The State Must Take Left-Wing Violence In Hand
Historically, the American left has suffered few consequences for political violence. That must change now.
September 10, 2025 is a day that should change American politics forever. The assassination of Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, on a Utah college campus has been a deep shock to the American people.
Kirk was not an elected official, nor a bureaucrat, nor a judge; he was not assassinated for any exercise of political power or office. He was assassinated because he held a conservative creed and had the audacity to stand for his beliefs. For those same beliefs, his assassination was mocked, justified, and celebrated before his lifeblood had cooled on the desert ground of Orem, Utah. Mainstream liberals on MSNBC speculated that one of Charlie’s dim, gun-toting fans had shot him in the throat in a spasm of celebration. The New York Times headlined its obituary of Kirk by calling him a “provocateur” and falsely accused him of antisemitism. And no one needs to make much of an effort to find a plethora of examples of leftists publicly exulting over his death on every social media platform and in offices and classrooms across the country.
Kirk’s assassination, and the range of responses from celebration to studied cynicism on the American left, are the result of the long history of modern America’s tolerance for left-wing violence. During the ’60s and especially the ’70s, left-wing violence in the U.S. exploded. During just 18 months during 1971 and 1972, the FBI catalogued over 2,500 bombings in the country. Terrorist groups like the Weather Underground conducted a campaign of guerilla warfare against the American government.
These efforts were monumentally unpopular among the American public, and led to President Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection victory in 1972. But they were quietly accepted among the liberal intelligentsia, and the radicals of the ’70s were quietly rehabilitated and offered posts in prestigious universities. They were more successful as professors and propagandists than they could have dreamed of being as terrorists. Today, the radical left dominates American academia and has been the leading influence for hundreds of thousands of American students (among them, former president Barack Obama). The ideological progeny of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have all but killed the midcentury liberalism that extended them a welcoming hand 40 years ago, and it is their revolutionary philosophy that provides the ideological foundation that justifies the continuous rhetorical treadmill that turns anodyne mainstream political positions of yesteryear into fascism and authoritarianism—calumnies delivered purely for effect by mainstream Democrats, but which, if taken to their logical conclusion, are naturally a call for violent resistance.
The tolerance for left-wing political violence is not limited to revolutionary intellectuals. The left has a long history of defending the perpetrators of low-level thuggery and violent street crime, both individually and en masse. “Riots are the language of the unheard,” one common justification runs. The result is that, as we saw vividly in the summer of 2020, left-wing militant cells and mobs of criminal opportunists can riot, loot, and burn down entire neighborhoods with little repercussion. Democratic politicians and political organizations, under the guises of restorative justice or antiracist activism or decarceration, have installed a law enforcement and prosecutorial regime in the cities they control that dedicates vast resources to stop criminals from being arrested when crime is committed, to not charging them when arrested, to minimizing their sentences when convicted, and to releasing them from prison early when sentenced.
The result is a society where public school teachers and university professors feel entirely comfortable expressing their elation at the assassination of a mainstream conservative political figure. Why should they be uncomfortable? Every authority figure they trust and every institution they value has been telling them since their youth that conservatives are fascists, violent bigots seeking to plunge the U.S. into apartheid authoritarianism. How could the death of one of the main proponents of such a program be anything but a cause for celebration?
In this sense, Kirk’s murderer—and his various and numerous admirers—merely took the ideological framework of the modern left to its logical conclusion. And if things do not change, it is likely that more such events will follow.
People like to comfort themselves by saying that political assassinations don’t really work, that making martyrs merely galvanizes the opposition. This is, unfortunately, wishful thinking. Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA as an unqualified teenager with a big vision, and he worked tirelessly and capably to turn that vision reality. He fashioned Turning Point into one of the largest and most important political organizations on the American right. Its success came by dint of his outstanding talent and work ethic. By the time of his death, he had forged a massive political machine that not only fundraised huge amounts, but moved voters. It pumped desperately needed young blood into Republican politics. The strength of his machine gave Kirk significant influence over presidential administration—dozens of people currently serving in the White House today are there because of connections made by Charlie Kirk through Turning Point USA. At just 31 years old, Kirk, who never obtained a college degree and held no political office, was one of the most important men in American politics.
That kind of talent will not be easy for the American right to replace. The surge in political enthusiasm that has occurred because of his death will, unfortunately, not last, and could not have the same kind of institutional effect that Kirk had to begin with. If rallies and vigils and some random cancellings of liberals and leftists foolish enough to take seriously the rhetorical premises of their political leaders are all that results from his murder, the assassination will have been a substantive political victory from the left. This sets a very dangerous precedent: political violence is a profitable occupation. And this is a risk that does not fall solely upon conservatives or Republicans—once political violence becomes commonplace, it inevitably spreads to all sectors of society and involves every party and creed in a general outpouring of blood and terror. People will not be attacked forever without retaliating.
There are few things more pressing than preventing the outbreak of an American Years of Lead or a return to the political terrorism of the ’60s and ’70s. The only reasonable response is to bring to bear the overwhelming force of the state on the side of order and justice, and an end to tolerating the left’s apologetics for violence, especially political violence.
There are many ways such an end can be accomplished, but the most productive would be to dismantle the organizations that promote such activism and to proscribe their funding. The federal government has a multitude of tools that can be brought to bear on these groups. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bob Jones University v. United States that “entitlement to tax exemption depends on meeting certain common law standards of charity—namely, that an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.” There can be little doubt that the promotion of political violence and militating against public disorder serve no public purpose and are contrary to established public policy. Any organization that promotes public disorder, rioting, assassination, revolution, or other forms of violence, can and must be stripped of its tax-exempt status and subjected to the requirements of law.
The targets for such actions are numerous. There are thousands of left-wing NGOs across the country engaged in apologia for political violence and public disorder—many of them linked directly to that consistent nemesis of civil society, George Soros. No sane person, viewing the utter devastation caused by progressive pro-crime organizations like those that championed Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, can pretend that they serve a public purpose and are in accordance with public policy. The resulting crime, filth, and insecurity of property was too much even for deepest-blue Southern California. There would be few political acts more justified than stripping these pro-crime foundations and their organizational appendages of their tax exemptions.
Other, more stringent charges—under RICO or the Anti-Riot Act—can be brought to bear against the most violent offenders. But the biggest blow should fall against the mainstream institutional structures that propagate such violence to the left-wing masses and the “respectable” liberal intelligentsia. Only a massive, forceful response from the state, conducted lawfully and in accordance with the principles of justice and good government, but striking a clear blow against the ideological apparatus of the left, will be sufficient to prevent the eruption of further and more damaging attacks like that suffered last Wednesday.
The post The State Must Take Left-Wing Violence In Hand appeared first on The American Conservative.
