Liberals tell us 1) that Charlie Kirk had it coming, but 2) hardly any liberals approved of his murder. Both of those assertions are false. At City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s Christina Buttons reminds us of some basic facts. Copious links are omitted:
When the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA was assassinated last month, leaders in both parties condemned the attack, and many mourned the husband and father of two. But some progressives on social media had a different reaction: they rationalized, mocked, and even celebrated the killing.
The scale of this reaction was not trivial. An online database logged over 63,000 user-submitted posts that cheered Kirk’s death, though the site was later taken down. One of the few unremoved celebratory posts, which references the song “No One Mourns the Wicked,” has 234,000 likes. As Christopher Rufo observed, many who work in the “helping professions”—teachers, nurses, school counselors, social workers, and physicians—celebrated, mocked, or justified the assassination.
What accounts for this reaction? Buttons describes our bifurcated media landscape, in which half the country marinates in narratives that bear little relation to truth. Within that landscape, she identifies three factors:
Three factors contributed to the celebration of Kirk’s assassination: cognitive shortcuts, institutional cues, and a changing conception of what counts as harm.
You can read the whole article for more. This strikes me as noteworthy:
By the 2010s, watchdog groups like the [Southern Poverty Law Center] and [the Anti-Defamation League] faced a scarcity problem: with fewer open bigots and violent groups in public life, they shifted from tracking the actions of fringe actors to policing the rhetoric of high-visibility conservatives. That expansion kept watchdogs relevant to donors and newsrooms, but it also resulted in more mainstream figures being categorized as “hateful.”
As Kirk’s profile grew, major watchdogs built standing files on him and Turning Point USA. The SPLC published “Turning Point USA: A case study of the hard right in 2024.” It said TPUSA was “emblematic” of the Republican Party’s desire to “enforce a social order rooted in white supremacy.” The ADL’s Center on Extremism posted a later-deleted overview of TPUSA in its Extremism, Terrorism & Bigotry section, accusing the group of attracting racists, its representatives of making bigoted statements, and Kirk of “attack[ing] the transgender community.”
Left-wing activist networks, including watchdog groups, often supply “information subsidies” to newsrooms: prepackaged research, quotes, and narratives intended to shape how a story is told. When mainstream outlets use this material, they give credence to activists’ framing. Many readers regard these outlets as neutral arbiters and miss the bias.
Also this:
Slogans such as “silence is violence” and “words are violence” framed nonparticipation and certain speech as inflicting harm. For many young people raised in a culture of expressive individualism—the idea that we define ourselves by what we publicly affirm—having those beliefs challenged constitutes a form of “emotional harm.”
No doubt that is true. At the end of the day, though, I think the principal explanation of why so many Democrats applauded Charlie Kirk’s murder is that a great many liberals are horrible people.
