Charlie Kirk’s Death Exposes The Left’s Divide

Elite liberal opinion runs up against the left-wing base

Leading liberal commentators and Democratic politicians made sure to condemn Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week. “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form,” declared California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out public life and make people afraid of participating,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a video address. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein saw the murder as a bad omen for American democracy while praising Kirk for doing politics “the right way.”

These views contrasted sharply with the sentiments expressed on Bluesky, Reddit, and the left-wing corners of X and TikTok. The left-wing base either celebrated Kirk’s death, blamed the conservative commentator’s hate for his own demise, or obnoxiously equivocated about the matter. These posts got high engagement, even if they weren’t authored by public personalities. Nearly all public figures made sure to condemn the killing, but many of them went out of their way to declare Kirk a terrible person who brought this on himself. Those callous figures include Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and publications like The Nation and Mother Jones. Popular liberal streamer Destiny was more than callous in his celebration of the murder and declared we need more violence to terrify conservatives.

There’s a certain take gaining popularity that all of the celebration and victim-blaming is fake, and that the Left universally condemned the shooting. Liberal columnist Jonathan Chait and Highly Respected fan Richard Hanania are some of the voices arguing for this view. It’s silly. The evidence is pretty clear that a large number of people on the Left were either celebratory or callous towards Kirk’s death. These same people would argue the Right was celebrating the death of a prominent left-wing figure if there were so many viral conservative posts doing so. Back in the 2010s, liberal journalists would frequently trawl for conservative posts to provide evidence for a narrative they’d want to create. So we’d end up with stories like “Conservatives are OUTRAGED at Lady Gaga’s Dress” and the evidence would be a handful of no follower accounts with three likes saying they found the pop singer’s dress stupid.

The liberal media has blamed the Right for political assassinations it neither celebrated nor had any connection to. When JFK was assassinated in 1963, the media initially blamed right-wing groups like the John Birch Society, which prompted attacks on JBS offices and death threats against Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign headquarters. When then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in a random attack by a lunatic, the Tea Party and white nationalists were blamed despite the shooter having no political motive whatsoever. Giffords was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the case of Kirk’s murder, the gunman was a leftist who killed on behalf of his ideology. The gunman in turn received a notable level of support from other leftists. Only the most obtuse would try to deny the Left’s blame here. The entire American Left is not represented by Ezra Klein, a figure regularly mocked and criticized by his ideological peers.

The stark contrast between the horrified and the celebratory/dismissive responses expose the divide within the Left. Elite liberal opinion, as dictated by prominent columnists and party operators, wants Democrats to move to the center, be less woke, and sound more sensible to independent voters. It’s a strategy pursued by both Newsom and Klein. The California governor has gone on a wide array of podcasts, including Charlie Kirk’s, to try to convince Americans that Democrats are moving away from woke and addressing middle-of-the-road issues. Klein offers “Abundance liberalism” that aims to provide a pro-free market, friendlier version of the Left. Democrats are still committed to DEI and opposing sensible immigration enforcement, but they try to do it now without the lefty jargon. They also try to treat Trump as a normal political figure rather than the new Hitler. It doesn’t always work, but they do try.

The base is different. They want a more aggressive posture from the Democrats. They don’t want their leaders going on right-wing podcasts and appearing moderate. They want WAR. Democratic offices are inundated with calls to violently resist ICE raids. Much of the left-wing base embraced Luigi Mangione as a hero. They support violent measures against Tesla to protest Elon Musk’s politics. They’re really angry and Trump-deranged on Bluesky. Lefty academics and journalists are still as committed to woke as before, as are the activist groups that influence the Democratic Party. The DNC meetings this year affirmed that these groups still wield power over the party, forcing the proceedings to issue land acknowledgments and mandate gender pronouns.

The base is just as radical as it ever was. The difference is that the public is less beholden to their opinions now than in the age of peak woke. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, social media was still dominated by the Left. Online media sites like HuffPost and Buzzfeed were important and where people turned to for news. These sites were extremely woke and animated by Trump Derangement Syndrome. It was easy to whip up the public into a frenzy over Trump’s latest comments, black criminals shot by police, and the Alt Right. Now it’s much harder. The public is less politicized. Zoomers are more right-leaning than Millennials were a decade ago. Online news sites are barely surviving and social media is much more right-wing than it was in the pre-X era. Trump won the popular vote last year, indicating independents are sick of woke.

Democratic politicians and some liberal columnists understand the public mood and want to push the party in a centrist direction. But the base is resistant.

There’s a similarity in this situation to what the American Right experienced after the 2012 election. Party leaders and Conservative Inc. wanted the GOP to move in a new direction. It wanted the Right to embrace amnesty, focus solely on fiscal issues, and be more “inclusive.” Any hint of racial politics had to be purged. The new GOP would be so friendly that liberals would have to conclude Republicans were harmless. If one followed National Review or rising politicians like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan, one would think the future of the party was a milquetoast “conservatarianism.”

Obviously, that was mistaken. The Breitbart comments section better reflected the mood on the Right than Paul Ryan, and it triumphed with Trump’s election in 2016. The base of the Right was angry, firmly opposed to amnesty, and wanted a party that waged culture war and didn’t care about being politically correct. The one candidate who ran against elite conservative opinion won the Republican nomination.

The Democratic Party could witness a similar outcome in 2028.

The assassination did not happen in a vacuum and it was not a freak accident. It was carried out by a leftist on behalf of sentiments shared by a large number of Americans. It was a political act that found support among a large number of leftists. To deny that is to be willfully stupid.

One can acknowledge that not everyone on the Left is celebrating Kirk’s death. But to pretend no one is because of elite liberal opinion fails to account for the anger of the left-wing base. 2028 will determine which side holds the future for the Democratic Party.