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“A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin famously quipped when asked by Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel what form of government the wise men of the 1787 Constitutional Convention had just devised. So it is—and so it has been. But for how much longer will it be?

It’s a question I now find myself asking with distressing frequency.

It ought to be axiomatic that republican self-governance can only endure as long as a people are willing and able to hash out their differences with pens and ballot boxes—not knives and guns. The moment that a people—or at least a plurality or otherwise-sizable portion of the people—stops settling its differences with the former and instead opts for the latter, self-government dies.

Perhaps we are not there quite yet. Perhaps. But we are certainly getting dangerously close. In this, America’s 250th anniversary year, it is undeniable that the American Left has emerged as an existential threat to the long-term survival of the republic.

On Saturday evening, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen attempted to breach a security checkpoint at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) in Washington, D.C. Allen’s goal was simple: Kill as many top Trump officials, perhaps even including the Big Man himself, as he could. Allen, a graduate of the uber-prestigious California Institute of Technology, thus became the second graduate of a top 15-ranked American university in barely over a year to assassinate or attempt to assassinate someone else due to a political disagreement.

America’s elite universities used to teach civics and instill a love of country. Perhaps they taught physics or engineering. Maybe they tried to cure cancer too. But that was then. Now, our most advanced institutions of higher education produce left-wing political assassins or would-be left-wing political assassins.

Nor is this merely an elite university problem. To be sure, it certainly is that: Those with Ph.D.s are roughly twice as likely as those without them to support political violence. But the problem is much, much more widespread: Roughly one-quarter of self-described “very liberal” people tell pollsters that political violence can “sometimes be justified.” Hasan Piker, the Hamas-loving, Soviet Union-adoring, America-hating podcast bro darling of the (increasingly “mainstream”) Left, justifies this violence fetish every step of the way. Jimmy Kimmel, the inexplicably unfunny late-night TV host, “jokes” about how First Lady Melania Trump is an “expectant widow.” That’s in contrast with Erika Kirk—an actual widow, also due to left-wing political violence, and whose tears Saturday evening will be etched in the memories of decent Americans for a long time to come.

The Bible rejects necromancy, but I suspect Benjamin Franklin might like a word. The American Left is indeed “united in hate,” as Jamie Glazov and I recently discussed on my show. Unfortunately for those of us who still love the land of the free and the home of the brave, that very united leftist hatred now manifests itself in a positively deadly manner.

From the Family Research Council attempted shooting in 2012 to the Republican congressional baseball team shooting in 2017 to the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanuagh in 2022 to the Christophobic transgender mass shootings in Tennessee (2023) and Minnesota (2025) to the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination to Charlie Kirk’s murder to the now-countless attempts on President Trump’s life and so many others in-between, the verdict is in and it is unanimous: The Left has a massive violence fetishization problem. Heck, an outright majority (56%) of self-identified left-wing respondents recently told the excellent Network Contagion Research Institute that the murder of Trump would be perfectly acceptable to their (broken) moral compasses.

How, exactly, are those of us on team civilizational sanity supposed to share a country with people who want us dead?

It turns out that when leftists said that “speech is violence,” what they really meant is that left-wing violence is an appropriate response to right-leaning speech. An older generation of liberals venerated free speech and championed the “marketplace of ideas” that constitutes America’s public discourse. But that was then. Now, so-called progressives justify violence, up to and including lethal violence, precisely to oppose free speech. And they have the chutzpah and remarkable irony of doing this in the perverse name of “progress.”

For the Left, the ends always justify the means. Saul Alinsky famously taught so in Rules for Radicals (1971). But the Left has long believed it is thus. Decades before Alinsky, around the time of the Holodomor, New York Times Moscow bureau chief and Joseph Stalin admirer Walter Duranty famously observed, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

For the American Left, then, it turns out that President Trump is just a rather large and important “egg.” Ditto Charlie Kirk.

Given how the Left feels about us, it is obvious that we on the Right are utterly powerless to tamp down the leftist assassination porn that is MS NOW’s programming or Bluesky’s chatter on a seemingly daily basis. If the American Left is going to be talked away from the abyss, and to finally stop ginning up its acolytes’ murderous passions by indulging in ever-more escalatory and unhinged rhetoric about the purported “fascism,” “tyranny,” or “authoritarianism” coming from Trump and the broader Right, then that earnest dissuasion must come from the Left itself.

And which prominent, universally known leftist has the courage, conviction, and basic human decency to take on his own side like this? It’s a great question. The mind reels. It’s certainly not Barack Obama, who was last seen trying to discern the WHCD shooter’s true motive. The 44th president is blissfully unaware, apparently, of the existence of a manifesto laying out shooter’s motivation in the clearest terms imaginable. Or maybe Obama is just a liar tout court. After all, as he learned from his old mentor, the ends always justify the means.

Fortunately, the Left’s “ends,” at least when it comes to America itself, are increasingly clear. They hate it. They think it’s no good, very bad—a bastion of “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and Western civilization “chauvinism.” Accordingly, they seek to end it—to eradicate it. Sometimes, the mask drops and they just say it out loud. It’s clear as day. And if that’s the end goal, then the means of political violence makes sense, at least in a demonic sort of way. After all, as we’ve already noted, when a free people stops settling its differences with words and instead opts for weapons, republican self-governance dies. And they do want the republic to die.

It only turns out that for the Left, that’s not a bug—it’s a feature. The duty of all patriotic Americans, in this quarter-millennium celebration of the greatest country in the history of mankind, is to recognize the threat as such. Patriotic citizens are called to oppose all enemies of the American republic, foreign and domestic. Leftists, as part of the riling up of tensions that is their ceaseless assassination porn, often paint those of us on team civilizational sanity as a domestic threat. They should instead look in the mirror and stare into the depraved depths of their very dark souls.