Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a political event by someone who believed everything the media told him.
On Friday, Donald Trump walked into a room packed with the journalists who wrote those stories.
What a pollster just revealed about why most Americans would never do the same should make your blood boil.
The Poll That Should Terrify Every American
Matt Towery – a pollster who has tracked American political behavior for decades – just dropped a number that reveals exactly how badly the left's rhetoric machine has broken this country.
Seventy percent of Americans now say they won't attend a political event because they believe violence may take place there.
Not fifty percent.
Seventy.
That means less than half of the country is willing to show up for democracy in person.
Towery said the quiet part out loud on Fox News Friday night: the main culprits, he said, are the journalists sitting at that dinner.
https://twitter.com/ChildeoftheKing/status/2081769246736933127?s=20
He wasn't talking about random extremists.
He was talking about the journalists.
The Left Built This
This didn't happen by accident.
The media spent years perfecting a formula – take any conservative policy position, any Trump action, any Republican lawmaker, and frame it as an existential threat requiring urgent resistance.
Not debate. Resistance.
The word choice matters because it implies the stakes are too high for normal political opposition.
Laura Ingraham put it in historical perspective Friday night – Reagan was called a warmonger who would blow up the world, and Jackson Browne held No Nukes concerts, but nobody was afraid to attend a Reagan rally.
Something fundamentally different happened this time.
A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis of more than 750 domestic terrorism incidents found that left-wing attacks outnumbered right-wing ones for the first time in more than 30 years.
Kirk was gunned down at a Turning Point USA campus event in Utah.
Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman was assassinated.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's house was firebombed while his family was inside.
The attacker who tried to assassinate Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April left a note targeting Trump administration officials.
Every single one of those attacks came after years of the media describing Republicans as fascists, authoritarians, and threats to democracy who must be stopped.
https://twitter.com/TVNewsNow/status/2080798680987164998?s=20
City Journal documented what it called the "left-wing terror memeplex" – a coordinated set of narratives pushed by the Democrat Party and progressive groups that tells unstable people conservatives are an existential danger that normal politics can't stop.
None of it is true.
All of it inspires violence in unstable people who believe it.
Trump Deserves a Medal
Towery said something your local news anchor would never say: Donald Trump ought to be given a medal for showing up tonight.
Iran is threatening him.
He's already had to be rushed off a stage after a shooter's bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania.
An attacker tried to kill him at the Correspondents' Dinner just three months ago.
And tonight, he walked back into the same event – surrounded by journalists who have dedicated their professional lives to destroying him – and sat down to dinner.
That's not stubbornness.
That's the kind of courage that used to define American public life before 70 percent of the country decided it wasn't worth the risk.
The same journalists filling that banquet room tonight will file stories tomorrow about threats to democracy.
They will not mention that they helped create the environment Towery just described.
They never do.
Seventy percent of Americans are afraid.
He isn't.
Sources:
- Ian Schwartz, "Towery: 70% Of Americans Don't Want To Attend Political Events Due To Fear Of Violence," RealClearPolitics, July 25, 2026.
- Christopher Rufo, "Political Violence From the Left Is Surging," City Journal, September 30, 2025.
- Kriegman, "Why the Left's Extremism Now Fuels Most Political Violence," Substack, April 26, 2026.
- Christian Science Monitor Staff, "Why violence against the political right appears to be growing," CSMonitor.com, April 28, 2026.