Charlie Kirk’s assassination reveals the growing threat of Democrats’ violence

American  Thinker 

The numbers were shocking. The implications, worse.

In a recent conversation on my show News Sight, Patrick Basham laid out findings that expose a political culture edging toward something darker than polarization. His words stayed with me long after our broadcast aired on October 7.

Basham, the director of the Democracy Institute, has spent decades studying political behavior on both sides of the Atlantic. He is measured, data-driven, and careful with his language. Which is why what he said was so striking.

Reflecting on the Institute’s fresh polling data, he told me, “It’s a sort of quite terrifying, or at least unnerving, result. Just across the board, such a large minority admit to a pollster that they have hatred in their heart for those who hold opposing political views. But that said, we get to the nub of the issue, which is that a majority of Democrats admit that they hate at least some people who hold opposing views.”

The choice of words in the poll was deliberate. “We use the word ‘hatred,’ ‘hate,’ because we didn’t want to say ‘dislike’ or ‘strongly disagree.’ That’s just too tame today,” Basham explained. “This poll was taken in the days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. We wanted to identify how intense the sentiments were. And we were not shocked that a majority of Democrats would acknowledge quite openly that that is how they felt about political opponents.”

This hatred did not emerge overnight. Basham traced its roots through the Trump era. “It’s probably not shocking when you consider over the last decade what Democratic voters have openly, explicitly, overtly said about Trump and about those who support him,” he said. “A healthy or unhealthy slice of Democratic voters really do view themselves as better people than their Republican peers, and there is a willingness to take that further.”

The poll results did not stop at expressions of hatred. They revealed something even more alarming. “This is where we go from clearly unnerving data to really quite terrifying data,” Basham told me. “One in three Democratic voters can sign off on political violence and is open to telling a pollster that that is the case. In the modern era of American history, this is uncharted territory, and in a very, very bad way.”

I asked him whether this surge in violent acceptance was coming from elite rhetoric or bubbling up from the grassroots.

Basham answered carefully: “Is this because of the rhetoric from Democratic leaders and the media? The political persecution of conservatives and Republicans? The weaponization of the federal government against the regime’s political enemies? Or is it about cultural changes? We simply have tens of millions of voters, not exclusively on the Democratic side but disproportionately so, who for their own weird and wonderful, weird and not so wonderful reasons, not only hate their opponents but are willing to condone and endorse the violence committed by others against those opponents?”

When the conversation turned to Charlie Kirk’s assassination itself, Basham was blunt: “It’s hard to remain calm intellectually when you’re face to face with these kinds of numbers. They tell us something very sad, very tragic, very dark about American political culture. The Charlie Kirk assassination is the most obvious, tangible demonstration of that. Not only is it not an isolated incident, but it is unlikely to be one, given the intense hatred and the willingness to condone violence that operates disproportionately among Democrats.”

Basham’s conclusions were sober. “What we know now, anecdotally and empirically, is that in America, a sizable minority of voters do not subscribe to some of the basic, fundamental tenets of liberal democracy, no matter how liberal they consider themselves,” he said. “That is one of the most unsettling conclusions that I’ve had to reach over many years of studying American political culture very, very closely.”

Basham expects violence to remain at its current level or worsen. “If I had to predict,” he said, “I would say it’s going to increase. I suspect it will take more assassinations, or at least more attempted assassinations of prominent figures, before most people recognize that this is madness.”

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has already had political repercussions. Basham noted that it has energized young conservatives, especially Christian voters, and could shape Republican prospects in key states. Meanwhile, Democrats are embracing positions that please their base but alienate the wider electorate. “They are going to have a really, really hard time winning senatorial races in swing states,” he observed.

By the end of our conversation, one truth was unmistakable. America has entered a period where hatred is mainstream, and political violence is no longer unthinkable. Basham’s data-driven warnings are not predictions; they are descriptions of the present. Pretending otherwise would be a dangerous mistake.