There's a specific moment you can point to when a political movement forfeits any claim to basic decency, and the American left has now supplied several. Somewhere between cheering a near-miss on President Donald Trump's life and mocking the murder of Charlie Kirk a year later, I’ve found it impossible to believe the American left can be redeemed.
One of the most disturbing things we witnessed following the incident in which Trump was almost assassinated in Butler, Pa., in 2024, was the response from a surprisingly large portion of the online left — they were disappointed that the shooter had missed. I believe many of us hoped the event would make the country pause and consider whether political rhetoric had become so intense that we, as a society, would finally realize some sort of change was necessary.
Instead, nothing changed. To this day, there are leftists who insist the whole thing was staged, a conspiracy theory that conveniently lets them avoid reckoning with what their own side said out loud.
Then came Charlie Kirk's assassination, and the left showed America exactly what it is a second time. Rather than universal condemnation of political violence, plenty on the left celebrated. On the anniversary of his murder, social media was flooded with posts mocking his death all over again. I won't repost them here. They're vile enough that repeating them would only spread the cruelty further.
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Now, days after a statue honoring Kirk was unveiled outside Turning Point USA's Phoenix headquarters, someone vandalized it with red paint. Phoenix police received calls about the vandalism around 8 a.m. on Sunday, and officers are investigating. The statue, which depicts Kirk in the act of tossing hats to a crowd, was defaced with red paint, a large spot directly on the neck, the exact spot where Kirk was shot.
That wasn’t an accident.
The statue had only been up three days. It was unveiled on Sept. 10, 2026, exactly one year after Kirk's assassination, and that same day community members visited Turning Point USA headquarters to leave flowers, hats, and other tributes in his memory as part of a broader set of events marking the anniversary.
Kirk spent his life traveling the country, engaging college students who disagreed with him, and for that countless people on the left brand him a bigot, giving them the moral cover to mock him and his murder.
Deep down, I think we all want to believe that people are mostly good at heart. And for most, it is probably true. The problem is that when you look at the left specifically, how it reacts to certain events, what polls say it believes about political violence, it’s hard not to believe that leftism is some soul-corroding ideology that strips people of basic humanity.
But each time I am tempted to think that isn't so, the left finds a fresh way to prove otherwise. Will things get better? I hope so. But I think they’ll get a lot worse first. But what really keeps me up at night is the worry that the left is too far gone to change.
