Who Owns Political Violence — the Right or the Left?

By Joe Palaggi

Charlie Kirk’s assassination should force us to confront the question too many dodge: Who really owns political violence in America — the right or the left?

Charlie’s assassination should have ended one convenient narrative: that political violence in America is only a problem on the right. It wasn’t a Proud Boy or a militia member who pulled the trigger. It was a man who appears to have convinced himself that killing Kirk was the same as killing “hatred.”

That logic isn’t new on the left. Progressives have long flirted with the idea that violence can be justified as resistance. From Antifa riots that torched businesses and police stations, to the July 4 attack on an ICE facility in Texas that left an officer wounded, to the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where the killer shouted “Free Palestine!” before murdering two, the pattern is clear. When rhetoric about oppression and liberation hardens into conviction, it doesn’t take much for someone to move from slogans to bullets.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the 1970s, the Weather Underground carried out a campaign of bombings against courthouses and police stations, calling it resistance to “imperialism.” During the same era, radical groups justified kidnappings and armed robberies in the name of “justice.” Even after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, dozens of pro-life centers and churches were firebombed or vandalized by groups hiding behind slogans like “If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you.” The thread running through these incidents is the same: violence wrapped in the language of liberation.

Yet progressive leaders and sympathetic media rarely linger on these episodes. They downplay them, excuse them, or treat them as one-off tragedies. The outrage that rightly followed Buffalo, Jacksonville, or January 6 rarely attaches when the ideology comes from the left. That double standard not only insults the victims, it encourages the radicals.

None of this means conservatives are innocent. The Buffalo supermarket massacre, the Jacksonville shooting, the Allen mall murders, and of course the January 6 riot all prove that the right has its own fringe willing to turn conviction into violence. But let’s be clear about something: conservatives who cross the line don’t do so from weakness or mere reaction. They act from the belief that what they are protecting — the nation, tradition, order — is worth any cost. It’s a dangerous conviction, but a conviction nonetheless.

That’s the real mirror here. Progressives justify violence as liberation. Conservatives justify violence as preservation. Both recast it as defense of the sacred, whether that sacred thing is justice or order. And once politics is treated as sacred, compromise looks like betrayal. At that point, extremists don’t just disagree — they decide opponents must be destroyed.

This is where media bias does real damage. Think about how much airtime Jan. 6 continues to receive — congressional hearings, documentaries, endless front-page coverage. Now compare that with the minimal attention given to Antifa’s month-long sieges of courthouses in Portland, or the wave of firebombings against pro-life groups after Dobbs. Most people outside those communities barely heard about them. And when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the story was covered quickly and then disappeared, as if acknowledging it too loudly would upset a preferred narrative.

The hypocrisy is glaring. Progressives condemn the right’s violence while excusing their own as “resistance.” Conservatives condemn Antifa but too often excuse the excesses of those who claim the banner of patriotism. Both stories are self-serving, and both blind us to the reality that bullets don’t care about party lines.

The greater danger is not just the body count, though far-right violence has indeed claimed more lives in recent years. The deeper danger is the permission slip our political culture keeps handing out. When leaders call every election “the last one that matters,” when opponents are branded fascists or traitors, the stage is set. Most citizens will never act on those words. But someone will. And when they do, we get Buffalo or Jacksonville, Allen or Washington, or now, the killing of Charlie Kirk.

If this trajectory continues, we will normalize political violence as just another form of protest. That’s how fragile democracies collapse. History shows what happens when political violence becomes routine. Think of 1970s Latin America, where radicals and juntas traded blows until democracy itself collapsed. Once violence is normalized, it rarely stays at the fringes.”

Charlie Kirk’s death is a tragedy, as were the deaths in Buffalo, Jacksonville, Allen, and at the Jewish Museum. Each victim was a human being, not a talking point. The lesson isn’t to weaponize their memory against opponents but to recognize how easily our sacred causes can become excuses for brutality.

If the left wants credibility when it condemns conservative violence, it must first admit its own. If the right wants to preserve its principles, it must draw a sharper line between conviction and vigilantism. Until then, progress will topple, conservatism will protect, and both will bleed.