The shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk has once again revealed a terrible truth about American politics: the violence is not evenly distributed. The endless drumbeat from legacy media about “both sides” being equally culpable for the coarsening of debate is not merely false, it is malicious. It is a deliberate obfuscation, a way of protecting the very forces that have poisoned civic life and now produced bloodshed.

This is not a matter of right and left meeting in the middle of some toxic exchange. It is the direct, predictable consequence of a decade of Trump Derangement Syndrome metastasizing into something darker and deadlier. Charlie Kirk’s murder is not an isolated event. It is another poisoned fruit of the left’s relentless campaign to depict conservatives as enemies to be destroyed rather than fellow citizens to be debated.

From the moment Donald Trump entered the 2016 race, his opponents reached for the most incendiary language imaginable. Trump was not just wrong, they declared—he was Hitler reborn, a fascist, a dictator in waiting. That language, echoed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and across cable news, stripped away the last restraints of taboo. If Trump was Hitler, then anything—anything—became justified in resisting him.

The predictable result was the normalization of assassination fantasies. Comedians joked about beheading Trump. Madonna mused aloud about bombing the White House. Hollywood elites applauded every grotesque spectacle that presented the president as worthy of execution. The cultural line that had held firm since Dallas in 1963 was obliterated. For Trump and those around him, it was suddenly “open season.”

Kirk, a conservative activist and devout father, became one more target in this climate. According to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, his accused killer, Tyler Robinson, was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.” Once a promising student, Robinson dropped out of college and sank into the swamp of social media, where Trump and his allies are depicted daily as existential threats to humanity. The Kool-Aid was readily available, and Robinson drank deeply.

The parallels to Thomas Matthew Crooks, who tried to kill Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, are chilling. In both cases, young men radicalized by the cultural permission slip handed out by the left decided that violence was the ultimate form of political expression. And in both cases, the supposed guardians of civility—the press, academia, even medical professionals—have looked on with at least tacit approval.

Charlie Kirk’s death should be a moment of moral clarity. Instead, Big Media has rushed to bury the truth under the false equivalence of “political polarization.” This is a lie. Conservatives are not producing a steady stream of would-be assassins targeting their opponents. There is no mirror image here. The violence flows overwhelmingly in one direction—from the fevered imaginations of a left that long ago convinced itself that Trump and his supporters are subhuman.

And it is not only the extremists online. It is the Democrats in Congress who label Trump a dictator and claim his return to office will end democracy itself. It is the prosecutors who twist the law into knots to drag him into courtrooms. It is the endless chorus of pundits who repeat the catechism that Trump is beyond redemption and his allies beyond the pale. Words, endlessly repeated, have consequences.

Kirk’s murder is a direct consequence of this dehumanization campaign. Only a truly sick political culture could look at a man whose life was devoted to faith, family, and the Constitution and conclude that he should be gunned down in cold blood. The celebrations online, the grotesque cheerleading for his death, show just how deep the rot has spread.

Charlie Kirk deserves more than hollow condolences. He deserves a reckoning—a recognition that his blood was spilled not by some free-floating madness but by a movement that has made violence its last argument. Until that reckoning comes, until the poison of Trump Derangement Syndrome is named for what it is, America will remain a nation where political murder is no longer unthinkable but increasingly inevitable.