What Next? If the Brown Shooting Is Politically Motivated, Will the Trump Administration Finally Do Something about Leftist Violence?

If the Brown University shooting is politically motivated, will the Trump administration finally do something about leftist violence?

It’s that time: my new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, is dropping tomorrow in hardback, Kindle and audiobook formats. If you’ve already preordered, you’ll get it tomorrow. Otherwise, head on over to Amazon dot com and get your copy.

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You might think it’s not helpful to speculate, but early indications are the Brown shooting was a targeted attack on a prominent campus conservative.

So far, there hasn’t been a great deal of information released, but what we do know points in only one direction.

It was obvious that Charlie Kirk’s murder would not be the last political assassination of Trump’s second term—still less than a year old—but few would have expected the leader of a college Republican club to be the next target.

Ella Cook, aged just 19, had been leading a study session on campus when a gunman entered the room, “yelled something unique” —“Orange man bad”? “Trans rights are human rights”?­—and then opened fire. He shot Cook in the face, killing her instantly. Another student was killed, and around a dozen others were injured.

The shooter is still on the loose.

The university has put out a long-winded statement featuring all the usual nostrums about “coming together” and so on, and making no mention whatsoever of the political views and roles of the victims. For many, this writer included, this will only confirm the suspicion the attack was politically motivated.

On social media, it’s already being reported that Providence Police Department contacted Ella Cooke’s family and told them they believe the attack was targeted.

Last week, when I was in Washington DC promoting my new book, I sat down with Jack Posobiec and his lovely wife Tanya to talk about political violence as part of a roundtable for Human Events.

Of course we talked about Charlie Kirk’s murder, and we contextualized it by talking about the left’s long history of killing people with opposing political viewpoints, including people on their own side. Tanya, who was born in Belarus, described life behind the Iron Curtain and what it was like living in a place where people literally disappeared in the middle of the night—to a Siberian mine or gulag, or simply direct to a shallow unmarked grave—for believing the wrong things or, even worse, speaking them out loud.

At one point I said, quite bluntly, that Charlie Kirk’s murder had proven that killing people really does work. Jack wanted me to add a little thatch to that bald assertion, and so I did.

Here’s what I said, more or less. By murdering Charlie Kirk, the left has eliminated the Republican Party’s brightest young star, a man who helped win over a new generation of Americans to the right-wing cause, and would have spent decades organizing and campaigning. Charlie Kirk could very well have gone on to occupy high political office himself.

Now, with Charlie Kirk gone, none of that will happen. There is no obvious replacement for him. Turning Point USA, the organization he created, is adrift and may never be the thing it was before.

The killing has had a wider chilling effect too. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, recently said he no longer goes out, the risk to his safety is so great, and expressed doubt about whether, given the chance again, he would be involved with the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE.

All of these consequences of the murder of Charlie Kirk, and others, serve leftist ends—that much should be clear.

There have been no reprisals, no wider arrests. Only Tyler Robinson stands accused for pulling the trigger.

After the catharsis of the firings and public shamings of people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder, what’s actually being done to prevent leftists from carrying out more violence? Sure, Antifa has been designated a domestic terrorist organization—but what does that actually mean? Will there be arrests? When?

Three months after the act, any leftist will look at Charlie Kirk’s murder, and no matter how economically illiterate they are, they’ll do a simple cost-benefit analysis and come to this conclusion: killing your enemies works. Let’s keep doing it.

If the Brown killings really are another instance of targeted left-wing violence, the Trump administration must act, and what’s more it must be seen to act.

At this moment, the American right is fractured and vulnerable, absent leadership, flailing and thrashing around, allowing itself to be consumed with absurd conspiracizing about what was patently a left-wing political murder and had nothing to do with Egyptian planes and French commandos—or Israel, for that matter, however much Charlie Kirk might have been coming to change his opinions on its influence over American politics.

If the left smells blood—and it does—is it any wonder the violence continues?

The enormous goodwill and sympathy engendered by Charlie Kirk’s murder is being squandered. The narrative—of a left wing that monopolizes political violence—is being redefined.

That’s exactly what Bari Weiss was doing on Wednesday night when she interviewed Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, at a CBS townhall: redefining the narrative. In a scene reminiscent of Jerry Springer, Erika Kirk was confronted by the last man ever to speak to her husband: the student who asked him the question he was about to answer when he was shot through the neck by the coward Tyler Robinson. Hunter Kozak offered no condolences or sympathy for Erika Kirk’s grievous loss, but instead, with the backing of Weiss, asked her to denounce Donald Trump for his “violent” rhetoric.