End political violence.
Free speech, violence, and misinformation
I learned about the assassination of Charlie Kirk while sitting in a quiet little coffee shop in San Francisco, pecking away at my laptop as I tried to focus on work. A barista was chatting with a friend; both were young women, by all appearances perfectly ordinary.
A man had been killed, one barista explained; she thought it was a good thing, he deserved it. One wasn’t sure who Charlie Kirk was; the other clarified that he the guy who went around college campuses arguing for right-wing stuff, which meant he was asking for it as far as she was concerned. I was a little unsettled to hear the cheerful reaction to an assassination and the swift justification thereof; I also knew next to nothing about Charlie Kirk.
I know a lot more about Charlie Kirk now than I did when he was alive, and I’ve seen a lot more happen since then. This article will discuss political violence in liberal democracies from Charlie Hebdo to Charlie Kirk and beyond, a paradox of tolerance widely attributed to Karl Popper, and the urgent problem of rising political violence in the United States, three distinct political topics that are nevertheless closely related. I encourage you to share this article with friends and tense acquaintances across the political spectrum.
There are a lot of people who do not want to believe that there is a real and growing problem with political violence in the United States, or that the problem is growing on the left. It is urgent that Blue Team liberals and moderates take steps to identify and isolate the violent part of the left wing from the larger Blue Team political tent and work to de-radicalize the left.
Right-wing political violence
For a lot of readers who are liberal, left-wing, or just generally have Blue Team loyalties, the first response to the above assertion is to claim, without good evidence, that right-wing political violence is a greater problem.1 Right-wing political violence exists, but it is neither seeing the same growth nor is it being actively ignored.2 Currently, the primary right-wing danger to the democratic process does not lie in political violence.3
For example, anti-abortion violence targeting clinics and providers has continued after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade (1973) in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022); however, it has declined. The volume and deadliness of anti-abortion violence peaked sometime in the 1990s.4
Generally, right-wing political violence has been a higher priority for domestic law enforcement than left-wing political violence, being more vigorously investigated and prosecuted by state and federal authorities for most of the last several decades.5 The most alarming instance of right-wing political violence since 1995,6 the January 6th storming of the Capitol, was curbed by law enforcement and punished with prosecutions.7 Now is not the time to shout tu quoque in order to avoid cleaning one’s own house.8
The reality of the problem
Charlie Kirk’s assassin9 was a left-wing political independent motivated by left-wing politics.10 The act was abetted and celebrated by people on the left.11 This information was actively concealed by Blue Team media, with 24% of respondents believing that the assassin was a Republican and 17% believing that his motives were right-wing.12 After Jimmy Kimmel spread the lie that the shooter was aligned with rival right-wing groups, Blue Team media rallied in defense of Kimmel even as evidence that the assassin was left-wing continued to mount.13
The shooting of Charlie Kirk was not an isolated event.14 A significant amount of recent political violence in the US can be reasonably be described left-wing based on either the motives or the affiliations of the attackers.15 Other cases had less clear motives and assassins with unclear affiliation, such as the high-profile attempt to assassinate Donald Trump that left him with a bloody ear.16 Comparatively few have been right-wing.17
These attacks have targeted not only Republicans, but other perceived enemies of left-wing causes on the basis of that emnity, including certain moderate Democrats,18 Jews,19 Christians,20 health care executives,21 whites,22 ABC affiliate stations,23 and ICE.24 Many of these violent acts have been celebrated by left-wing individuals on and off social media.25
Left-wing political violence is a growing trend, and a lot of moderates in the Blue Team tent are in denial about this problem, partly due to rising partisanship within the media ecosystem.26 While there has been significant left-wing political violence in the US in the past, what we’re seeing right now is a recent trend that emerged in the 21st century.27
Je suis Charlie
There are real and related global trends in political violence. The slogan Je suis Charlie dates from ten years ago, referring to Charlie Hebdo, a French magazine that is frequently irreverent and satirical. When that irreverence and satire has been turned on Muslim subjects through its cartoons, the response has included lawsuits (2006), firebombings (2011), shootings (2015), social media censorship (2020), and stabbings (2020); essentially, all possible venues have been pursued, both legal and illegal, to censor the magazine and punish those involved with its production.28
Globally, Islamists are responsible for a large amount of political violence, and particularly political violence intended to suppress controversial speech. However, America did not have a significant domestic population of Islamists until changes in immigration patterns during the Bush II administration, and the population remains a small minority.29 Islamist political violence used to be detached from mainstream American politics.
From foreign phenomenon to the American mainstream
Islamists have fallen into company with the American left wing. This is a very new phenomenon. Before the 21st century, Muslims were simply not a significant presence in mainstream American politics as far as either major party was concerned.30 In the Trump era, Islamists may be found integrated with democratic socialists in political and protest networks.
The alignment of Islamist organizations with the American left wing has been broadly associated with a rise in tolerance for political violence31 as well as being directly linked to a number of specific acts of political violence.32 This relationship isn’t a simple unidirectional cause and effect; both trends reinforce each other and share common root causes.
The postmodern left is censorious, equating speech with violence.33 There have been plenty within the postmodern left who responded to the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo with criticism of Charlie Hebdo. The roots of this particular postmodern left alignment trace back to the 1960s, explained and exhibited quite clearly through examining the work and life of Frantz Fanon.
For most mainstream Democrats of the 1990s, Frantz Fanon was a fringe radical they hadn’t heard of; for the growing postmodern left that worked its way into the mainstream in the 2010s, his work and ideas were gospel.34 Unfortunately, those ideas include a direct endorsement of revolutionary violence.35 In addition to the embrace of explicitly violent ideology, there are four key ideological factors that have contributed to the growth in left-wing violence:
Moving away from universal principles, especially the principle of free speech.36
Failure of the liberal political establishment to recognize and address the illiberality of the postmodern left.37
Treating disagreeable speech as a form of violence.38
Finding hateful subtext in statements by political opponents.39
The last two points combined are particularly relevant to the Charlie Kirk assassination and the response to it.40 Within the “blue bubble,” all Red Team views are construed as highly radical and hateful, with moderate positions concealing radical subtext that is revealed or constructed by Blue Team media elites, through close reading and Freudian psychoanalysis if necessary.41
Factually, most of Charlie Kirk’s political opinions, both on the issues and, more importantly,42 on the subject of how issues should be decided, were not especially radical. His opinions would have been considered largely ordinary within the Republican Party from the 1980s to the present, and most would not have been remarkable in a moderate or conservative Democrat of the 1990s. However, they did not need to be radical to be construed as radical and hateful by observers within the blue bubble.43 The rise of partisan media has produced a significant problem with strategic partisan misinformation.44
Charlie Kirk’s main project was a devotion to civil debate, dialogue, and discourse. His harshest critics within Red Team’s media ecosystem were the true violent radicals.45 His assassination has made the future ascendance of right-wing political violence more likely, rather than less, both because he was a likely future leader himself and because he was in a position to significantly influence other likely future leaders like J. D. Vance.
Where do we go next?
The problem we face right now as a society is one that Karl Popper described in 1945. Our survival as a liberal democracy that relies on discourse and debate requires that we identify and suppress those who advocate for and engage in political violence. This is widely described as the “paradox of tolerance.” In order to maintain a tolerant society, we cannot tolerate the substitution of violence for persuasion.46 Democracy needs a loyal opposition, one that accepts a common democratic framework and is willing to accept losing elections.47
“But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.” - Karl Popper, 1945
Popper was right. This is why January 6th, 2021 needed to be taken seriously.48 This is why the Boogaloo Boys should be (and were) prosecuted. And, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and other recent acts of left-wing political violence, it is why the Democratic Party and the associated Blue Team media ecosystem needs to kick out the radicals who look fondly upon political violence.49
In the past, the Democratic Party was much better at pushing the radicals to the margins and included a more significant number of moderates. The growing Horseshoe Caucus, on the other hand, is full of radicals who are actively trying to eliminate the moderates from the party. The minority of House Democrats who voted against condemning Kirk’s assassination represent the leading edge of a troublesome trend.
Political violence is not going to preserve our democracy.
This is, generally, an example of tu quoque argument. Deflecting from the issue doesn’t address the problem.
Blue Team and Red Team partisans will both claim that their side has always been less violent. Both sides can present convincing and earnest research supporting that claim. The methodology of most of this research is suspect; for example, many such studies do not include the George Floyd riots or the January 6th insurrection as political violence at all, in spite of both being highly significant episodes of political violence. Others are skewed by singular high-mortality events, such as the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. However, while comparative baseline levels of political violence in the 1980s-2020s varies significantly, the trends generally show stagnant right-wing violence and increasing left-wing violence.
I would say that the dangers are executive overreach and undermining the legitimacy of the electoral process, both of which can still be addressed both in the court of law and the court of public opinion. The Trump administration controls neither the court system nor the electoral process; indeed, it has thus far been unable to deport one particular high-profile individual who unambiguously lacks the legal right to reside in the United States because it has by and large (if sometimes belatedly) obeyed the orders of the court system.
This is most trivially true with the inclusion of the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing and measuring by total deaths, but it’s also true counting incidents broadly. A small amount persists. The most notable recent act of political violence by a right-wing figure was the assassination of Melissa Hortman, which was carried out by a person known to be strongly opposed to abortion. While the assassin was incontestably right-wing, whether or not the violence was motivated by his right-wing perspective is contested; he claimed to have been acting on the orders of Governor Tim Walz and may have been motivated by delusion.
Here, I’m speaking of the 1980s onward; the place where there is some room for debate on this topic is Islamist political violence, which has sometimes been a high priority for federal law enforcement. Some people would classify this as right-wing (as it is religious conservatism) and others left-wing; for example, there was a string of three prominent pro-Palestinian acts of political violence in the spring of 2025, with the first two being perpetrated by ordinary domestic left-wing activists and the third being a flamethrower attack by an Egyptian pro-Palestinian attacker on June 1st.
The fact that foreign Islamists and domestic left-wing activists may be conducting similarly-targeted political violence for similar reasons poses some difficulty for trying to classify political violence by categories.
Whether the successful Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995 was more or less alarming than the failed Counting Day Putsch of 2021 can be debated at length.
The Trump pardon of the rioters was a dangerous precedent. For better or worse, the punishments meted out prior to the mass pardon were substantial. Some may debate whether or not I’m right to label the event as the Counting Day Putsch and mark it as the most significant episode of right-wing political violence within the US in the last twenty years, but while the number of deaths due to the violence was small (1 rioter) and the disruption failed, this marked the first forcible disruption of the process of counting electoral votes in the entire history of the United States.
Educational footnote: The tu quoque fallacy, named for a Latin phrase meaning “you too,” is also known as “whataboutism.” Rhetorical deflection to the sins of the “other side” is a very common phenomenon; unfortunately, many loyal partisans are hypocrites, and we can’t really deal with wrongdoing without building conditional or transient alliances between those who are loyalty to principles over partisanship and self-interested hypocrites who would not support prosecution of their own side.
As assassins are sometimes motivated by a desire for notoriety, I have left the perpetrators in this article nameless and faceless, even though I discuss their motives and affiliations, and would encourage others to do so when practical.
The evidence for this is quite conclusive: Texts indicating he was motivated by the claim that Kirk was spreading hate, his family testifying about the political division that had grown between them, and his lover’s trans activist posts on Reddit. The bullet casing inscriptions alone would have been considered conclusive with a right-wing attacker. It is also unambiguous that the attacker, while politically left-wing and with motives legibly informed by “Blue Team” descriptions of Charlie Kirk, was not a Democrat.
While it is not clear if the assassin had assistance prior to the act, it is known that an unrelated left-wing individual stepped up to falsely confess to the assassin in an attempt to help the actual assassin escape. Which, frankly, is wildly alarming. Celebrations on social media were widely documented and in some cases subsequently deleted to avoid a wave of right-wing cancellation attempts.
Jimmy Kimmel’s prominent claim that the attacker was “MAGA” (Trumpist) was not grounded in any evidence at all. The attacker also was not a “Groyper” by any accounts.
Texts to the assassin’s roommate, testimony of his family, and other evidence emerged later as events unfolded.
Most notably, The Atlantic recently ran an article from experts who believe that 2025 is the first year that left-wing terrorism has overtaken right-wing terrorism in the United States, tracing the start of the trend of rising left-wing violence to Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
The distinction between these two things is difficult but real. Even in the era of high political polarization, many passionate people do not subscribe to a fully left-wing or right-wing package of beliefs. The health care CEO assassin is a good example of someone who was not really right-wing or left-wing overall (we have his Reddit posts to analyze) but had a clear legibly left-wing motive laid out in his manifesto (he talked about health care companies being “parasites,” “too powerful,” and “greedy and corrupt,” citing left-wing activists Michael Moore and Elisabeth Rosenthal).
The fact that the assassination attempt was lauded by many on the left, however, is a problem in and of itself regardless of the motives of the shooter.
The assassination of Melissa Hortman was carried out by a right-wing individual who declared his motives were to enable the election of Governor Tim Walz as the next Democratic senator for Minnesota. The general consensus is that he was acting on the basis of insanity, with a left-wing minority insisting it was anti-abortion violence, a right-wing minority insisting it was part of a pro-immigrant agenda, and no significant factions celebrating the assassination.
On April 13th, 2025, a left-wing American activist attempted to murder the sleeping moderate Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and his family by setting the governor’s mansion on fire in the name of Palestine. If he had succeeded, this would have been the first assassination of a sitting governor in more than a century.
On May 21st, a left-wing American activist carried out a mass shooting that targeted at least four people and resulting in the deaths of two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum during an event organized by the American Jewish Committee, ironically an event intended to build a coalition to help Gazans. By all appearances, the target selection was based simply on identification of the targets as presumptively Jewish.
As mentioned in Note 13, while the assassin who killed Brian Thompson was not clearly identifiable as left-wing in his everyday life, his stated motivations (health care costs are driven by greed and corruption), beliefs, and the sources of those beliefs (Elisabeth Rosenthal, Michael Moore) all were left-wing, as were those who applauded his act.
Notably, a stated motivation in a 2023 Tennessee shooting.
On September 19th, a left-wing retired lawyer who had spent twenty years working for Blue Team political groups, including as the legislative advocacy director for California’s teachers’ union, fired a gun at Sacramento’s ABC affiliate station in a drive-by shooting.
On July 4th, eleven people wearing tactical gear and armed with guns attacked an ICE facility in Texas in an unambiguous paramilitary assault by an organized left-wing group. On September 24th, a lone gunman used a bolt-action rifle to fire from the rooftop of an immigration lawyer’s office into an ICE facility and a windowless ICE van. In the four months since I drafted this article, there have been numerous additional incidents of violence.
I personally have seen shrines to the healthcare CEO assassin at essentially random convention vendor booths.
Both on the left and right wing, news has become heavily filtered by a desire to make one’s own team look good and the other team look bad. Left-wing political violence looks bad for Blue Team, so it’s mainly discussed on right-wing media.
Especially notable: Weather Underground, responsible for multiple bombings and arson attacks in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I can’t find a more comprehensive and concise review than “Controversies” section of the Wikipedia article.
Nation of Islam would generally be classified as a black nationalist group, with distinct goals and methods even if they are nominally Muslim.
The most prominent Muslims in American politics in the 20th century were Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, who were both well outside of the mainstream. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, began his political career in 2002 and was elected to Congress in 2006.
As with many social phenomena, it can be difficult to distinguish cause and effect. Higher tolerance for political violence has enabled greater support for Islamic terrorists within the American left; conversely, embracing groups and activists broadly aligned with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist groups pushes the left into
I already mentioned several examples, but pro-Palestinian political violence also occurred during street protests, such as the murder of Paul Kessler in Thousand Oaks, California in 2023, less than a month after Hamas’s October 7th attacks.
Indeed, in general, postmodern people tend to treat words as having magical importance, bringing literary symbolism to the lens through which they view reality. Since postmodernism comes from a generally literary rather than scientific background, this is not surprising.
Fanon is among the highest tiers of the most-cited writers on Google Scholar in spite of his relatively short career. The short of it is that Frantz Fanon took ideas from Marx and Freud and applied them to race and colonialism in order to justify terrorism, rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide by Algerians. In analysis that has been thoroughly disproven by the subsquent course of history, he believed that revolutionary violence was both more effective at gaining independence and resulted in a better long-term outcome for the successor state.
It’s worth noting that Frantz Fanon was not speaking purely academically; he fought for the FLN in the field, wrote propaganda for them, and assisted with their military strategy, and was therefore directly responsible for some measure of political violence by an Islamist terrorist organization.
Or, to use a postmodern turn of phrase, I might say something like “rejection of the normative Enlightenment meta-narrative.” The idea that everyone should operate by the same universal principles and standards and has a certain set of basic fixed rights is at the core of liberalism.
A few specific individuals have done so; however, these individual warnings have rarely translated into effective action, and many formerly liberal institutions are now aligned fully with the postmodern left.
Burning a Quran or an American flag, or calling someone by a racial slur, is not an act of violence. Classifying disagreeable speech as an act of violence creates a justification for using violence in response to disagreeable speech. This attitude is not unique to postmodernism; instead, what’s closer to unique is the classification of disagreeable speech and insults to a group or cause as fundamentally nonviolent, which is a cornerstone of the globally and historically distinctive kind of philosophical liberalism that social scientists sometimes describe as WEIRD.
If someone says “silence is violence,” this is what they’re doing.
It is possible that Kirk was targeted because he was moderate and therefore effective at persuading undecided voters; however, the assassin characterized Kirk as “full of hate and spreading hate,” and most likely believed Kirk to be radical.
Misrepresentation of opponents as radical is not limited to Blue Team, though I would say from experience (and polling) the Blue Team epistemic bubble is more thoroughly closed than the Red Team epistemic bubble, mainly because a greater share of traditional media and entertainment elites are aligned with Blue Team and partly because Red Team has more ideological diversity. (See, in particular, the Obama-Trump voters.)
The distinction between radical political opinions and radical opinions about how politics should be practiced is subtle but important. For example, the Amish widely hold genuinely radical beliefs, but this is politically nonproblematic because they do not attempt to use violent force to impose their radical lifestyle on others. Conversely, the idea that the private health insurance industry is broken and needs to be reformed is mainstream, but assassinating healthcare CEOs in order to try to frighten health insurance companies into self-reform is a radical and unacceptable political tactic.
Broadly, both sides benefit in the near term by painting the opposition as more extreme than they really are. In the long term,
This includes Groypers and Boogaloo Boys; mainstream Blue Team media went as far as to highlight the fact that there was a a disagreement between Groypers and Charlie Kirk, but many tended to omit the fact that the disagreement centered on Kirk’s insistence that democratic debate was at the center of meaningful political change.
Popper’s paradox is often summarized as saying that a tolerant society cannot accept intolerance, and then misused as a justification for political violence against persons deemed “intolerant,” such as racists or sexists. Flatly, it’s clear that liberal democracy can function and progress in the presence of widespread bigotry; the risk seen with the rise of Hitler, Lenin, and other dictatorial regimes is the use of political violence to suppress opposition.
Since every party is eventually out of the majority position, this means every party has to be willing to accept that an agenda contrary to their desires will be implemented from time to time.
Trump’s “sore loser” problem when losing the 2020 election was troublesome for the same reasons that partisans refusing to accept the lost election as legitimate was troublesome in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2024. However, right now, the Republican Party is playing within the rules compatible with Popper’s standards of tolerance; they are trying to win elections rather than eliminate their political opposition by force of arms, and they did indeed win democratic elections in 2024.
Broadly, the Trump administration can and has been checked both by the courts and Congress; at present, the fact that the administration has thus far been unable to permanently deport an illegal immigrant who had never received a visa on essentially technical and procedural grounds should be taken as firm evidence that the court system remains effective as a check on abuse of executive power. The democratic process was largely functional in the 2024 elections, and the 2026 midterms are likely to remain as democratically functional as the 2018 and 2022 midterms were, provided that there is not a widespread outbreak of political violence.
Given that the radicals are the ones pressing purity tests on candidates, I firmly believe that Democrats will find that they gain a bigger tent of voters and politicians if they kick out the radicals.