The Public Conversation and the Unavoidable Conclusion

What has the Left done – not just to the country, but to individuals – by their incessant slandering of the Right?

Every day, thousands of people – probably more, frankly, probably hundreds of thousands, when you count all the leftist teachers and influencers and tiktokers and politicians and false preachers – lie about the Right.

They lie about what individual politicians, activists and supporters believe in; they misrepresent what the Right advocates.

When called out, they will always say that it was just normal exaggeration, a little hyperbole for effect. It’s not.

It never is.

Consider – as a far too typical example – the now infamous tweet from horror author Stephen King, in which he accused Charlie Kirk of “advocating stoning gays to death.”

Ambassador Ric Grenell corrected the lie – he slapped him down hard. Grenell replied to the tweet, posting a detailed correction, including this point at its heart: “I knew Charlie. Well. And I’m gay. He was always cheering for me and always finding ways to help me succeed. You have no idea what you’re saying.”

Stephen King apologized.

But the thousands of other Leftists who make the same vile claim about conservatives all the time never get corrected, and the readers believe the calumny.

As those of us who live by the printed word know far too well – a forced correction is never fully effective, because you can never reach all the people who heard the original lie. For half the audience, or a quarter, or maybe 90%, the lie is never corrected. It remains in the minds of the original audience; if they believed it at the time, it will continue polluting their opinions forever.

No conservative favors the stoning of gays, the starvation of poor people, the subjugation of women, or any of the other slanders that the modern American Left spreads on a daily basis to their millions of gullible listeners.

Conservatives, in fact, are the ones who call for safer streets, a healthy economy, and economic opportunities for all law-abiding citizens. It’s the conservatives who want everybody to achieve the American dream; it’s the Left that crushes these opportunities with destructive policies.

But the student in a leftist’s classroom, or the parishioner stuck in a socialist “church,” or the viewer watching the pollution on MSNBC or CNN or even C-Span, hears these slanders constantly, and too often has no idea that he’s consuming a daily diet of lies.

This consumption of false information causes millions to join demonstrations that destroy their schools, their towns, their own relationships. And sometimes, tragically, it causes some individuals to turn to violence, having been told directly that these conservatives – often by name – would deserve it if something bad were to happen to them.

That’s what brings us to days like September 10, 2025, and to a Turning Point USA event in Utah that ended so horrifically.

Who are the victims of such a terror?

It’s not only Charlie Kirk.

The late Charlie Kirk – one of the most brilliant, decent, and honorable statesmen this country has produced – was the direct casualty, and yes, our hearts are right to break for his wife and children, and for his friends and colleagues.

But there are others to consider too, others whom we might not think about at first.

Now that we know who the assassin is – a young man with parents and two brothers, according to early news reports – we should think about them for a moment as well.

Consider for a moment the father and mother of this monster.

Imagine learning that the son you raised and loved just murdered someone. Imagine being in the position of having to see your own son arrested for such a heinous crime.

Like most people in this open society, he had all kinds of teachers and friends, watched all sorts of programs and podcasts and talk shows.

Some of those people, maybe in class, maybe at the student union, maybe on the dark web, filled his mind – and all their audiences’ minds – with the aforementioned slanders, about conservatives in general, and about Charlie Kirk in particular.

These leftists did something to him, as they do to millions of their other targets, every day. The boy’s professors and heroes, the pop culture communists and other Democrat leaders on the television news, seem to live for the joy of spreading vicious lies about conservatives, day in and day out. After enough such poison, after months or years of it, it’s bound to have an effect.

We are not absolving the killer; don’t get us wrong. This one single alleged assassin is fully responsible and deserves the capital punishment that he’ll rightly receive, assuming he’s guilty, and assuming he’s convicted. He chose to do this, of his own accord.

But there is a reason his mind was so polluted.

You don’t have hundreds of thousands of college students demonstrating in favor of bloodthirsty terrorists on college campuses without some effective voices having somehow convinced them that Hamas isn’t really bloodthirsty.

You don’t have millions of citizens voting for an anti-semitic marxist mayoral candidate in the country’s most Jewish city without their minds having been polluted with years and years’ worth of lies.

You don’t have black Americans or illegal immigrants violently assaulting innocent white pedestrians and commuters unless they have been told for years that “toxic white privilege is the thing that is keeping them down.”

There were people in the assassin’s orbit – maybe people who never even met him, just preached from an online site or a lecture hall podium – and made this impressionable punk think it would be right – even exemplary – to cut down Charlie Kirk in cold blood. And these people have therefore also destroyed the lives of so many innocent people around the boy.

It’s not just the obvious victims – the Charlie Kirks, the Irina Zarutskas, the thousands of unknown, non-famous victims of street crime and politically motivated violence that don’t make it to the front page or don’t go viral on the internet.

Think also of the people in the killers’ families, the people in the families or classrooms of those radicalized criminals.

Think of the people in this specific killer’s own family – who now have to live for the rest of their lives with the knowledge that their son, their cousin, their brother, their grandchild, whatever – turned into such a monster and assassinated one of America’s greatest role models.

As a parent, how do you live with that knowledge?

A personal note:

As a father of three myself – my kids are young adults, two of whom attended the same community college that Charlie Kirk did – and probably like many others in my shoes, I spent the first 48 hours thinking mostly about Charlie Kirk. We all did.

But since the apprehension of the assassin, I find myself thinking of his parents.

The first famous assassin I can really recall thinking about – as a kid – was John Wilkes Booth. As I studied history and followed current events, of course, I learned about countless others. There have been many assassins in history.

But I don’t think I’ve ever thought about the killers’ own families before today.

All those monsters of history whose parents were still alive, think how they must have suffered too, for the rest of their lives, knowing that they unknowingly brought such a destructive influence into the world.

What an awful hell on earth these murderers create for their own families when they do their evil.

And now that there’s so much of this – think who else is responsible.

All the people who filled this killer’s susceptible mind with poison – in person, on tv, on the radio, in print, on the internet – who falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays, who falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk was a racist, who falsely claimed that he was a white supremacist, who falsely claimed he was a nazi…

Remember, it isn’t just that they disagreed on policies, it’s that Charlie Kirk wasn’t actually guilty of holding any of the attitudes that the Left claimed he held.

By filling this impressionable young sponge with lies, they didn’t just kill Charlie Kirk, they didn’t just turn this one punk into a killer – they also destroyed the lives of the many innocent people in this killer’s orbit, especially his parents.

I cannot imagine living the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had raised an assassin, or had an assassin for a brother or grandchild. I feel so sorry for his father and mother, and their other sons, their priest, and the other decent people in the killer’s orbit.

We hear calls, usually from the Left, for the public discourse to renounce violence, to stop using angry rhetoric. But that’s not really what we need most.

We need the Left to stop lying.

We need the Left to stop mischaracterizing their political enemies’ beliefs, to stop attributing to the Right these hundreds of repulsive views and causes which the Right simply does not hold.

The problem isn’t that the Left and Right call for each other’s defeat in election campaigns; that’s how a republic works.

The problem is that the Right tells the truth, both about what it believes and about why they disagree with what the Left believes…

…while the Left spreads vile calumnies about the Right, specifically to gin up utterly undeserved hatred in their credulous audiences.

The Left destroys everything it touches.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant.  President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.  

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