The Gray Zone of Political Violence

George Floyd’s death in 2020 led to looting and violence that Democratic lawmakers often excused. Charlie Kirk’s death in 2025 has led to prayer meetings.

And the Left has seemed more outraged about Jimmy Kimmel briefly being taken off the air than Kirk being murdered. Meantime, Luigi Mangione, accused of killing United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson last year, has enjoyed support from some on the left.

It’s all part of the American Left’s move toward the gray zone when it comes to political violence, Douglas Murray writes. “The question is not whether men of violence exist, what political direction they come from, or who finds violence useful to their cause,” he points out. “The question is whether the mainstream of society can hold to a single standard when violence enters the fray. Can it condemn violence without qualification, or will it recognize, and even indulge, the temporary advantages that a touch of violence can bring?”

Read more here.

Last week, President Trump signed a proclamation requiring employers to pay $100,000 for each potential H-1B visa holder they hope to sponsor. Valid for up to six years, H-1B visas allow immigrants to work at a job that requires a college degree, sometimes leading to permanent residency and even citizenship.

The administration argues that employers have “exploited” the program by hiring lower-paid foreign workers and therefore undercutting U.S. wages.

That’s not the case, Santiago Vidal Calvo and Daniel Di Martino point out. The median H-1B worker is paid $120,000 annually. And companies already pay at least $10,000 for each visa holder they sponsor. If employers could get around these costs by just hiring Americans, they would.

“If allowed to stand, this move would diminish the high-skilled immigration pipeline that has allowed the American medical, technology, and higher-education sectors to flourish,” Calvo and Di Martino write. “It would ignite a rush to move labor offshore and leave American workers worse off than before.”

Read more of their take here.

The shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the murder of Charlie Kirk both underscore a horrific trend: members of ordinary families committing digitally driven violence.

“These acts of terror reflect something dark in our nation’s soul,” Christopher F. Rufo writes. “The perpetrators were so dissatisfied with their middle-class lives that they sought to destroy the highest symbols of their society: murdering children in church pews, an attack on God; and murdering a political speaker in cold blood, an attack on the republic.”

This new form of terrorism poses a challenge for law enforcement, which lacks a program to assess and respond to online radicalization. Stopping future acts will be difficult, but we must “work to protect the things we love and grapple for a solution, however elusive it may seem,” Rufo writes.

We have an opportunity to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy by doing what he did best: listening. That means not looking at our adversaries as enemies on a screen. “If we take a step back, talk to one another, and most importantly, understand that what we see and hear online is not always an accurate representation of reality, we may conclude that the ‘other’ is really just a friend or neighbor with different views,” Yael Bar Tur writes. “When you broaden your perspective, you can see that even the shameful and preposterous reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death represent a slim fraction of all American voices.”

“Rome didn’t fall in a day, and no one at the time understood the exact causes, the tipping points or what they could have done to turn things around.

We’re doing no better.”

Photo credit: Spencer Platt / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images