Charlie Kirk and I had a lot we didn’t agree on, but he used to bring me on his show.
Unlike his leftist haters, the man who was martyred this week in Utah for spreading his conservative beliefs with vigor and love wasn’t afraid to engage with views that contradicted his own.
The opposite: He sought them out.
In an age of podcasters ensconced in the safety of their home studios, Charlie Kirk met young people where they were, on college campuses, and invited them to debate.
This is how you fight polarization.
This is how you fight violence.
This is what it means to be an American — to crave the voices of those you disagree with, and the rush of trying to convince them.
And it is this that led to his murder.
A culture on the Left, opposed to honest, spirited debate, has demonized the views of the other side as “hateful,” as fascism, as Nazism.
When you call your political opponents Hitler enough times, you’ve signed their death warrant.
Who wouldn’t kill Hitler if given the chance?
Yet even in their condemnations of Kirk’s murder, Democrats are doubling down on the rhetoric that led to it.
“The scourge of gun violence and political violence must end. The shooting of Charlie Kirk is the latest incident of this chaos and it must stop. We cannot go down this road,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“This kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy,” former President Barack Obama posted, language echoed almost word-for-word by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani.
Note the both-sidesing.
Note the passive voice.
Even in their denunciations, the left is gaslighting us about the truth: The vast majority of the political violence in this country is coming from their side.
And they are unwilling to take an ounce of responsibility for it.
They can’t — because there’s nothing in their philosophy to explain why the cold-blooded murder of Charlie Kirk is wrong.
They view the world not through the Judeo-Christian lens of right versus wrong, but through the lens of power.
In their view, people with less power have no moral responsibilities.
Moreover, they claim language is violence, and believing things counter to leftist orthodoxy is a form of violence, too.
And they believe that when victims, as they see themselves, are threatened by such “violence,” physical violence is a righteous response.
It’s doubly ironic that the left’s own language these days is replete with fighting words.
“Our only chance to save our democracy is to fight fire with fire,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said earlier this week. “We’re in a war right now to save this country, so you have to be willing to do whatever is necessary to save the country.”
“We’re gonna punch these sons of bitches in the mouth,” Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed last month.
Yet in the wake of Charlie’s murder, Democrat after Democrat is decrying political violence “on both sides.”
They have the absolute chutzpah to bemoan the dangers of Donald Trump and his supporters before Charlie’s body is even buried.
It’s not just projection; it’s an inversion of victim and perpetrator.
They called for war, and when someone heeded them and picked up a gun to murder a conservative icon, they cast themselves as the victims.
Here’s the truth, leftists: The violence is coming from inside your house.
It’s the result of decades of demonizing right-wing voices with legitimate views — views in fact shared by most Americans.
And when censorship and deplatforming and cancel culture failed to silence those voices, the left’s fanatics picked up guns.
I want the country to come together. I want us to unify against the scourge of political violence.
But we can’t do that while the left is lying to our faces.
This only stops when they take responsibility for their actions.
When they confess that their rhetoric has led to the murder of innocents.
It starts when they admit it was wrong to paint political differences as evil hatreds, and commit now, in Charlie’s memory, to return to the values of civil debate.
Let Obama admit that even if he disagrees, it is legitimate to vote for Donald Trump — that it doesn’t make you a Nazi or a fascist.
Let AOC admit that even if she disagrees, it is legitimate to believe there are only two genders — that it’s not hateful or bigoted, but what most Americans believe.
Let Murphy admit that even if he disagrees, it is legitimate to believe that life begins at conception — that it doesn’t make you a misogynist who wants women to die.
Then we can truly turn down the temperature, honor Charlie’s legacy — and unite.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the author of “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women” and hosts “Batya” on NewsNation.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
