Erika Kirk, at the moment she publicly forgave
her husband’s murderer. Click for video.

As numerous pundits on the web have already noted, the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week has clarified most starkly the political divide in both the United States as well as across the world.

On the right, we have Kirk’s widow yesterday speaking at a memorial service for her husband, and with tears standing before the world to forgive his killer.

I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the Gospel, is love. And always love. Love for our enemies, and love for those who persecute us.

Her speech matched the general tone of most of the speakers at that memorial service. The service itself, as well as the numerous peaceful candlelight vigils nationwide in memory of Kirk, illustrate clearly the response of the right to this heinous act. No riots, no violence, no calls for bloodshed. Only prayer and a cold fury to make sure such violence never happens again.

That tone was set by Kirk himself, before he died. All he ever did was want to debate his very mainstream conservative ideas with leftists, with good will and rationality. He proved it in a text he sent to leftist pundit Van Jones just before his murder:

I’d love to have you on my show to have a respectful conversation about crime and race. I would be a gentleman as I know you would be as well. We can disagree about the issues agreeably.

The left’s response to Kirk however has been not love or good will but hate. Hundreds and hundreds of partisan leftists went on social media to gleefully celebrate his assassination. Leftist politicians and entertainers defamed both him and what he stood for, with lies and slanders. And when the television show of one entertainer, Jimmy Kimmel, got canceled by ABC because Kimmel had falsely claimed on the air that a Trump supporter had killed Kirk, one leftist and former teacher’s union employee decided it was okay to protest Kimmel’s cancellation by firing multiple bullets into the offices of an ABC affiliate in Sacramento. The man, Al Hernandez Santana, also has an extensive X feed where he had expressed hate for Donald Trump, often wishing him dead.

He is clearly not sane, but he is also not an outlier on the left. The response of the left to Kirk’s murder has revealed that for too many Democratic Party supporters, Santana is mainstream.

This contrast actually isn’t new, but it has never been so visible. And because of that visibility it has not gone unnoticed by the general public, the people who normally don’t follow politics closely and in the past had simply refused to recognize the growing absolute differences between the right and the left.

They are noticing now, and the consequences have been most illustrated by the surge in Republican voter registrations across multiple states.

The rate of Republican registrations in Florida tripled in the days immediately following Kirk’s slaying. “Since Charlie was killed we’ve been seeing about 600 new Republican voters a day,” Florida GOP chair Evan Power told The Post. “We [usually] average about 200 a day, so 600 is a much bigger number—it’s a big deal.”

…Crucial swing state Pennsylvania saw a similar surge after Kirk’s killing. Republican voter registration doubled that week compared to previous averages. The Keystone State clocked 2,148 new GOPers the week ending Sept 13, compared to 1,018 the week before. Democrats, by comparison, gained a measly 400 or so voters for each of those weeks.

And it’s not just happening in red, or purple, states. Leticia Munoz of the Republican Party of New Mexico told The Post that from Wednesday — the day Kirk was killed — to Sunday, 78 Democrats approached her booth at the New Mexico state fair to change their registration to Republican.

This registration shift had been noted earlier, but the numbers in the past week are quite startling. More detailed analysis confirms these anecdotes.

Decision Desk HQ’s Data Science Team recently found a sharply pro-Republican trend in voter registration among 18-to-29 year olds, a group constituted almost entirely by members of Generation Z (often defined as those born after 1996). This was especially true among young men under 30, who exhibited a noticeable decline in Democratic registration, especially compared to women in the same age group. Looking just at white voters under 30 who were registered with the two major parties on Jan. 1, 2025, only about 37% of men were registered Democrats, compared with around 56% of women.

But the decline in Democratic registration was most apparent among the very youngest white voters. Among those ages 18 to 24, only about one-third were registered as Democrats, including only about 3 in 10 voters aged 18 to 20. The very youngest women also dropped below 50% Democratic registration. Now, young voters of any race or ethnicity are more likely to register as unaffiliated or as something besides Democratic or Republican, so that is an added complication with voter registration numbers. However, white men under 25 are basically the most Republican-leaning age group by party registration if we only look at voters registered with the two main parties.

This trend in GOP preference was not apparent among only young white men, but also among young men of color. Although voters of color are broadly more Democratic than white voters, the very youngest voters registered with the two major parties are getting closer to 50-50 in their party registration: As of Jan. 1, fewer than 60% of nonwhite men who were 18 to 20 were registered Democrats across two-party registration.

That young voters are registering Republican is a major change. For decades large majorities of young people routinely registered as Democrats. These numbers indicate a very fundamental culture change that should have an impact for decades.

The left’s continuous move to the left and madness

Yet, does the left recognize these facts and rethink its public strategy? No. Despite the evidence that the left’s hateful rhetoric and violent actions have only damaged its brand and driven people away, the Democratic Party’s leadership and its radical left base in academia and the entertainment business seem incapable of recognizing these facts. Instead, it doubles down. Just one example, Democrat congresswoman Ilhan Oma (D-Minnesota) this weekend continued to slander Kirk, claiming his words were “reprehensible” while defending her past statements that Kirk was a “monster” and “Dr. Frankenstein”.

Meanwhile, on the left this weekend we had another shooting during a wedding in New Hampshire, the shooter screaming “Free Palestine!” as he killed one person and injured several others. Some might argue that supporting Palestinians in Israel does not make this man a leftist, but that would be dishonest. It is the left that has backed not only the Palestinians, but Hamas, and have done so frequently and in public, with violence and hate.

This blindness on the left and within the Democratic Party however is a very good thing. It has become insane, and insanity will only rarely win out in any conversation. Either it reforms itself, or it will soon be gone as a viable political movement.