Reasonable Left-Wingers Must Denounce Political Violence Before It’s Too Late

The horrifying slaughter of Charlie Kirk should have ended the debate. When a man tries to murder a conservative activist on stage—not silence him with chants or deplatform him, but literally take his life—it marks a new and dangerous escalation. It is not hyperbole to say that, after years of saturating its own followers with the rhetoric of apocalypse, the political Left now presides over a culture where violence has become not only thinkable but justified to an entire generation of radicalised individuals who have been manipulated into genuinely believing that in killing a young man of 31, a loving husband and father of two, they are engaging in ‘anti-fascist resistance.’ Kirk’s real assassin is a culture of hateful hysteria methodically built up by the media, the university, and almost every layer of left-wing power in the West. They sowed the wind. We are now only starting to reap the whirlwind.

We should have the moral courage to recognise that Kirk’s assassination was not an anomaly, or that the foul deed was really his alone. That would be to silence a debate that has now made itself urgent. Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old sicario who killed Kirk, was the predictable outcome of a climate in which mainstream progressives have spent years telling their supporters that conservatives are not just fellow countrymen they happen to disagree with on a range of fundamental issues but existential threats to democracy, human rights, and civilisation itself. When one trains people to believe that they are locked in an eschatological battle of good against evil, it is only a matter of time before one unstable zealot will come to conclude that bullets might be quicker and more effective than ballots.

The troubling pattern is now visible across the West. In May 2024, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot at point-blank range by a man with a long record of involvement in progressive and globalist causes. In America, during the same year, Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts in the space of months. The first came terrifyingly close to success; had Trump leaned an inch differently at that rally in Pennsylvania, in July 2024, the United States would already have been plunged into chaos. A second attempt was foiled only by the vigilance of the then-candidate’s security staff. In both cases, individuals drunk on ‘Antifa’ online discourse were the culprits. 

And these are only the most spectacular incidents. Conservatives face an atmosphere of intimidation and menace on a daily basis. On more than one occasion, I was personally besieged by left-wing hordes in events at campus; in both cases, these militias of intolerance could only be restrained by the action of the police. More serious episodes include the ordeal undergone by Tucker Carlson’s family when the neo-Bolshevik mobs besieged and vandalised his home in Washington, D.C. Even as Kirk bled to death and his wife and kids prayed for his recovery, hundreds of thousands of vile, self-satisfied comments by hateful left-wingers were already invading the internet. The lesson is always the same: conservatives are fair game, conservatives deserve no peace, conservatives are not citizens with rights and fellow countrymen but monsters to be shouted down, harassed, and—now, increasingly—shot at.

Yet when violence does erupt from the Left, the reaction is revealing. It is treated as a freak occurrence, a lone madman or, even, an unfortunate disaster that, deep down, the victim had actually deserved. The Nation had no qualms about saying that “Kirk’s legacy deserves no mourning”, as the murdered young man was “an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct.” On German TV, anchor Dunja Hayali also elaborated on why, in fact, Kirk had it coming: “Charlie Kirk often made disguising, racist, sexist and misanthropic statements.” These are the same people who will also insist on having a monopoly on empathy, tolerance, and kindness. Indeed, Hayali had the gall to complain about “misantrophy” while expressing objective approval of a man whose entire career had famously been built on the idea of awarding every idea and every person the right to an honest debate.

Of course, when violence comes from the Right, the entire Right is put on trial. After every atrocity committed by some deranged neo-Nazi, conservatives everywhere are ordered to disavow, apologise, and accept guilt by association. When it is the Left’s radicals who spill blood, no such reckoning is ever demanded. No editorials ask leftist politicians to take responsibility for their overheated rhetoric. No university boards apologise for letting mobs fester on campus. This is so even though mainstream left-wing politicians and opinion makers do demonise their adversaries in a way unimaginable among those on the Right.

The danger should be obvious to all: spirals of violence never remain one-sided. Should civil dialogue become impossible, the road to civil conflict will be wide open. Persuasion would be abandoned because persuasion would have been declared impossible. Political struggle would collapse into force.

Reasonable voices on the left must see the precipice before it is too late. They must admit, honestly, that their own side has cultivated a culture of hatred—that it has spent years calling every opponent a ‘Nazi,’ branding half the electorate a ‘threat to democracy,’ portraying the other side as guided by evil purposes and their potential arrival to power as Armageddon. They must apologise for this and begin dismantling it. 

It is not too late, but the window is closing. No one should ignore the deep wound caused by Charlie’s murder—and, worse still, by the undisguised, evil glee shown by so many of his haters. In 1936, the murder of Spanish conservative leader José Calvo Sotelo began a chain of events that led directly to the horrors of the Civil War. Democracies have always been fragile things. They rely on the assumption that, ultimately, the nation is everybody’s common home, and that ideas are better discussed than silenced. By indulging the politics of hatred, the Left is putting that assumption in mortal jeopardy.

If our democratic systems are to endure, words must stop serving as matches for fanatics. If they want to avert further mutual radicalisation, those sensible, intelligent voices on the Left must look themselves in the mirror and disown the culture of violence they have birthed or been complicit with. It is their historical responsibility to do so.