The reaction by liberals to the murder of Conservative activist Charlie Kirk displays the same twisted thinking as their demonization of Israel.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Sep 11, 2025
The murder of the young conservative activist Charlie Kirk wasn’t just a horrifying crime. It wasn’t just a tragedy for his family, with a wife’s life shattered and two small children left fatherless. It was also a seismic moment for America and for a West that’s spinning out of control.
Kirk, 31, is being mourned as America’s most reasoned and articulate defender of the West, Christianity and Israel against those enemies of civilization who want to destroy them all.
The organization he founded, Turning Point USA, was all about promoting debate to settle political differences. This week, Kirk was destroyed by the evil he was trying to stem. At the very moment he was discussing political violence, someone shot him dead under a banner that read: “Prove me wrong.”
This terrible act represented far more, however, than just an attack on free speech.
Incidents of political violence in America have been steadily ticking upwards for years. There have been two attempts to assassinate U.S. President Donald Trump, one of which came within a whisker of killing him.
In June, a Minnesota Democrat lawmaker and her husband were murdered, and a Democrat state senator and his wife also shot and injured by an apparently unhinged Christian. In April, the Harrisburg residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish and a Democrat, was firebombed by a “Palestine” supporter.
In 2017, during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Va., four Republicans were shot by a man said by the state’s attorney-general to have been “fueled by rage against Republican legislators.”
We have no idea at present who murdered Charlie Kirk. The single-shot bullet to his neck, which is thought to have been fired from a rooftop, looked like a highly professional hit job.
But among the general public, a poisonous and dangerous stew is bubbling, composed of ideologues, fanatics, antisemites, obsessives, mentally ill people and others being whipped up by the incitement relentlessly spewed out on social media.
This is fueling a culture that’s now descended into anarchy, nihilism, loss of reason, and a total loss of moral compass. Although this degeneracy crosses the political aisle, it’s not evenly balanced either in type or in scale. It’s being driven overwhelmingly by the left.
Right-wing violence tends to be perpetrated by loners: conspiracy theorists, Jew-haters or fringe individuals who subscribe to the paranoid lies, perversions and dark theories infesting far-right websites.
By contrast, the left, which dominates the culture—in universities, unions, the media, the Democratic Party—has been whipping itself into an unhinged frenzy over Trump, white people, “gender-critical” women, the climate “emergency” and everyone who dissents from progressive orthodoxies.
Such dissenters, all of whom they term “the right,” aren’t regarded as opponents to be argued with but as the embodiment of evil. To the left, the “wrong” kind of speech constitutes violence. It therefore follows that violence used against such dissenters is justified.
Thus, activists are told to take direct action against their targets, such as white people, climate-change “deniers” or “colonialist” statues.
These same leftists are driving the frenzy of antisemitism in the West. Indeed, some of the instant reactions to Kirk’s murder displayed the same warped thinking with which they attack Israel.
They instantly deflected the blame for the murder from their own side onto Kirk himself or his most prominent supporter, Donald Trump.
On MSNBC, Matthew Dowd said that Kirk had been one of the most “especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech … aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
Dowd’s colleague, Katy Tur, called Kirk a “divisive figure” and said the Trump administration would use the shooting “as justification for something.” And the Democrat governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, rushed to blame Trump for inciting political violence.
In exactly the same way, the left blames Israel for its own victimization while sanitizing its Palestinian Arab attackers. That’s why left-wingers excused or ignored the atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023, and seek to prevent Israel from defeating the genocidists of Hamas.
To the left’s Israel-haters, just as Kirk deserved to be killed, so, too, “colonialist” Israel deserves to be annihilated. Israeli residents in the “West Bank” are “illegal settlers” who therefore deserve to be murdered.
The posters of hostages kidnapped by Hamas and other Palestinians were torn down because Israeli Jews aren’t to be considered victims; if they were raped, tortured, murdered or burned alive on Oct. 7, then they had it coming to them just because they were Israeli Jews.
Telling themselves that they stand for virtue, conscience and compassion because they are committed to liberal universalism and the brotherhood of man, left-wingers denounce all who are committed to the West, the nation-state, and Israel as the “right,” “fascists” and “Nazis.”
What should you do with Nazis? Why, destroy them. Thus, left-wing demonization leads straight to murder.
That’s why, after Kirk was shot dead, a list of prominent people hated by the left and who they say should be murdered next sprang up on social media.
Driving this obscenity is the belief that the left or the minorities they support can do no wrong, while conservatives can do no right. So the left excuse, ignore or deny the violence committed by those they support.
That’s why it took two weeks for the media to report the shocking murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, by Decarlos Brown, an African-American vagrant. This was despite a deeply shocking video on social media showing Zarutska sitting on a bus reading her phone when a hooded man rises behind her and slashes her in the neck with a knife, whereupon she bleeds to death.
Brown, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had 14 prior criminal convictions, has been left free to walk the streets and commit murder. Even when liberals finally acknowledged this terrible crime, their sympathies were reserved for Brown rather than his victim. The mandatory narrative of black victimhood effectively erased the evidence that was in front of their eyes.
This is exactly how it’s playing out with the demonization of Israel. The mandatory liberal narrative of oppressive Israel and its “Palestinian” victims has led great swathes of American and British society to fall for the lies that Israel is causing starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, and simply erases the evidence that this is the very opposite of the truth.
Political hatred and violence aren’t confined to the left. The huge difference from the right, though, is the way they respond to acts of violence by their own side.
Mainstream conservatives react with visceral horror to right-wing violence. Within the extreme right-wing echo chamber, such acts are typically followed by the spinning of conspiracy theories (“the Mossad killed Charlie Kirk”) and other nonsensical and bigoted falsehoods.
But the left uniquely turns the political murder of its foes into a moral project to be celebrated, promoted and incentivized.
That’s why most political violence is associated with progressive causes: Antifa, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Palestine Action. All these and more make common cause with radical Islamists in their shared agenda to bring down the West, destroy white capitalist society and exterminate Israel.
It’s why countless Muslims have also been celebrating Kirk’s murder on social media with posts saying, “He was an enemy of Islam and deserved it” or “This is justice for supporting Israel.”
It’s why the Oct. 7 attacks produced celebration and jubilation. It’s why almost half of Britain thinks the Israelis are as bad as the Nazis.
In this climate, reason gets you nowhere. And as we have now seen so graphically demonstrated, reason can actually get you murdered.
This is what Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora are now up against. It’s a moral, intellectual and spiritual crisis in the West which threatens its disintegration altogether as a culture.
The forces of evil have been unleashed. They have to be defeated. May Charlie Kirk’s memory be a blessing, and may his devastating murder be the watershed that finally opens the West’s shuttered eyes.
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