What the Media Gets Wrong About the Right
Modern Age with Dan McCarthy | Episode 016
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It’s been a little more than two weeks since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and already we see how few consequences there are—both for those whose radical rhetoric set the stage for the murder and for many of the radical activists who continue trying to silence conservatives on America’s campuses.
There are three components to the intimidation campaign aimed not only against the memory of Charlie Kirk, but against conservatives more broadly on America’s college campuses. At the very top of this campaign are those in the elite media and in the universities themselves, in many departments, who are promoting the idea that conservatives—not radical gunmen like Tyler Robinson—are the real threats to free speech and public safety. According to them, conservatives are the ones whose freedoms must be constrained and who must become the targets of both censure and ultimately some degree of force, whether by government or vigilantes such as Antifa activists or even gunmen themselves, in order to stop conservatives from creating dangerous situations and inflicting harm on others.
This is a topsy-turvy view of the world. It was not a conservative who shot a leftist in Utah—it was a left-wing gunman who murdered Charlie Kirk. So why are conservatives the ones being blamed by the media? Why is the media saying conservatives are a threat to free speech? Why are leftists continuing to claim that conservatives are the true sources of political violence in America and pose a danger to transgender individuals and other vulnerable minorities?
This left-wing line is being promoted both in elite media circles and in academic departments at universities. Academics claim that the right is always a source of incipient fascism—that it has always had a Ku Klux Klan element and not only a bigoted component but a violently bigoted one. They argue the right is a constant danger and that fascism is the ultimate expression of what the right has supposedly always been. This view has been embraced by many influential figures in the media, ensuring the message is propagated across the nation’s public airwaves to millions of viewers.
Jimmy Kimmel provides an emblematic example. Though he is a low-wattage entertainer with a late-night television show and not an especially large audience, it is telling that he went on air shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and claimed that MAGA was responsible for Kirk’s death. Kimmel suggested that Charlie Kirk was not murdered by a leftist, but perhaps by someone from the right, someone in the MAGA movement.
Kimmel’s wording was somewhat slippery and careful. He claimed that MAGA was trying to blame anyone but themselves for Charlie Kirk’s murder. There was just enough leeway for Kimmel to argue later that he wasn’t actually attributing the violence to MAGA, but merely saying MAGA was looking for scapegoats. Yet the implication to his audience was absolutely clear: Kimmel was trying to blame MAGA for the murder.
Kimmel can attempt to weasel out of that, claiming that technically he didn’t say what his audience heard or what he led them to believe. Now he is back on the air in at least some markets. A number of owners of local ABC affiliates have refused to carry his show any longer. Still, we saw the left try to turn the tables on conservatives over this Jimmy Kimmel incident. Kimmel lied about a political assassination, putting the blame on the victims—on MAGA, on conservatives, and on Charlie Kirk himself.
Now, think about if someone had tried to do this back in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. If Johnny Carson had gone on NBC’s Tonight Show that evening and said that Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats were trying to blame anyone except their own extremists for the murder of JFK, Carson would have been yanked off the air in a heartbeat. No progressive, no liberal, no one on the left would have objected—and in fact, no one on the right would have objected either—because it would have been utterly outrageous and unacceptable.
Similarly, consider the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. If someone had gone on national television that evening and said, “African-Americans are going wild right now. They’re trying to blame anyone except their fellow blacks for the murder of Martin Luther King,” that would have been completely unacceptable and utterly outrageous. Such a person would not only have had their show cancelled but would never have been on air in America again. Yet it seems acceptable to say those kinds of things about conservatives: to claim that MAGA is responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk, to deny the assassin was left-wing, and to misrepresent the facts while providing outright disinformation to an audience.
For several years we’ve heard about the supposed corrosiveness of disinformation in America’s media. Yet here we have an example of the left using not even a news show but an entertainment program to corrupt Americans’ understanding of a horrendous act of political violence. And if you think it’s just someone like Jimmy Kimmel doing this, think again. The most popular Substack newsletter in the country is written by Heather Cox Richardson, a leftist who constantly claims that Donald Trump’s America is plunging into anti-democratic extremism and becoming a hotbed of fascism. She too has tried to suggest that the killer of Charlie Kirk was not a leftist but some sort of radicalized right-winger—perhaps a so-called groyper—who wanted to kill Charlie Kirk.
These are outright lies. In some cases they may not even be lies so much as an inability to perceive reality. Many elite liberals are encapsulated in their own pocket universes—liberal media bubbles where they have no conservative friends and, as the saying goes, never “touch grass.” They rarely interact with reality. Instead, they live in parallel worlds constructed by academic theoreticians, media talking heads like Jimmy Kimmel, and even niche social media networks such as Blue Sky. Immediately after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Blue Sky was filled with gloating, horrific statements of approval for the murder and factually inaccurate attacks on Charlie Kirk.
Progressives, leftists, and the hard left no longer seem to care about facts or reality. All they care about is the friend-enemy distinction. They see conservatives—indeed anyone on the right—as enemies. They think it’s perfectly fine to demonize the right as fascists or as threats to the lives of African Americans, as we saw in 2020 with the George Floyd incident, or as threats to transgender individuals. Yet in recent months we’ve seen several mass murders carried out not by people attacking transgender individuals but by transgender individuals who were deeply disturbed and attacked large numbers of people with firearms. The reality of America today is the opposite of what you hear from Jimmy Kimmel, the academic left, and much of the mainstream media. Nevertheless, there are no consequences for promulgating falsehoods from the left.
There are really three layers to the way the left is trying to enforce its agenda—layers that resemble the very things leftists claim to oppose. The left is adopting some of the tactics once used by fascists. Historically, fascists were associated with “black shirt” and “brown shirt” movements—street thugs who beat up political opponents of the fascist party. This allowed the party to claim legitimacy through elections while simultaneously using a paramilitary wing to intimidate and assault opponents.
The so-called Antifa movement is essentially a fascist movement. It consists of street thugs who intimidate and assault people, sometimes using fists, smoke bombs, or small incendiary devices. I am a vice president at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and we sponsor many campus speakers across America. A number of these events have been disrupted by Antifa activists wielding incendiary devices and other weapons. This is the street-fighting layer of the left, but there are layers both above and below it.
Above Antifa are the intellectuals—members of the media and the academy—who constantly send the message that America is under siege by the hard right. They insist all danger comes from the right, that the right is anti-democratic and pro-dictator, and that it represents the acme of evil. They stop just short of calling the American right the “great Satan,” but the implication is clear: the right is as bad as Nazism. Different versions of this narrative circulate in the academy and the media. Some commentators use more measured language, while others on social media go further, likening the right to Mussolini, Hitler, or other fascist dictators.
These narratives interlock like links in a chain. One pundit might say, “The right is associated with violence and tried to have a coup on January 6, 2021,” but won’t go so far as to call the right Nazi. Another pundit, perhaps at a political magazine or on social media, will take the next step, saying the right clearly resembles historical fascism. Less respectable figures in the left-wing media and academy fill in the final blanks, openly depicting the right in Nazi uniforms.
Yet these academics, media propagandists, and left-wing television personalities who escalate the rhetoric do not have the courage of their convictions. They don’t even truly believe what they say. If they genuinely believed America was on the verge of a dictatorial takeover by the hard right, they would be fleeing the country or taking up arms. Instead, they behave as a comfortable class of people whose lives are not in danger. They are millionaires, tenured professors, and media figures who act as if life will continue as comfortably as ever. Their rhetoric grows ever more extreme only because they see it as a way to gain political advantage and maintain their privileges and wealth.
They are challenged by a populist movement asking hard questions: Why are taxpayer dollars funding universities that teach the next generation to hate America? Why are we giving money to institutions that claim women are not a biological reality and that men can be women too? Why are our public airwaves, especially late at night, monopolized by networks employing left-wing political hosts who consistently attack only one side of the political spectrum and rarely criticize Democrats or President Joe Biden?
This is something that Americans might start to question. They might start to say, why is it that these FCC licenses—licenses regarding the public airwaves, which have to be shared by everyone—wind up in the hands of people who seem to exclusively program left-wing messages? There is a lot of privilege at stake here that the establishment left, the left in power, is afraid of losing.
For generations, the left has had a stranglehold on the federal bureaucracy. Not only did Democrats control Congress for decades at a time, but even more importantly, the left is deeply embedded in the nation’s philanthropies, foundations, and the universities, which are in some ways mountains of cash because they have endowments that in many cases are tens, perhaps even hundreds, of billions of dollars. These are extremely wealthy, powerful institutions—institutions that are changing the minds of young people who come for what they think will be education but instead is a kind of propagandization.
These institutions are worried about public scrutiny. They are worried about voters looking at what is actually happening within these hallowed halls, and they are very worried about scrutiny being applied to the money and privileges that the elite left has. So they say that anyone who is a populist, anyone on the right, anyone who is anti-establishment and challenges the power of the universities, the media, and the major philanthropies, must not be a good-faith democrat—a good Jeffersonian Democrat perhaps—but is in fact a fascist, someone trying to overthrow all the norms of decent society and bring about a nightmarish totalitarian one. That is the self-defense ideology the privileged left has devised. And they do not actually believe it, because they never behave as if America is on the verge of a coup or a takeover by their enemies.
This left—very privileged, very wealthy, very comfortable—is connected to a second kind of left: the street-fighting left. This is the left’s equivalent of the brown shirts or the black shirts or various other fascist thugs, except this layer styles itself as Antifa, as being anti-fascist. The label may be different, but the substance is the same: people who will physically intimidate and threaten anyone they politically disagree with and who will try to keep any conservative speaker off America’s campuses.
Sometimes they simply shout down a speaker or disrupt a talk in quasi-passive ways—standing all at once to create a spectacle, lining up in front of a stage to block the view, shouting so a speaker cannot be heard. Often they go to more extreme measures: they use physical violence, throw punches, start grappling with people, and provoke security, trying to create a violent environment within a venue or on a campus. They will physically assault speakers and hosts they dislike.
There was a left-of-center professor—her name, I think, was Allison Stanger—at Middlebury College, hosting a debate with Charles Murray, a libertarian thinker who talks about science, IQ, and other topics unacceptable to the egalitarian left. Charles Murray is not a racist, though he is often demonized that way; he is no more a racist than ordinary conservatives or fascists. He is a generous human being—I know him slightly—and a good person. Yet he is demonized and physically attacked by the left when speaking on campuses, and not just him but also Allison Stanger, the professor hosting the debate, who suffered a concussion when a left-wing mob attacked her and Charles Murray.
Antifa mobs are very much the brown-shirt or black-shirt component of the left. Notice how the respectable left deals with these radicals: they always minimize the violence. They say, well, maybe the Antifa types go a little too far, but they are not systematic, not organized; it’s just a random incident, not something to take very seriously. The elite left talks about street crime the same way—someone getting stabbed in the neck and murdered on the subway is just the price of living in a city.
They say, sometimes a crazy person will drive a knife into your neck, but don’t worry, it doesn’t happen that often; crime rates are slightly down, so everything is fine, go back to sleep—until one day someone does plunge a blade into your neck. The elite left likes to minimize both the violent conditions they create in our cities through soft-on-crime policies and the atmosphere of intimidation on America’s campuses directed against conservatives.
They also employ a very sinister maneuver: claiming that to fight the Antifa radical, street-fighting left, the moderate left must clamp down on campus speech to keep conservatives safe—from themselves. A university will say, “We totally believe in free speech and would like a conservative to come to campus, but we’ll have to charge thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in security fees and insurance for you to speak.” If you don’t pay, they say they can’t protect you, and if they can’t protect you, you can’t come because you’re too much of a liability.
Your message is too controversial, and an Antifa radical might pop up and kill you or at least maim you. There might be a violent incident if a conservative speaks. This is a way for a university administration, claiming to be looking out for security, to make itself an ally of the Antifa radicals: “You make the threat, and we will cancel the conservative speaker based on the threat,” even as they claim it is only about costs and security.
This is a sinister attack on freedom of speech and freedom of thought on America’s college campuses—campuses heavily subsidized by taxpayers, whether they are public universities directly receiving state money or private research universities receiving hundreds of millions of federal dollars to support various programs. There is a connection between the thuggish Antifa left and the supposedly moderate, establishment, more genteel, quasi-polite elite left.
The Antifa left takes the propaganda and ideas that come from the mainstream media and academic departments—history and others—and radicalizes that message, taking it further. They say, if it’s true that Donald Trump is threatening American democracy, if it’s true, as various academics say, that there are parallels between the Trump movement and fascism, then the conclusion follows: if it is 1933, don’t people have a responsibility to stop the Nazis from taking power? Shouldn’t you punch a Nazi if that’s what it takes to stop them? Shouldn’t you use physical force, if necessary, to uphold liberalism, the rule of law, and democracy?
If you would do that in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, why wouldn’t you do that in a parallel circumstance in America? The Antifa left is acting on the premises laid out by the respectable left. They also claim they are using defensive violence: only “beating up” Charles Murray or various conservative speakers, only threatening their lives and well-being because they claim to be protecting minorities, protecting transgender persons, protecting the ghost of George Floyd, and other supposedly noble causes.
The Antifa left is taking a message created by the respectable, elite left—“look at the dangers facing black Americans; look at how police are supposedly a danger; ignore any instances of transgender mass shootings; transgender people are deeply vulnerable and under siege by a malevolent, bigoted right-wing”—and acting on those premises. The elite left, with all its privileges, does not get its hands dirty and would see such actions as compromising and exposing them to legal liability of the kind that Jimmy Kimmel, for example, is not currently facing.
They let the street thugs take the message and run with it, then beat people up on account of it. They let the street thugs spend a little time in jail for their mischief, but the elite level produces cadres of lawyers and foundation executives who provide bail money and attorneys to get these Antifa thugs out of jail. The street thugs are the mailed fist of a more respectable left that controls money and prestige.
But there is a third layer as well. Even most of the Antifa thugs are not actually murderous. They act on these ideas to the point of punching people, throwing bombs, and using violence and intimidation, but they do not usually go so far as to take up arms to commit mass murder of conservatives or assassinate prominent conservative leaders. Deep down, they know the things they say are false: America is not on the verge of a fascist takeover; police are not randomly killing black people; marauding mobs of MAGA extremists are not beating up transgender people.
The Antifa left knows it is not defending anyone. It is simply a group of thugs who enjoy beating people up. This is what they do on a Saturday night because they have no productive lives of their own. As certain recent incidents have indicated, these are people addicted to all sorts of idiotic distractions, including pornography and various bizarre internet subcultures like the furry lifestyle and the strangeness connected with transgenderism. Because their lives are so empty, creating violence and inflicting pain is something they enjoy. Their claim of defensiveness is merely a pretext—an ideological camouflage. The reality is thuggery for the sheer joy of it.
Then there are people who are more disturbed or more intensely committed. This describes Charlie Kirk’s assassin. He was in a sexual relationship with a transgender person and spent an enormous amount of time in transgender and furry subcultures online. The furry subculture involves people who get a sexual thrill from dressing up as furry animals and pretending to be cartoon characters. These are mentally unbalanced individuals. When mental instability is combined with sexuality and its power, it can create deep emotional disturbances in those engaged in it.
The assassin who killed Charlie Kirk was deeply immersed in that subculture. He had a transgender lover and took seriously what he heard from the media and online about the supposed fascism of Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, and MAGA, and the alleged danger posed to people like his transgender partner by someone like Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s statements—asserting that women are a biological reality and that men are not women—were seen as an existential threat to those close to the gunman.
The assassin decided to act on these premises and go further than the typical Antifa activist. Tyler Robinson actually picked up a gun. Coming from a right-wing family, he had long been trained in the use of firearms and knew how to handle a rifle. He concluded it was a simple matter to take a rifle, climb to a roof, and end what he believed was a threat to transgender persons and a threat of fascism. He carved slogans on his bullets that made his political agenda clear: one bullet said “Catch fascist,” and other bullets referenced the furry subculture. This was where the assassin was coming from.
Jimmy Kimmel went on air a few days later and lied about the whole thing, trying to blame it on MAGA instead. This is an absolute outrage, yet Kimmel seems to have gotten away with it, as have many other elite, prestige liberals. Lunatics like the gunman who killed Charlie Kirk are being primed and given a motive—an ideological pattern they can fit themselves into so they feel like heroes, “saving” endangered people such as George Floyd or transgender individuals, by murdering a man who was simply speaking on a college campus in good faith.
These are the three layers of the left, and they work together in harmony. They are not all part of a single organization or conspiracy, but rather a series of chain reactions understood by each link. The elite left creates ideological constructs that justify murder, even though it rarely engages in street violence or killing. The street-fighting left uses that ideology to intimidate and assault others. And then there are people at the extreme—like the gunman who killed Charlie Kirk—who follow the logic to its end: if it’s true that your enemies are Nazis and you should punch a Nazi, why not shoot one?
All of this must be dismantled and stopped. There is a role for law enforcement, but public opinion plays the most important part. Law enforcement must investigate disturbed individuals who may plan assassinations and must take seriously the sustained intimidation against conservatives on America’s college campuses—a campaign that has gone on for more than a decade and has been tolerated by university administrations for far too long. It should not be conservatives who pay the price. There should be no “tax” on conservative free speech.
University administrators must be held responsible if their campuses are unsafe or if they fail to provide an environment where conservatives can speak freely. They should be financially liable for the security needed to protect speakers, and they should face the loss of federal funding if they exclude conservatives on spurious security grounds. Law enforcement measures are also necessary against Antifa radicals, the street thugs who act on elite rhetoric.
But what can be done about the elite liberals who never get their hands dirty—those who happily promulgate ideological justifications for assassinations and thuggery while engaging only in inflammatory rhetoric? Inflammatory rhetoric has a long history in American politics, dating back to the Revolution. Afterward, bitter disputes between Federalists and Jeffersonians often turned violent, even leading to murder, arson, and the destruction of printing presses. Preventing political violence requires effort not only from law enforcement but from all Americans of goodwill, to scale back demonization and excessive rhetoric.
The elite left often claims, “You can’t criticize us for inflammatory rhetoric because conservatives use it too. President Trump calls the press the enemy of the people, which is just as inflammatory as calling someone a Nazi.” But it is not nearly as inflammatory, and even if the right sometimes goes too far, that does not justify the left’s extremism. Because the left has created today’s climate of intimidation and violence on America’s campuses—leading to murders like that of Charlie Kirk—it has the first responsibility to rein in its rhetoric and act responsibly.
The left can criticize Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk as much as it wants, but it must do so civilly and based on ideas, not by claiming that opponents are bigots or fascists with no right to speak. Greater humility is required.
Finally, consider the memorial held for Charlie Kirk in Arizona, which revealed an extraordinary scene. Erica Kirk, Charlie’s widow, declared that she forgives the gunman who murdered her husband. This act of tremendous Christian charity bore witness to her deep faith and to her husband’s as well. Erica Kirk’s forgiveness profoundly moved people, bringing many to the church and back to Christian faith.
In striking contrast, Donald Trump later said at the same event that he does not forgive his enemies, does not wish them well, and in fact hates them. This shocked many Christians, including some of Trump’s own supporters, though others approved, saying they liked that Trump does not pretend his enemies are good people. The American right is divided: some saw Trump’s words as shockingly un-Christian, while others saw them as natural, even a kind of justice or passion toward one’s enemies, especially after the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk.
This moral contrast between Erica Kirk and Donald Trump is an incredibly powerful teaching moment. It calls Americans to reflect on the nature of revenge, enmity, political opposition, and the importance of forgiveness and unity under God. There is a poetic, even dramatic dimension to this contrast—something reminiscent of the moral depth and tragedy found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Prince Hamlet has lost his kingdom because his uncle Claudius murdered his father and took the throne. Throughout the play, Hamlet debates what to do about this. Is he so ashamed of losing his patrimony and being unable to avenge his father that he will kill himself? Hamlet contemplates suicide, but he also contemplates murder. He thinks, I am going to kill the king. The king may have taken the throne illegitimately, yet he occupies it. It would violate the norms of monarchy to take up a sword and murder the man who now rules. Nevertheless, as a vengeful son, Hamlet feels compelled to kill Claudius.
Hamlet is an educated man who knows modern philosophy and seems to know something of ancient philosophy as well. But he is also a Christian, torn between these different tendencies within his soul and these intellectual traditions—the modern, the ancient, and the Christian. At one point, he comes upon King Claudius as Claudius is trying, unsuccessfully, to repent of his sins. Claudius prays for forgiveness for murdering Hamlet’s father but finds he cannot truly repent. He knows that genuine repentance would require giving up his crown and submitting to punishment, and he is unwilling to do that.
Claudius wants forgiveness, yet he lacks the purity of soul to seek it fully. While Claudius struggles in this dark night of the soul, Hamlet has the opportunity to murder him. Hamlet knows that if he kills Claudius before he has repented, he will be enlisting the laws of God to condemn Claudius to eternal damnation. If Claudius dies in a state of mortal sin, he will go to hell. Hamlet wonders about the implications of this for both men and their eternal souls. If Hamlet uses this opportunity to damn Claudius forever, he may also condemn himself. Yet is that what vengeance calls for? Is that what honor demands for the spilled blood of a kinsman? Shakespeare’s play wrestles with these profound questions.
These themes are echoed in the saga of Donald Trump and Erica Kirk. Erica Kirk said one reason she forgives her husband’s murderer is that she does not want a stain on her conscience if the killer receives the death penalty. She does not want her own soul jeopardized by vengeance, by even the thought of “pulling the lever on the electric chair.” She is thinking of eternal things—Christian love, love even for the man who murdered her husband and the father of her children. Her faith and forgiveness transcend worldly vengeance and enmity.
Donald Trump, by contrast, is a man focused on this world. He thinks about vengeance, about business, about stopping murderers and radicals from creating an environment for murders like that of Charlie Kirk. Christians believe that political authority, even when held by ungodly individuals, comes from God. So, while Trump may not be a good Christian—or even a Christian at all—he holds authority because God allows it. This raises questions about how God uses different people to fulfill His plan and about the interplay of justice, government, and individual souls.
This is not only a Shakespearean drama but a drama of humanity itself: a drama of the state, of justice, and of the relationship of the individual to eternity. It plays out through Erica Kirk and Donald Trump. It offers instruction to Americans of all faiths and backgrounds. We should contemplate what Trump himself has said. Though he admitted he does not forgive his enemies and does not wish them well, he also said this makes him a worse person than Charlie and Erica Kirk. Trump recognizes, at some level, that he falls short of the highest moral ideal.
Trump has even said in interviews that when he occasionally thinks about the afterlife and God’s judgment, he trembles and worries that his standing before God is not good. This is a moment for all Americans—beyond ideology—to reflect on their own souls, their disposition toward friends and countrymen, and even toward those they hate.