After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah last week, leftist and contrarian figures across the country reacted with open celebration, prompting widespread public condemnation.
Fox News Digital spoke this week to several experts who analyzed whether the trend remains a fringe occurrence or if celebrations of political opponents’ deaths and injuries are becoming mainstream.
Paul Sracic is a former politics professor at Youngstown State University and is currently an adjunct fellow at the domestic policy-focused Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He said the answer depends on one’s definition of ‘fringe.’
Sracic said recent surveys showed as many as one-fifth of self-identified liberals agreed that political violence is sometimes justified.
‘Presumably, most of these very liberal and liberal voters support Democrats. This should horrify Democratic leaders, but it’s arguably the inevitable outcome of Democrats either adopting or at most failing to push back against notions that words themselves can be a form of violence and therefore can make people feel ‘unsafe’ if they are exposed to a political argument with which they disagree,’ Sracic said.
Democratic leaders, however they might personally think, also know that these more-energized voters must be attracted to the polls in the midterms, no matter the political environment, in order for the party to have a shot at winning back part of the federal government, he said.
Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., who is also running for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s to-be-open Senate seat, offered another perspective – focusing on the increasing trend of political violence from the left against the right.
He cited Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., nearly being assassinated at a Virginia ballfield, two attempts on President Donald Trump’s life, and Kirk’s murder.
‘Make no mistake—whether you stand with President Trump, support Israel, or believe in free-market capitalism, you are being targeted,’ Barr said.
‘I will work with the Trump administration and provide every resource necessary to prevent these acts of domestic terrorism before they happen.’
Democratic strategist and former congressional staff advisor Julian Epstein argued that multiple factors are driving the reaction to Kirk’s killing.
‘The celebration of Kirk’s death on the far left, both on and offline, is far too common, and not sufficiently denounced,’ he said. ‘The minimization of assassination by Democrat elites in arguing the both side-ism — and in the case of an ABC reporter, the moral relativism — is also too common.’
Epstein warned that the indiscriminate use of historically charged terms like ‘fascism’ is radicalizing political bases, and argued the left is failing to uphold Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights-era call to reject violence as a path to political change.
‘That failure occurred not only with the Kirk assassination, but also during the L.A. riots and the scourge of antisemitic violence on college campuses and elsewhere in the past few years,’ he said.
Link Lauren, former advisor to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and host of the podcast ‘Spot On,’ said the trend is no longer fringe but increasingly mainstream:
‘They call us Nazis, fascists, and threats to democracy. In the wake of George Floyd, the left burned down cities and businesses,’ Lauren said.
‘Since Charlie’s assassination, conservatives have gathered in churches and peaceful prayer. [That] tells you all you need to know.’
At the Manhattan Institute, legal policy fellow Tal Fortgang added that political violence is ‘capacious.’
‘There is an increasingly mainstream view among progressives, gaining ground within the Democratic Party as its democratic socialist influence grows, that terrorism is justified if it evens out power disparities,’ he said. ‘So you see prominent Democrats downplaying the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, on the grounds that Israel was the more powerful party in that fight.’
Fortgang said New York Assemb. Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America have risen in prominence since the Hamas terror attacks.
‘And, as Mamdani’s star has risen, so has the premise that violence is justified if it’s someone ‘powerless’ attacking someone ‘powerful.’’
Fortgang also pointed to comments from Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts after the murder of a health care executive – a case in which the prime suspect has been treated like a celebrity outside his ongoing court hearings.
Warren originally said that violence is ‘never the answer,’ with the caveat that ‘people can only be pushed so far… if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change.’ She later clarified her remarks, stating: ‘Violence is never the answer. Period. I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.’
Fortgang said suspect Luigi Mangione ‘struck a blow against capitalism,’ and posited that Kirk’s suspected murderer Tyler Robinson may have been motivated by a desire to avenge transphobia.
‘Hamas fights settler-colonialism when they burn families alive. Systemic thinking is dehumanizing, but it became basically orthodoxy on the American left,’ he said.
‘Even if it is not solely responsible for the uptick in political violence, or its widespread celebration, it helps sustain it. That’s what the Democratic Party needs to confront.’