Following the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last week, there’s been an outpouring of public opinion about the direction of the country. The assassination was the latest in a spate of political violence, including the shooting of Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, arson at Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, a shooting at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, and the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump.
Some, including Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, have called for descalation, while Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Trump administration have vowed to crack down on left-wing hate speech. Voices on the left and right asked questions about how the country should move forward.
Ezra Klein (Left bias) wrote in the New York Times Opinion (Left), “My reaction to this, honestly, is that it is too little to just say we oppose political violence… Not because I agreed with him — no, most of what he poured himself into trying to achieve, I pour myself into trying to prevent. But I find myself grieving for him because I recognize some commonality with him. He was murdered for participating in our politics. Somewhere beyond how much divided us, there was something that bonded us, too. Some effort to change this country in ways that we think are good. I believe this so strongly: We have to be able to see that the bullet that tore into him was an act of violence against us all.”
David French (Lean Right) said, “If we’re convinced that political violence comes from only one side of the divide, then the temptation toward punitive authoritarianism is overwhelming…We screen out negative information about our side because we so desperately want to see ourselves as good people, fighting hard in a righteous struggle. It’s not just that we believe our ideas are better, but that we are better — we possess higher character and better values than the people on the other side.”
A writer in The Guardian (Left) wrote, “In reality, more than three-quarters of all extremist-related killings in the US over the last 10 years have come from rightwing extremists, with the radical left responsible for only a fraction of them…the biggest danger in a polarised climate is that the shooting becomes the Reichstag fire of our age. That arson attack on27 February 1933 marked Germany’s pivot from fragile democracy to outright dictatorship.”
For The Free Press’ (Lean Right) series on “Repairing America After the Murder of Charlie Kirk” Yuval Levin argued, “When we say we are divided, we often mean that we disagree too much and have too little in common. In reality, Americans don’t disagree nearly enough. Even most politically engaged people don’t actually spend much time in active disagreement with people who have different views. We spend most of our time cocooned away with people we agree with, talking about those terrible people on the other side, but rarely actually talk to those people. This feeds the common misimpression that disagreement is a mark of civic failure, and that the very existence of people who don’t share our goals and priorities is a problem to be solved.”
