The radical Left’s assault on the Right is an assault on our nation.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a watershed moment in the contest of ideologies—and increasingly of peoples—in America.
On the one hand are what might be called the restorationists, who yearn for a common culture that has been eroding since the 1970s, and mostly vanished in the 2010s. The most recent example of this tendency is Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s press conference announcing that Charlie Kirk’s killer was captured. Cox issued a well-meaning exhortation to all Americans to “find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.” In this vision, Kirk’s brutal murder is an episode that shocks us as a people into pursuing greater concord and amity.
The governor should be credited with categorically rejecting political violence and laying out an optimistic vision. His prescription and analysis are technically correct—but also contextually and prudentially wrong. The restorationists have an aspiration but not a case. It’s a problem worth understanding.
Edmund Burke once wrote, “Circumstances…give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.” The circumstances in America now must be described accurately. There is no roughly equitable contest of sides, each with its own dangerous extremists. It is not, for example, Northern Ireland of a generation past. Instead, we are in a contest in which one side overwhelmingly reserves violence to itself and employs it freely.
That side is, of course, the Left.
The examples of the Left’s frequent recourse to terror, mayhem, and death abound. There is formally extralegal violence, which includes the murder of Kirk, the transgender killers of small children, the deliberate creation of insecure common spaces in which assaults and deaths occur, the murders of Jews in public, shooters targeting conservative organizations, and the various attempts to kill conservative presidents, Supreme Court justices, and congressmen. There is also regime-sanctioned mass violence—most significantly the Black Lives Matter insurrection during the summer of 2020. Additionally, there are varieties of formal and networked repression, from government-imposed pandemic restrictions and iniquitous racial/ethnic preferentialism to societally enforced cancel culture and speech codes.
It is worth noting that this is not especially incisive or contrarian analysis: everyone knows it. Everyone knows that the Left is the violent faction in American public life today. Everyone knows that shop windows were boarded up in November 2020 out of fear of the Left’s reaction to the election, not the Right’s. Everyone knows there is no threat to public order in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk as there was after the death of George Floyd. Everyone knows that a gathering of pro-Palestinians carries with it a high potential for violence, but a gathering of pro-Israel partisans does not. Everyone knows there is a national network of street fighters on the Left, not on the Right. Everyone knows that colleges have to worry about security for conservative events, not leftist ones.
Everyone knows.
Charlie Kirk knew it. In an X post from April 7, he wrote, “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.” And it must have occurred to him that a similar proportion of the Left felt the same about him.
One of the distinguishing features of this interlocking apparatus, enforced with loss of livelihoods at best and loss of life at worst, is the ready participation of the regime’s institutions in its enforcement. This cooperative repression happens with varying degrees of deniability. The Left may assert that it did not slaughter Charlie Kirk in broad daylight, in front of his wife and children, but its propaganda organs will issue copious apologetics for the act. The Left may insist that it doesn’t wish to force Americans to violate their conscience, but its judicial organs will aggressively punish Colorado bakers or the Little Sisters of the Poor until they do.
This is not a strictly American phenomenon: the Left’s campaign of terror is now a feature of governance across the Anglosphere.
In Britain, repression of dissenting speech against the leftist consensus has reached Iron Curtain levels, complete with writers arrested at airports and housewives jailed for years for expressing politically incorrect sentiments. In Canada, protestors who would have been positively celebrated had they been pro-regime were targeted with government action normally reserved for wartime. In Australia, the regime imposed a hijacking of Anzac Day festivities by indigenous activists and threatened reprisals against Australians who objected.
This is a civilizational affliction, a societal sickness, in which one cohort of the inheritors of the Anglo-American tradition has turned entirely against it—and means to end it. An essential element of that project is the campaign of terror and repression now being waged against majorities that still believe in those old values and their folkways.
Think, for example, of local councils in England that are dominated by leftists and Islamists that ban the English flag. Think too of American leftists who characterize views that were ordinary 15 minutes ago as “fascist” or “extremist.” In an appalling example of this pathology, the Stanislaus County (California) Democrats issued a statement declining an invitation to participate in a vigil for the murdered Kirk, citing his “associations with fascist ideology.” Kirk, of course, was routinely pilloried by actual fascists who hated his optimistic faith in traditional Americanism.
We don’t face threats just to our political or partisan preferences, but to our nation’s very existence.
For America, this means the fight is not Right versus Left, but Americans versus un-Americans. This is useful as a polemic, and also happens to be wholly descriptive. We are the ones who hold public debates. They are the ones who shoot the debaters.
Adopting this framing requires a series of conversations and affirmations that most public figures in American life have avoided for the past half-century. That is changing now, and it must accelerate. Vice President JD Vance anticipated this necessary turn in his epochal RNC address in July 2024, when he affirmed that America is more than an idea, but also a place and a people—an obvious truth with which the Founders agreed, and which was predictably denounced as white supremacy on MSNBC. In the wake of the Kirk assassination, this becomes the pivot point. Everything now—now that even affable collegiate-roadshow figures are being gunned down—depends upon defining who is American and who is not.
The restorationists, then, are virtuous but rooted in a vanished past, and therefore wrong. What’s at hand is something different than a plausible return to common ground. There is a balance of terror—and it is severely tilted leftward. That is the starting point for understanding what comes next.
The facile response is to match terror for terror. Even if morally acceptable—and it is not—it is unlikely to succeed. The nature of the Right, by which we mean the Americans, does not admit to it. Americans do not burn down police stations, shoot campus speakers, or mount multi-city insurrections. Un-Americans, unmoored from the common good, do.
We do have recourse to our own strengths. Americans have our own societal networks that are rapidly strengthening, which can immunize us from at least the lower-tier mechanisms of repression of the un-Americans. This is important for creating space to go on the offensive, as Christopher Rufo and others have pioneered.
We have something else too: control of the federal government. It is a possession neither lasting nor guaranteed, and the Americans’ future rests heavily—perhaps wholly—on whether we now use it.
The un-Americans’ networks should be uprooted, their institutions overthrown, and their supporters denied a place in public life. The resolve that has already shown itself in deploying the National Guard to leftist-controlled cities, securing the U.S.-Mexico border, and sinking trafficking boats in the Caribbean must be brought to bear against the bearers of political violence. The Trump Administration is signaling that this is exactly what will happen. Yesterday, as Stephen Miller told Vice President JD Vance, who hosted Charlie Kirk’s show, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the DOJ, Homeland Security, and throughout this government, to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks…. We will do it in Charlie’s name.”
In Genesis 50:20, Joseph tells his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” If what was meant for evil is turned to good, then the government will defend America and the Americans—and that will make all the difference.
