abortion and transgenderism. That leftists hold to these cornerstones with clenched fists is visible in Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from radical trans ideology during her presidential campaign and her decision to make “reproductive rights” a central focus. The adherence is so strong that one Democrat voted for the Born-Alive Act in January of this year — one. All others went on the record in favor of leaving babies who survived abortions to die.

Every abortion is violent and brutal, but leaving a baby born alive to die is a further exploration of depravity. If that isn’t enough, it’s also worth noting that if leftists had their way, partial-birth abortion would still be practiced in this country. Every nay vote on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was cast by a Democrat, and one can read media pieces calmly discussing the “nuances” of the violent process (which involves jamming scissors into the back of the baby’s head and crushing it), like this one from NPR.

When it comes to trans ideology, even descriptions of trans interventions from trans-friendly sources reveals just how violent the ideology is. Yet leftists enthusiastically advocate for administering cross-sex hormones and amputating intact, functioning body parts and replacing them with pseudo-parts that require lifetime medical intervention to maintain them. The ideology requires destroying the body’s sexual characteristics, first with hormones, then with the scalpel, regardless of whether the individual is an adult or a child. Meanwhile, doctors, actors, journalists, teachers, and influencers tell trans-identifying individuals (and those close to them) that they will likely commit suicide if they are unable to force everyone around them to embrace their “new identity.”

This last lie is particularly heinous, and it ties in with the overarching leftist orthodoxy mentioned earlier that disagreement is an existential threat and those who disagree with those on the left are Hitler-wannabes who are engaging in genocide, threatening them, or forcing them to end their own or the lives of others. It is also important to note that unfettered abortion through all nine months of pregnancy and beyond and transgender mutilation of children and adults are, for the left, essential elements of “the good life.” They are “fundamental rights,” without which life is scarcely worth living — just as they are rightly fundamental evils for Charlie Kirk and his fellow conservatives.

Complete and Utter Defeat

The ideology of the left and the ideology espoused by Charlie Kirk cannot coexist in equilibrium; these two worldviews are in a death struggle. That was true long before an assassin’s bullet struck the 31-year-old husband and father in the neck, but that truth is more stark, more grim now. It is underlined in innocent blood.

The dirty little secret is that many conservative, God-fearing, peace-loving Americans would have put up with a cultural milieu that allowed abortion until six months or more, lauded trans-identifying adults, and same-sex unions if the left’s social activists had seen fit to stop there. Not so easily satisfied, Democrats decried as the pinnacle of evil anyone who opposed child castration, or the deliberate starvation of babies who survived abortions, or the dedication of an entire month to celebrating whatever recently popularized sexual lifestyle is the furthest from biblical marriage. Left-wing power brokers made sure to clarify that their moral approbation was not without teeth.

Against that backdrop, Kirk had emerged as a leader of a somewhat motley crew of conservatives, ex-liberals, Americans of no particular political persuasion, and a real-estate-guru-turned-president who, backed into a corner and perceiving the destructive nature of Democrats and their radical ideology, determined to resist. That decision ultimately cost Kirk his life, a life that he sacrificed for God and his country.

The proper response to this horrific assassination is not to decry political violence generally, or merely to talk about how everyone should be nicer to each other, or to Monday-morning-quarterback Kirk’s campus events and imply that he would still be alive if he had been more gospel-oriented and less provocative or political. Nor is it sufficient merely to bring Kirk’s killer to justice.

If Americans want to live in a country where young men aren’t assassinated for articulating truths about Jesus Christ, male and female, and human life, the political ideology that led to Charlie Kirk’s murder must be utterly and completely defeated, and the political party that incarnates that ideology must be denied power.

Those of goodwill who still consider themselves on the left should step aside and allow the demise of the movement that has become so toxic it is destroying the nation. More important, federal and state governments have a responsibility to deal with organizations that foment leftist violence. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have voiced strongly the administration’s resolve to do so, with the president “designating the radical far-left group Antifa as a terrorist organization.”

Further, the First Amendment does not require the government to shuttle taxpayer funds to schools, medical organizations, and NGOs so they can spread the lies that unborn babies are not human or that men can become women and women can become men. Just as the Trump administration has threatened the funding of school systems that allow men in women’s sports, it should seek to cut off funding from schools that preach gender ideology and tell young people that anyone who disagrees with them is threatening their existence.

Conservative individuals and Christians specifically must carry on the work that Kirk did: Proclaiming the gospel and the truth about reality and exposing the left’s insidious ideology and its allegiance to violence — whether political violence, violence in the womb, or violence done in the name of “gender affirmation.” The left’s addiction to censorship, “safe spaces,” and political violence reveals its inherent weakness: It thrives on lies, not logic; obfuscation, not openness. Conservatives must wage war on those lies until the left’s ideology is so widely discredited, debunked, and refuted that its proudest opponents are ashamed to acknowledge it.

Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.