In the immediate aftermath of the fourth assassination attempt on President Trump this past weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we heard the familiar chorus of voices in the corporate media and political establishment calling for calm, for unity, for lowering the temperature, toning down the rhetoric. We heard the same thing after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, and after Trump was shot in the face by a would-be assassin on the campaign trail in July 2024.
As always, the people saying this pretend it’s a “both sides” problem, that the political left and right are both at risk of becoming dangerously violent, and that for the sake of our democracy we all need to calm down.
What nonsense. There is only one side in America today that has a persistent and very real-world problem with political violence, and everyone knows it’s the left.
It’s the left that has produced four would-be assassins of President Trump. It’s the left that produced Charlie Kirk’s assassin and the sneering online hordes who celebrated his murder. It’s the left that produced Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood, and overnight became a folk hero to his fellow travelers.
The left riots and burns down cities in a way that makes Jan. 6 look tame, and the corporate press justifies it as a form of political speech. The left regularly threatens conservative speakers and events, forcing organizers to provide a level of security that liberal events never need. The left foments violence not just by spreading false propaganda about conservatives but by funding the supposed right-wing extremists they warn about, as the recent federal criminal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown.
Surveys consistently find a shocking tolerance for political violence among left-leaning Americans that simply is not present on the right. A YouGov poll last year found a whopping 42 percent of self-described liberals believe political violence is sometimes justifiable (only 9 percent of conservatives said the same). An April 2025 Rutgers University study on political violence found that 56 percent of self-identifying left-wing respondents justified murdering Trump, while 50 percent said the same of Elon Musk. If these numbers were reversed, and showed massive support for political violence on the right, it’s all the corporate press would talk about.
As it is, the press won’t even admit the left’s predilection for political violence, even though the reality of it is borne out nearly every week — and not just in the form of trans mass shooters targeting Christian schoolchildren and churches. When Jimmy Kimmel’s show was briefly suspended last year following Kimmel’s vile commentary on Kirk’s assassination (including his false assertion that Kirk’s assassin was MAGA), a man shot up an ABC affiliate station in Sacramento. To be clear, the alleged shooter (a former legislative director for the California Federation of Teachers) was outraged at ABC for suspending Kimmel, not at Kimmel for lying about Kirk’s assassin.
Speaking of Kimmel, a few days before Cole Allen allegedly burst into the WHCD venue to kill Trump, Kimmel aired a fake WHCD routine in which he pretended to host the dinner. As part of the routine he said, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” After the assassination attempt, First Lady Melania Trump rightly called out Kimmel, saying, “People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.” (The president and first lady both called on ABC to fire Kimmel for his violent rhetoric.)
Kimmel isn’t even an outlier on the American left. He’s representative — a normie leftist. Minutes after the assassination attempt at the WHCD, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt blamed Trump for almost getting murdered, saying the president is “poisoning the rhetoric” in America, and that he’s a “vile and disgusting man.” The idea that Trump has it coming is a mainstream view on the left. Tune into CNN or The View, and you will hear versions of this violence-inspiring rhetoric spewing forth from the mouths of supposedly respectable, establishment liberals.
And yet somehow whenever there’s a high-profile act of political violence from the left — this time not from a nutjob but a man who simply believes all the mainstream left’s conspiracy theories about Trump and decided to act on them — we get the same brain-dead “both-sides” scolding from figures on the establishment right.
This time around, it was Princeton professor and professional nice guy Robert P. George, who took to X the day after the assassination attempt to ask if everyone, “right or left, MAGA or anti-MAGA, Republican or Democrat,” could just “stop catastrophizing and trying to get everyone on your side worked up into a rage?” What we need to do, George insisted, is talk it out and make sure we don’t demonize each other. “We need to argue with our political adversaries — passionately perhaps — but with respect for their humanity and dignity. We don’t need to destroy them. That mustn’t be our aim.”
The left is manifestly trying to destroy the right, to kill prominent conservatives and Republicans. But Professor George insists you mustn’t destroy them first, just argue with them.
It takes a certain trained submissiveness to respond to recurring leftist political violence in this country with such extreme supineness. It’s as if George thinks we’re in an argument with people who simply want a marginally higher tax rate, and things have gotten a little heated.
In reality, we’re in a life-or-death contest with bloodthirsty radicals who would very much like to terrorize us without end and orphan our children if they can. It’s not “catastrophizing” to say that, it’s simply to acknowledge what’s actually happening. When ordinary Democrats and liberals publicly celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, it’s not “demonizing” anyone to point out that such behavior is in fact demonic and dangerous and has no place in a civilized society. To admit that most of our institutions are complicit in the creation of violent terrorists and would-be assassins is a plain admission of the truth.
Under these circumstances, yes, we need to destroy them, we need to stop them. If that means dismantling institutions controlled by the left, then we must dismantle them. If we have to change the law to do that, or apply the law to its fullest possible extent, then by all means we need to do that. To paraphrase Aragorn, war is upon us whether we would risk it or not. We are not going to argue these people out of their commitment to political violence. They are resorting to unjust force, and only just force will stop them.
Anything less means allowing them to carry on a campaign of violence and terror against us and our families. Maybe Professor George, ensconced in his ivory tower, is OK with that. He knows they will not come for him. Not at first, anyway.
But I’m not OK with it. And you shouldn’t be, either.
