On the assassination of Charlie Kirk - and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and very nearly Donald Trump himself

PART 2: The left can no longer deny a recent and rising pattern of political violence against its opponents.

(Second of two parts; Part 1 is here)

The legacy media claims Charlie Kirk’s killing is part of a decade-long bipartisan wave of political violence.

The legacy media is wrong. This assassination wave began last year - and it has come from the left, not the right.

Yes, lawmakers on both sides have been hurt or killed since Democrat Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011. But not all crimes are created equal. A political assassination targets someone whose killing has national significance. The target must be politically, economically, or culturally powerful, and the attack must resonate nationally for its symbolism.

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(Make your voice heard. Make the truth heard.)

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An assassination does not have to succeed to fit this definition. But it must have a serious chance of doing so; it cannot be semi-random, psychosis-driven crime.

The four major American assassinations in the 1960s¹ and the shooting of George Wallace in 1972 met that definition. Then, perhaps because of increased security, perhaps because of a cooling in political tension after Vietnam, the United States had no similar killings for five decades.² Shootings like the one that wounded Gifford, yes, but not assassinations. The most notable domestic terrorism was the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

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Then came the shooting of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024. It happened at a campaign rally — the very definition of political violence. It came within inches of killing Trump and altering American politics and life for a generation.

As I wrote at the time, the attempt on Trump’s life followed his regular demonization in the legacy media and by senior Democrats:

It is Democrats and the media who have compared Trump to Hitler³…

It’s Democrats- and the media - who, over and over, have called Trump an “existential threat” to democracy and the United States.

And those Democrats include the President of the United States.

A Secret Service counter-sniper killed Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, at the scene.

But stunningly, over a year later, authorities have not released a comprehensive investigation into Crooks, who was 23 at the time of the shooting.

What motivated Crooks’s attack on Trump? Did he tell anyone beforehand? Did anyone encourage him? We have no answers to those questions. His life, his drug use, his mental health, his political views, his finances, and his family and other relationships remain mostly a blank slate.

Crooks’s family seems to have successfully appealed for privacy — which seems unwarranted. Given the potential impact of what Crooks tried to do, his family owes law enforcement and the public complete cooperation.

Yet the legacy media have largely forgotten the assassination attempt, and Crooks.

It seems unlikely they would have done the same if Kamala Harris or Joe Biden had so narrowly escaped death.

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(Still standing)

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The second assassination attempt came on December 5.

This one succeeded.

A man in a surgical mask cut down Brian Thompson, the chief executive of United Healthcare — the insurance subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the largest private healthcare and insurance company in the world.

Thompson was not well known before he was killed. But his killing undoubtedly fell into the category of politically motivated assassination. Many people on the left cheered it, calling it necessary retribution against for-profit insurers.

“Online discussion has shown little sympathy for Thompson or the industry he represented,” The Guardian, a left-leaning news outlet, wrote. That was an understatement. Taylor Lorenz, a reporter who had worked for the Washington Post and New York Times, said she felt “joy” over Thompson’s killing.

Five days later, police arrested Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old scion of a wealthy Maryland family, or the shooting.

Mangione’s wealth and privilege did not lessen the left’s admiration for him. In fact, his swarthy good looks only seemed to increase it. A fundraiser for his legal defense has so far raised over $1 million in contributions.

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(For an extra million, he’ll give you a look at his pistol!)

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The message Mangione’s supporters have sent is only too clear: assassinations can be justifiable, if the victim is an executive or politician the left despises.

Charlie Kirk most certainly fell in that category, both for his views themselves and his commitment to free speech, which many on the left now openly despise. Just two days before Kirk’s assassination, the feminist Website Jezebel ran a piece called, “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk.”

The piece wasn’t serious; Kirk probably never saw it. But the fact it existed at all reveals just what Kirk had become to the left, which was well aware of how successful he had become at recruiting young people to support President Trump.

Kirk faced far more charged hate too. In October, police in Tempe, Arizona arrested a man for threatening him and Donald J. Trump Jr. And in an eerie coincidence, a Utah man posted a song called “Charlie Kirk Dead at 31” a few weeks ago to the Soundcloud music hosting site. (The man has not been connected to Kirk’s killing.)

Still, by the time of his death Kirk had his own private security and coordinated his events with local law enforcement. A half-dozen police officers were present at his event Wednesday in Utah — a seemingly reasonable number to help manage what Kirk no doubt expected would be a friendly crowd in a conservative state.

It wasn’t, though.

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(We need the truth more than ever. Help me find it. For pennies a day.)

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An honest accounting must acknowledge that many people on the right use inflammatory language to describe their opponents. Both Democrats and Republicans need to tone down their rhetoric.

But it’s past time for Democratic politicians, and the legacy media, to stop trying to “both-sides” what has happened in the last year.

The shootings of state Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota by an (alleged) killer who appears to have struggled with mental illness are not the same threat to the United States as the assassination of Brian Thompson by a man who has been lionized by millions of people on the left.

Comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, or Charlie Kirk to Joseph Goebbels — as The Nation did after Kirk was killed — is wrong and will only fuel further violence. This wave of violence is running left to right.

I don’t know how we stop it. And I certainly don’t want the right to escalate it.

But — at a minimum — leaders on the left have to acknowledge what’s really happening here, and speak out against it, and stop comparing Republican leaders to Nazis. Hey, maybe they could even tell their followers that free speech and debate are core American values, too.

Or is that too much to ask?

(End of Part 2; Part 1 is here)

1. John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

2. The 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan is an edge case, but John Hinckley Jr.’s motivations were personal and he was sent to a psychiatric hospital, so it falls outside the definition of strict political violence.

3. Here I offered a screenshot of a Washington Post opinion piece headlined, “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.”