Name the One Political Party Led by Those Who Call for Violence

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) at a memorial for Charlie Kirk at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday in Washington. Rod Lamkey Jr./AP

After the past few days of jabbering about which political party is to blame for political violence, consider this:

Joe Biden, September 10, 2025: “There is no place in our country for this kind of violence. It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones.”

Charlie Kirk, July 24, 2023: “Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia filled Alzheimer's corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

In recent days, MAGA warriors, Republican officials, and conservative bellowers—led by their bellower-in-chief—have repeatedly proclaimed that harsh rhetoric from the left is the main source of political violence in the United States and led to the murder of Kirk. Some MAGA blowhards have gone so far as to call for a civil war to avenge Kirk’s death.

As I write, we still don’t know what motivated the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, to kill Kirk, but regardless of how that pans out, Donald Trump and his legions are hell-bent on gaslighting the nation into believing they are the true victims of the polarization that plagues the nation. And even when some Republicans dare to note that it’s time to dial down the fear and loathing, they refuse to recognize how much has come from Trump and his cult, trying to both-sides the issue. Look at what House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Fox on Sunday:

People have got to stop framing simple policy disagreements in terms of existential threats to our democracy…You can't call the other side fascists and enemies of the state and not understand that there are some deranged people in our society who will take that as cues to act and do crazy and dangerous things…So members of Congress and all public officials have an obligation to speak clearly into this and calm the waters. We can have vigorous disputes. Charlie Kirk was an expert at that. He loved debate. But Charlie also advanced another really important idea: that is that he loved the people on the other side of that table. He was never motivated by hate. He was motivated by truth and love.

How does being motivated by truth and love propel a person to call for killing a political opponent? And where’s the truth and love in assailing, as Kirk did, four Black women—former First Lady Michelle Obama, commentator Joy Reid, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—by saying they “do not have brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."

I could spew thousands of words merely quoting the hateful and racist comments Kirk has uttered over the years—no doubt, you’ve seen many of the clips on social media. And let’s not forget he was a prominent supporter, like Johnson, of a man who has for years baselessly claimed the Democrats are evil miscreants, communists, and radicals who stole an election from him and who are literally scheming to destroy the United States. There are no leading Democrats who have ever incited with lies thousands to assault the Capitol and beat the hell out of cops.

Show me a single speaker at a Democratic convention who called for putting a Republican to death. Kirk was a featured speaker at the GOP’s 2024 shindig.

Kirk is hardly the only example of a MAGA star who has gone this far. In 2020, Steve Bannon called for beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-FBI director Christopher Wray. Before she was elected to the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene endorsed social media posts that urged murdering Rep. Nancy Pelosi and FBI agents, and she expressed support for hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The current FBI director, Kash Patel, reposted a video of himself taking a chainsaw to Trump’s political enemies, including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff. (When he was asked about this hideous social media post at his confirmation hearing, Patel replied, “Senator, I had nothing to do with the creation of that meme”—a weaselly statement that did not address his amplification of the violent imagery.) In 2023, Trump suggested that Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed. GOP Rep. Paul Gosar did the same.

Show me a single Democratic White House strategist or Democratic member of Congress or Democrat-appointed FBI director who has boosted an explicit call for killing a political opponent.

What’s crazy is that a movement led by an autocratic purveyor of hatred, paranoia, and bonkers conspiracy theories has not been held to account for its perversion of American politics. There certainly will be violent extremists on both sides of the spectrum. But far too many commentators and politicians relish both-sides-ing this issue, insisting the problem reaches across the partisan divide. Yet it’s not even-Steven. The leader of the Republican Party has expressed, embraced, and encouraged violent rhetoric and with his J6 pardons he has promoted acceptance of violent action—violent action on his behalf. There is nothing remotely comparable to this within the Democratic Party.

It's a failure of the commentariat and the Democratic Party that Trump and the Republicans have been able to get away with it. Elon Musk and Stephen Miller incessantly try to brand the left as the party of violence and murder, and they face little opprobrium for that. Democrats and progressives have the better (and a truthful) case that Trump and the MAGA right fuel extremism and hate. But they generally have not found an effective way to land that argument.

By failing to constantly highlight and slam the extremist rhetoric of the right, they have created space for it and allowed it to become normalized. And now, by not fixating on the brazen hypocrisy of GOP cries of both-sides-do-it, Democrats and the mainstream media permit those whose politics have been based on demonizing Democrats to escape accountability, and this also helps wily Trumpists limit a potent and necessary tactic for Democrats: calling out Trump as a fascist threat to America. Such talk, Trump and his crew contend, is reckless and causes violence and could be criminal. Their goal is to stifle criticism and perhaps impose a clampdown on opposition to Trump.

Countering the GOP exploitation and embrace of extremism is not easy. For decades, stretching back to McCarthyism, vilifying Democrats and liberals as anti-God, anti-family, anti-America has been an essential part of Republican strategy. It’s how the party has been able to convince millions of Americans to vote for candidates who oppose raising wages for workers, providing health coverage to those without, strengthening social welfare programs, enhancing environmental protections, restraining corporate power, and limiting tax cuts for the wealthy. Newt Gingrich advised his Republican comrades to deride Democrats as “traitors” and perilous for children. Sarah Palin called Barack Obama a pal of terrorists and a dangerous socialist. Glenn Beck said Obama planned to wreck the economy so he could become a dictator. Trump came along and turned the volume up to 11. (See my American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.)

The best way to address the sickness of political violence is not with anodyne blather. The remedy must be based on a clear vision of the cause.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

In the previous issue of Our Land, I wrote about how Donald Trump was exploiting the Kirk assassination and began the piece this way:

There are an estimated 500 million civilian-owned guns in the United States. There are 340.1 million people in America. It only takes 0.00000029 percent of the population—one person—with one of those half-billion guns to change our world. We cannot prevent every extremist or deranged person bent on killing from doing so. We certainly can institute gun safety measures and firearms restrictions and provide more and better social services to those in need. We can also try to adjust the tenor of our politics to counter or restrain the accelerants of violence.

Reading that, a writer named Awr Hawkins at Breitbart thought he had caught me in a major concession and penned an article clumsily headlined, “Mother Jones’ David Corn Criticizes Pro-2A Trump After Charlie Kirk Assassination But Admits impotency of Gun Control.” For his right-wing audience, Hawkins claimed I had “opened the article with a not-so-veiled admission of the impotency of gun control…by admitting how many guns are in circulation in America, then admitting the impossibility of preventing a given person, bent on bloodshed, from using a gun for ill.”

Talk about a stretch. I don’t think there is a single gun safety advocate who will say that implementing restraints on guns will lead to zero gun deaths. As long as we have any guns, there will be the potential for the violent misuse of weapons. But there are plenty of measures that can reduce, not eliminate, gun violence. And that’s the goal. Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require licenses or training for gun ownership, tighter red flag laws—whatever the measure—none of that will end gun violence. But there will be fewer lives lost. From what we know, these reforms would likely not have saved Kirk’s life. The alleged shooter apparently used a bolt-action rifle. But they will save others, including kids in schools.

In 2023, Kirk said, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” I think the number of gun deaths in this country is obscene, and the only impotency we face is among politicians unwilling to do anything about it.

The Pitt. I’ve not been the biggest fan of hospital shows. I was a devotee of M*A*S*H and St. Elsewhere, but I largely skipped ER, House, Grey’s Anatomy, and less well-known medical fare. Yet I recently became obsessed with The Pitt, the HBO Max series set in the emergency room of a Pittsburgh trauma center that was created by R. Scott Gemmill, a veteran of ER. The entire first season is one very long day in this always overcrowded and maxed-out urban ER, and it follows the doctors, nurses, and administrative workers, as they cope with a ceaseless tidal wave of cases.

The crew is led by Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch, who’s skillfully played by Noah Wylie, who back in the day was a doc on ER and bagged five consecutive Emmys. Robby is a steady captain who manages—mostly—to keep a lid on his cauldron of emotions, a particularly tough task at this moment, given it’s the anniversary of the day he failed to save the life of his medical mentor who died during the Covid pandemic. He oversees an eclectic roster that includes student doctors on rotation, residents learning the ropes, and badass nurses supervised by the tough-as-nails-but-kind-hearted Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa).

The steady flow of emergencies is mesmerizing. One after another injured or ill patients are wheeled into the ER. A drowned girl. A triathlete who has suffered cardiac arrest. A Nepali immigrant who was pushed on to a subway track. A woman wracked with pain from sickle cell disease. Some cases are straightforward; others are puzzlers. The Pitt, shot mostly in real time, shows us how they’re handled, often in minute and explicit detail—a warning to the squeamish!—with the feel of a documentary. There is a hypnotic rhythm to the unabating influx of patients, as the medical professionals initially confront each one with the basic ER lingo—BP! Tach! Sats!—before addressing the specifics. Real-life docs have attested to the verisimilitude of The Pitt. This is as close as most of us will get to the ER experience not as patients but as doctors and nurses.

Of course, there’s the drama beyond the life-and-death decision-making that’s occurring on the fly in this chaos-defying ER. Dr. Robby, the strong and silent type, is repressing his fragility. Evans gets punched by an impatient patient and starts to wonder if it’s time to move on. Robby’s No. 2 may be popping pills. Another resident is dealing with a miscarriage. Three newbies—the student doctors on their first day in the ER—are struggling to find their places. At times, the show can get a bit soapy: One resident is in a custody battle with her ex, and—what do you know!—he shows up in the ER with a broken leg caused by a skateboarding accident and, soon enough, his new gal is present. Robby has to operate on a severely injured young woman who’s the girlfriend of his quasi-stepson.

But the show deftly weaves these personal tales into the center-stage—the medical work—in small doses delivered intermittently. And as the day progresses, hot-button issues, such as opioid addiction, vaccine hesitation, abortion rights, and gun violence, arise, as our overworked heroes encounter assorted dilemmas.

The Pitt is a wonderful accomplishment, fully deserving of the five Emmys it won on Sunday, including for best drama series and best actor (Wylie.). It can, though, induce anxiety. So much pain. So much blood. So many hard decisions. So much life. And, yes, death. As Dr. Robby notes more than once, it never stops. Like him and his team, at the end of their shift that was extended by a nightmarish mass-casualty event, I, too, was exhausted. But also like them, I was ready to see what the next day (or season) would bring.

Blankets, Stephen Wilson Jr. If a musical alchemist blended Kurt Cobain and Willie Nelson, Stephen Wilson Jr. would be the result. The 46-year-old onetime Golden Gloves amateur boxer and microbiologist for the Mars candy company is often described as a mix of country and indie rock. His music is Americana on steroids. His first album, son of dad, was released in 2023, and a deluxe version of the album—which includes a propulsive live cover of “Stand By Me”—released earlier this year hit the iTunes Country Top 10. A popular track from that collection that combines twang and power chords, “Year to Be Young 1994,” serves as something of an origin story for Wilson. (“I must admit I felt the flame / Kurt Cobain, a Fender Mustang / MTV brought me up /This is your brain on drugs.”)

Last month, Wilson released an EP, Blankets, demonstrating he’s as much a grunger as a Nashville guy, with engaging covers of songs from Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Temple of the Dog, and the Postal Service—an ode to the 1990s. This month, he released a single, “Took a Walk,” which he co-wrote and performed with Shaboozey, a master blender himself of hip-hop and country (who was featured on two songs on Beyoncé's trailblazing Cowboy Carter album). The song is tied to The Long Walk, the just-out movie adapted from a Stephen King novel. A friend of mine who’s a rock star—truly—tells me he thinks Wilson is one of the more exciting musicians currently. He’s right.