The Friday Brief, September 12, 2025

The Violent Day

The Big Picture

Charlie Kirk

There are moments in politics where partisanship must yield to principle, and this is one of them.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a moral abomination, a crime that wounds not only his family and community but the very fabric of our republic. However deep our political disagreements, however profound our disgust with the movement Kirk embodied, nothing justifies the silencing of a human being with violence. Political murder is the acid that corrodes democracy. There is not a single legitimate excuse or reason for this murder.

In a republic worth saving, power is contested at the ballot box, not through bullets. We resolve our disputes with words, not weapons. Not soft words, not whispered disputes, but big, loud, passionate arguments.

The Founders, for all their contradictions, understood this: the peaceful transfer of power, the protection of dissent, the sanctity of life in public service. We cheapen all of it when we allow blood to replace ballots.

I will not celebrate this act; those on the left cheering and mocking need a personal reset. I will not shrug it off. I will not wrap it in the tattered banner of “the other side had it coming.” Because if violence becomes the coin of our politics, America is finished. Every decent person should condemn this assassination without hesitation, without hedging, without a single “but.”

And yet, because we must speak the whole truth, we cannot allow this terrible crime to be weaponized into a lie.

Even as the body is carried away, the MAGA chorus and the Trump White House are already doing what they always do: turning grief into grievance, mourning into manipulation. Their script is as familiar as it is cynical: all political violence comes from the left. Antifa. BLM. “Woke mobs.” “Trans assassins.” The “radical Democrats.” That’s the catechism, repeated endlessly until it becomes muscle memory.

But it is a grotesque lie.

The political violence in this country has never been the sole province of the left, and in the last decade, some of the most lethal violence has come from the right.

The names of cities and victims are etched into our memory: Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Buffalo. Dylann Roof’s massacre in Charleston. Cesar Sayoc’s pipe bombs, mailed to journalists and Democratic leaders after Trump’s rallies primed him with talk of “enemies of the people.” January 6th, when thousands stormed the Capitol, assaulted police, and chanted about hanging Mike Pence while Trump sat back, giggling and capering, and enjoyed the show.

Even Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Lost Boy who shot at Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a registered Republican, raised in a MAGA household.

When the right wants to memory-hole these events, they lean on another trick: they pretend these were lone wolves, “mentally ill” nobodies. For some, the voices of madness and internet celebrity lead them down the dark path that leads to a trigger pull and tragedy.

But many of these wolves drank from the same poisoned well, fed by the same voices. In the coming days, you’ll see the MAGA tactic of demanding silence, the conflation of rhetoric and action, demands the government punish opposition speech…but only for Trump’s opponents.

If rhetoric alone led to violence, the right needs to look into its own mirror.

The record is long and sickening.