Why blaming ‘the left’ is easier than deterring violence after Charlie Kirk’s murder

President Donald Trump is rejecting suggestions that right-wing extremism is a problem.

“Well, the problem is on the left,” Trump told reporters outside Air Force One. 

“The problem is on the left if you look at the problem — it’s not on the right like some people like to say, on the right. The problem we have is on the left. When you look at the agitators, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place, that’s the left, that’s not the right.” 

CHARLIE KIRK’S ALLEGED ASSASSIN ‘TAKEN OVER’ BY LEFTIST IDEOLOGY WHILE FBI PROBES WIDER PLOT: BONGINO

One reporter asked whether he planned to investigate.

“They’re already under investigation. They’re already under major investigation. A lot of the people that you would traditionally say are on the left.”

No matter how the question is framed, Trump sticks to his partisan analysis, as he did on “Fox & Friends”: “Radicals on the left are the problem. and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, open borders.” 

The contrast with Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, could not be starker.

Cox, who made the Sunday show rounds, says the country has to find an off-ramp from the current surge in political violence in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder.  There has to be a way to lower the temperature, he said.

Democrats from Barack Obama on down, to their credit, are denouncing the assassination as unacceptable, even if they disagreed with some or all of what Kirk stood for.

What’s striking is the ripple effect on everyone else.

Newsday had to apologize for an abominable cartoon.

The sketch showed an empty chair, with blood behind it, and the repeated phrase “Prove Me Wrong” — a frequent Kirk saying — with an arrow pointing to Turning Point USA.

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The Long Island paper called the cartoon “insensitive and offensive…We deeply regret this mistake and sincerely apologize to the family of Charlie Kirk and to all,” saying it’s been deleted online. But how does something that bad get approved?

Fox News, citing 10 sources, said the White House and Pam Bondi have lost confidence in Kash Patel. The FBI director stumbled in announcing that a suspect was in custody, only to see that person released as the wrong man. Patel says his tweet that the “subject” of the shooting was “in custody,” could have “been worded a little better.”

There were warning signs when Missouri’s attorney general was brought in with the same rank as Patel’s deputy, Dan Bongino, and Fox says he made clear he would not have left that job to serve as Patel’s number two.

Kari Lake, who runs the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said at a vigil for Kirk that the college that the accused shooter attended for one semester had “brainwashed” him.

“I am making a plea to mothers,” said Lake, who twice failed in bids for office in Arizona. “Do not send your children into these indoctrination camps.”

Lake added that her daughter didn’t go to college, instead working for Kirk.

Four years ago, the suspect went to Utah State University as a pre-engineering major.

And he was sufficiently, uh, brainwashed in 2021 that he decided to kill Kirk last week?

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Look, finger-pointing politics has been going on for a very long time. When President Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing, I wrote the front-page story. When the New York Times blamed Sarah Palin for the wounding of Gabby Giffords (and the death of six others) – because of a political map with crosshairs that the killer never saw – a top editor told me I was wrong but later admitted I’d been right.

And when the guy who badly wounded Steve Scalise at a Republican baseball practice was revealed to be a regular Rachel Maddow watcher, liberals jumped on that one.

So it is with the 22-year-old Kirk murder suspect and the pointless search for motive.

Is it relevant that the alleged shooter is living with a transgender man who is becoming a woman? Sure. But anyone who would plot to kill Charlie Kirk for political reasons is by definition insane, as are all these nutjob school shooters.

It’s also true, by the way, that the constant attacks on the president — the survivor of two assassination attempts — as Hitler and worse foster an atmosphere in which another attack is more likely.

But wait, there’s a final guilt-by-association maneuver going on.

We see it when Elon Musk immediately tweets “the left is the party of murder.” We see it when Spencer Cox calls social media a “cancer.”

The social media point may well be true, but we can’t put that genie back in the lamp.

By blaming “the left,” the X owner and others are depicting everyone who has liberal viewpoints as culpable, even if they never heard of Charlie Kirk, even if they are shocked and appalled by his murder. 

And that’s just, well, crazy.