It's iPhone week and I should be thinking mostly about iPhone specs and Apple Watch quirks, but here I am reacting to the news of the day, Charlie Kirk's murder. Of course, mindless partisans like Elon Musk will say this is proof that only the left is violent, but that's absolute nonsense. As Reid J. Epstein writes for the New York Times, Acts of political violence are now part of the American fabric.

Before Charlie Kirk, a right-wing political activist, was fatally shot on a college campus in Utah on Wednesday, there were two attempts to assassinate Donald J. Trump last year while he was the Republican nominee for president; a Passover firebombing at the residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania; middle-of-the-night shootings of Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota; and a man officials said was fixated on the coronavirus vaccine who killed a police officer in a shootout at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.

That is all just since last summer.

The problem is that politics has gotten too fundamentally violent, and I will say that definitively, there is one party in the US which revels in violence against their opponents. One that shares videos of minorities getting roughed up by masked men as though they were memes. One that takes glee in tearing people from their homes and sending them to third world countries. One that had supporters who wanted to hang the (Republican!) Vice President in 2021, only to be told they were brave heroes 4 years later. One that celebrates the idea of the federal government invading cities run by their opponents so they can "find out why it's call the Department of WAR". Yes, the president posted that over the weekend with an AI-generated image of Chicago being napalmed…

I don't support political violence, and assassinating a political pundit, no matter how vile their message is, is completely unacceptable, and is horrible. But don't believe for a second that this violent rhetoric or action is coming primarily from the left just because you have the memory of a goldfish.